The Book of Business Etiquette by Nella Braddy Henney (best pdf ebook reader .txt) 📕

It is so impossible for a false doctrine to stand on its own feet that the spread-eagle advertisement of this school contradicts itself long before it gets to the “Sign here and mail to-day” coupon. “The first time you try to swim,” shouts the advertisement, “for instance, you sink; and the first time you try to ride a bicycle you fall off. But the ability to do these things was born in you. And shortly you can both swim and ride. Then you wonder why you could not always do these things. They seem so absurdly simple.” It may be that there are people who have learned to swim and to ride a bicycle by sitting in a chair and cultivating certain inherent qualities but we have never heard of them. Everybody that we ever knew worked and worked hard swimming and riding before they learned. The only way to learn to do a job is to do it, and the only way to succeed is to work. Any school or any person who says that “the most important thing for you to do is not to work, but first to find the short road to success. After that you may safely work all you like—but as a matter of fact, you won't have to work very hard,” is a liar and a menace to the country and to business.

But the value of personality is not to be under-estimated. “Nature,” says Thackeray somewhere in “The Virginians,” “has written a letter of credit upon some men's faces, which is honored almost wherever presented. Harry Warrington's [Harry Warrington was the hero who brought about this observation] countenance was so stamped in his youth. His eyes were so bright, his cheeks so red and healthy, his look so frank and open, that almost all who beheld him, nay, even those who cheated him, trusted him.” It was the “letter of credit” stamped upon the face of Roosevelt, pledge of the character which lay behind it, which made him the idol of the American people.

Personality is hard to analyze and harder still to acquire. The usual advice given to one who is trying to cultivate a pleasing manner and address is “Be natural,” but this cannot be taken too literally. Most of us find it perfectly natural to be cross and disagreeable under trying circumstances. It would be natural for a man to cry out profane words when a woman grinds down on his corn but it would not be polite. It was natural for Uriah Heep to wriggle like an eel, but that did not make it any the less detestable. It was natural, considering the past history of Germany and the system under which he was educated, for the Kaiser to want to be lord of the world, but that did not make it any the less horrible.

Another bromidic piece of advice is “Be perfectly frank and sincere.” But this, too, has its limits. Some people pride themselves on saying exactly what they think. Usually they are brutal, insensitive, wholly incapable of sympathetic understanding of any one else, and cursed, besides, with a colossal vanity. A man may determine to tell nothing but the truth, but this does not make it necessary for him to tell the whole truth, especially when it will hurt the feelings or the reputation of some one else. No man has a right to impose his opinions and prejudices, his sufferings and agonies, on other people. It is the part of a coward to whine.

And yet a man must be himself, must be natural and sincere. Roosevelt could no more have adopted the academic manner of Wilson than Wilson could have adopted the boyish manner of Roosevelt. Lincoln could no more have adopted the courtly grace of Washington than Washington could have adopted the rugged simplicity of Lincoln. Nor would such transformations be desirable even if they were possible. The world would be a very dreary place if we were all cut by the same pattern.

A number of years ago in an upstate town in New York there was a shoe store which had been built up by the engaging personality of the man who owned it. He had worked his way up from a tiny shoe shop in New Jersey where, as a boy, he made shoes by hand before there were factories for the purpose, and he had always kept in close touch with the business even after he owned a large establishment and had a number of men working under him. He stayed in the shop, greeted his customers as they came in, and many times waited on them himself.

When he retired from active business he sold out to a man exactly his opposite in temperament, as good a man, so far as character went, as himself, but very quiet and taciturn. A woman who had always patronized the shop and was a friend of them both came to him soon after the transfer was made and said, “Now, Mr. Tillis, the reason this place has prospered so is on account of the personality of Mr. Kilbourne. His shoes are good but people can get good shoes at other places. They come here because of Mr. Kilbourne. They like him, and if you are not careful they will stop coming now that he is gone. You've got to smile and show them you are glad to see them.”

