Miss Manners Minds Your Business

by Nicholas Ivor Martin, Judith Martin

Overview

“Both a sad and hilarious commentary on the state of the modern workplace.”—New York Times

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393349856
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/20/2014
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	593,576
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Ivor Martin, who wrote The DaCapo Opera Manual, worked at the White House and was publisher of the Washington Monthly before becoming director of operations at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter.

Judith Martin, born a perfect lady in an imperfect society, is the author of the “Miss Manners” columns and best-selling books, two novels, and a travel book on Venice. She and her husband live in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part 1 The Basics

Chapter 1 Getting In 15

Chapter 2 Getting Out 37

Part 2 The Long Haul-On the Job

Chapter 3 What's That You Say? 65

Chapter 4 Is This Meeting Over? 91

Chapter 5 Love Me, Love My Laundry 101

Chapter 6 The Eeeew Factor 115

Chapter 7 The Attention Deficit 133

Chapter 8 Stop Asking Me How I'm Doing 153

Chapter 9 Enough Is How Much? 173

Part 3 The Long Haul-Off the Job

Chapter 10 OS the Premises 185

Chapter 11 What Can You Do For Me? 195

Chapter 12 Party Time 207

Chapter 13 My Other Family 227

Chapter 14 Let's All Be Friends 247

Chapter 15 More Than Friends 265

Index 287

Editorial Reviews

"[Judith Martin] is an extremely useful philosopher, and I consult her frequently, in order to behave better."

Daniel Handler

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 (“‘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

"The business world would run much more smoothly if everyone lived by Miss Manners’s rules of etiquette. Her latest witty guidebook is written with her son Nicholas, who has a day job as director of operations at the Lyric Opera of Chicago."

Bloomberg.com

"As they parse delicate questions of hierarchy, privacy, focus, gender, age, family matters, illness, gossip, rants, business trips, meetings, and socializing, the Martins broach the very core of human relationships. They also drive home the fact that our lives would be vastly improved if we consistently worked together with dignity, respect, responsibility, patience, and, as they so ably demonstrate, a sense of humor."

Booklist

The balancing and blurring of work and family roles has created "etiquette chaos," proclaims Judith Martin, who responds with her trademark wit to a host of thorny workplace-behavior questions in this new guide. Martin organizes questions and answers into 15 topical chapters and provides humorous yet helpful advice in the vein of Philip Galanes's Social Q's (LJ 6/15/11). Rather surprisingly, the contributions of Martin's coauthor son, an executive at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, are not particularly clear. An index, to be included in the published edition, was not seen. VERDICT An enjoyable collection that will defuse—if not fully solve—modern workplace dilemmas.

Library Journal