On Their Best Behavior

Letitia Baldrige offers a guide to executive manners

American business leaders have been urged to toughen up, to partake of power breakfasts, to dress only for success. Now along comes Letitia Baldrige's Complete Guide to Executive Manners (Rawson Associates; $22.95) telling them to be polite. Good manners constitute good business, Baldrige argues. Her model executive is gracious and considerate. When he fires a subordinate, he breaks the news compassionately; when he loses a job, he leaves the firm quickly and quietly. He exhibits an old-fashioned virtue: good manners.

A syndicated columnist, public relations executive and Jacqueline Kennedy's onetime White House social secretary, Baldrige, 58, has a solution for almost...

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