Mr. Tillis felt that the woman was telling the truth. He decided that he would stay in the shop and greet each customer with a gladsome smile and make himself generally pleasant and agreeable. The next day he was fitting a shoe on a woman who was also an old customer and a friend of both men. He was smiling in his best manner and congratulating himself that he was doing very well when the woman abruptly took her foot off the stand. “What are you laughing at?” she demanded.

Some years later he told Mr. Kilbourne about it. “I decided then that there was no use in me trying to be you. You had been yourself, and I made up my mind that I'd be myself.”

And that is, after all, the only rule that can be given. Be yourself, but be very sure that it is your best self.

It is personality which permits one man to do a thing that another would be shot for. What is charming in this man is disgusting in that. What is a smile with one becomes a smirk with another. What makes one succeed will cause another to fail. It is personality that opens the doors of opportunity. It cannot, alone, keep them open, but it is worth a good deal to get inside.

We were interested to observe the methods used by three young men who were looking for jobs, not one of whom would probably have succeeded if he had used the tactics of either of the others.

The first wanted to talk with the biggest executive in a large organization. He had fought his way through the ranks until he had got as far as the man's secretary. “Mr. So-and-So does not see people who want jobs,” said that young lady.

“I don't want a job,” he prevaricated mildly, “I want to talk to him.”

The girl let him in.

“Mr. So-and-So,” he said, “I don't want a job. I want advice.”

His manner was so ingenuous and charming, his earnestness so glowing, that the man at the desk listened while he talked, and then talked a while himself, and ended by giving the young man the position (as well as the advice) that he wanted. But if he had been less attractive personally and the older man had been shrewd enough to see through the ruse (or perhaps he did see through it but made the proper discount for it) or had been opposed to trick methods, the scheme might not have worked so well.

The most universal weakness of intellect lies in the part of the brain which listens to flattery. Very few people like compliments laid on with a trowel, but no man can resist the honest admiration of another if it seems sincere. And since it is the sort of thing that one likes almost above all else he often takes the false coin for the true.

The second young man met the rebuff so familiar to young men looking for their first job, “We want men with experience.”

“That's what everybody says,” the boy answered, “but what I want to know is how we are going to get that experience if you don't give us a chance.”

The older man sympathized, but had no place for the other and told him so.

“What would you do if you were I?” the young man asked as he turned to leave. The other grinned. “Why, I'd work for a firm for a week for nothing,” he said, “and show them that they could not get along without me.”

The boy stopped. “All right,” he said, “let me work for you a week.”

The older man had not expected this but he gave the youngster a chance and he made good.

The third young man had reached the point of desperation. He had been out of a job several weeks. He had been trying to get one all that time and had not succeeded. He walked into the employment bureau of a certain concern and said, “I want a job. I want a good job. Not some dinky little place filing letters or picking up chips. If you've got an executive position where there is plenty of work and plenty of responsibility, I want it.” They asked him a few questions about what he had been doing and a few more about what he thought he could do, and ended by giving him a desk and an office.

It would be foolish to advise any one to follow any of these plans. Each man must work out his own method, all the better if it is an original one. Most business men like a simple approach without any flourishes. “It is astonishing,” says one man whose income runs to six figures, “how many things one can get just by asking for them.” The best reporter in America says that he has always found the direct method of approach better than any other. None is infallible but this has the highest percentage of success.

So far as personal appearance is concerned—and this is one of the most important elements in the fashioning of personality—the greatest variations are not due to intrinsic differences in character, nor to differences of feature or form, but to the use and disuse of the bathtub. More sharp than the distinction between labor and capital or between socialism and despotism is that between the people who bathe daily and those who go to the tub only on Saturday night or less often. The people with whom personal cleanliness is a habit find dirt, grime, and sweat revolting. To them “the great unwashed” are repulsive.

“When you teach a man to bathe,” says John Leitch in his book on “Industrial Democracy,” “you do more than merely teach him to cleanse his body. You introduce him to a new kind of life and create in him a desire for better living.”

The month before he began his wonderful work at Tuskegee, Booker Washington spent visiting the Negro families in the part of Alabama where he was to teach. “One of the saddest things I saw during the month of travel which I have described,” he writes in his autobiography,