Miss Manners Minds Your Business

What do your colleagues, overlords, underlings, clients, and customers have in common? Not knowing how much they annoy you. Not to mention how much you may be annoying them. The route from cubicle to corner office is strewn with etiquette landmines. And now that the boundaries that once cleanly separated work from personal life are blurred, even polite people don’t recognize the difference between professional and social manners.

 

• What do you say to a colleague who has just been fired? 
• How do you maintain a family-friendly office without discriminating against singles? 
• What’s the difference between showing romantic interest and sexual harassment? 
• Which colleagues should be invited to family weddings? 
• When should you be unavailable, at or away from work?

 

Don’t convene a focus group or appeal to Human Resources—consult Miss Manners!

With wit and wisdom, Miss Manners restores civility, guiding you around your coworker’s messy cubicle, past your overly prying boss, around the bridal shower for the new temp, and through tedious staff meetings.

In Miss Manners Minds Your Business, Judith Martin and her son, executive Nicholas Ivor Martin, equip readers with the practical, pertinent, and utterly correct advice necessary to win the job, keep the job, and leave the job with sanity and dignity intact.

"With her sparkling wit and contrarian wisdom, syndicated columnist Martin, aka Miss Manners (Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior), writing with her son Nicholas (director of operations at the Lyric Opera of Chicago), reminds readers that business and etiquette need not be mutually exclusive, but that crucial distinctions exist between professional manners and social ones. It should come as no surprise that Miss Manners deplores relaxed dress codes (' â€˜casual' has come to mean all social decencies optional') and finds them symptomatic of a larger problem — the increasingly blurred boundaries between personal and professional life, with its accompanying loss of civility in both realms. 'Be yourself' is the worst possible advice to give a job seeker, according to Miss Manners: 'When attempting to enter the business world you need to learn to be someone else. It is called having a professional identity.' Intrepid, practical, and always humane, Miss Manners tackles common workplace hazards: irritating colleagues, rude customers, business travel, and office parties, which she'd prefer to see replaced by 'genuine workplace treats such as bonuses and time off.' Agent: David Hendin. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A witty guide to managing a real life wisely in a work-centered world.

The route from cubicle to corner office is strewn with etiquette land mines, and now that the boundaries separating work from personal life are blurred, even polite people don’t recognize the difference between professional and social manners.

What’s a contemporary professional to do?

No need to convene a focus group or appeal to HR—consult Miss Manners.

With wit and wisdom, she restores civility, guiding you around your coworker’s messy cubicle, past your overly prying boss, around the bridal shower for the new temp, and through tedious staff meetings.

In Miss Manners Minds Your Business, Judith Martin and her son, executive Nicholas Ivor Martin, equip readers with the practical, pertinent, and utterly correct advice necessary to win the job, keep the job, and leave the job, with sanity and dignity intact.

Judith Martin is the author of the “Miss Manners” columns and best-selling books. She lives in Washington, DC.Nicholas Ivor Martin is the director of operations at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.