Business Etiquette

BUSINESS Etiquette: 101 Ways to Conduct Business with Charm and Savvy
by: Ann Marie Sabath

Hello world! I am back, hopefully this time more often and with more insightful information. Now that all the boy drama is over I hope to concentrate 110% to my career and education. I am about to embark in the most important project of my career so far! The company I work for has a very aggressive and ambitions 5 year plan which we will begin to unfold this week. My role in the project is to work with a cross-functional team and an outside consultant to optimize our pricing and bundling structure. Because of the constant interaction with many outside businessmen and women I figure my first step towards a successful career is to brush up on my business etiquette.

If you know me well enough, you know I am the slowest reader ever! So I figure if I could find a small yet engaging book about business etiquette I could read and blog about it. If I schedule a time and set deadlines for my reading and blogging I know I can get this book read and share the knowledge gained with others out there who may not have the time to read.

So this is my plan; there are 116 tips plus an international etiquette chapter, which I hope to complete within 120 days. That gives me a deadline of completing this book on August 20, 2010 (I am allowing a couple of extra days)! Each day, I will write about a different tip, include my opinion about that certain tip and try to find a supporting article online.

As a way to kick off this project we look at Ann Marie's introduction. The book is filled with useful advice but according to the author, the underlying principal is to "Make the individual with whom you're dealing feel as though he or she were the most important person in the world."

She supports this by adding the fact that, as humans we tend to spend time- and will often go out of our way to help- those who make us feel like a million bucks.

So before we begin looking at the 116 tips in this book we can already walk away with one of the most useful tips in dealing with others; remembering to make an effort to learn more about others than you share about yourself!

I hope you enjoy this as much as I will. Please feel free to comment and if you have a book and want to bring something up about the tip discussed feel free to join in. I just ask that you do not jump ahead or retype the entire tip, for this is not our work and we don't have rights to this work.

See you tomorrow for the first tip!