The book of business etiquette
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| The book of business etiquette |
It would be a pleasure to call over by name and thank individually the businessmen and the business organizations that so graciously furnished the material upon which this little book is based. But the author feels that some of them will not agree with all the statements made and the inferences drawn, and for this reason, is unable to do better than give this meager return for a service which was by no means meager.
Excerpt:
The businessman is the national hero of America, as native to the soil and as typical of the country as baseball or Broadway or big advertising. He is an interesting figure, picturesque and not unlovable, not so dashing perhaps as a knight in armour or a soldier in uniform, but he is not without the noble (and ignoble) qualities which have characterized the tribe of man since the world began. America, in common with other countries, has had distinguished statesmen and soldiers, authors and artists — and they have not all gone to their graves unhonored and unsung — but the hero story which be- longs to her and to no one else are the story of the businessman.
Nearly always it has had its beginning in humble surroundings, with a little boy born in a log cabin in the woods, in a wretched shanty at the edge of a field, in a crowded tenement section or in the slums of a foreign city, who studied and worked by delight and firelight while he made his living blacking boots or selling papers until he found the trail by which he could climb to what we are pleased to call success.
Measured by the standards of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages, when practically the only form of achievement worth mentioning was fighting to kill, his career has not been a romantic one. It has had to do not with dragons and banners and trumpets, but with stockyards and oil fields, with railroads, sewer systems, heat, light, and water plants, telephones, cotton, corn, ten-cent stores and — we might as well make a clean breast of it — chewing gum.
Contents:
I. The American Business Man ... 1
II. The Value of Courtesy .... 17
III. Putting Courtesy into Business. 40
IV. Personality 70
V. Table Manners 94
VI. Telephones and Front Doors . . 108
VII. Traveling and Selling . . . . 130
VIII. The Business of Writing .... 153
IX. Morals and Manners 183
PART II
X. "Big Business " 209
XI. In a Department Store 242
XII. A While with a Traveling Man . 250
XIII. Tables for Two or More . . , . 268
XIV. Ladies First? 279