Letitia Baldrige on Executive Etiquette

You arrive early at a restaurant for a business lunch to which you've been invited by a fellow executive. Do you take a table? If you take a table, should you order a drink? And if your host never arrives, what do you do?

Take the table, but not the drink, because "It looks sloppy," says Letitia Baldrige, the former White House social secretary and an authority on etiquette. Nor should you eat the bread sticks: "It gets the table all crumbed up." If the host fails to arrive after 40 minutes, tip the waiter $5 or $10 and let the other executive know, so that you can be reimbursed. "A host is a host," Miss Baldrige said.

This month Miss Baldrige, who heads her own public relations and marketing company, is starting a "corporate manners" division to educate men and women on the nicer points that are often overlooked in the business world. There is a desperate need for such training, she said in an needs, Mr. Korda said, "is efficiency, excellence and caring about your work."

Whatever the value of corporate manners, few people would seem better prepared to instill them than Miss Baldrige. A Vassar graduate, she has spent a lifetime advising others on etiquette, as social secretary to the late Ambassador and Mrs. David Bruce in Paris, to the former Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce in Rome and to Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House. In 1978, Miss Baldrige revised "The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette," and she is currently writing a book on corporate etiquette, to be published next year.

The vice president of Miss Baldrige's new division, Lily Lodge, has a pedigree at least as impressive. Miss Lodge is a Wellesley alumna, niece of the late Henry Cabot Lodge and daughter of John Davis Lodge, the United States Ambassador to Switzerland. Miss Lodge, a speech teacher, will bring her talents to "a business world punctuated with dissonant voices, harsh accents and unpleasant tones,” Miss Baldridge said.

Miss Lodge has already helped modulate voices at Revlon, Citibank and the Ford Foundation. "I've worked with lots of women climbing up the corporate ladder who have shrill, high voices, so that what they

in their companies," she said, while "middle managers are fascinated" with the subject. Clients have included Dean Witter Reynolds, where she was a director before the brokerage house was acquired by Sears, Roebuck.

Corporate manners training will encompass the usual niceties of the non business world: How to make an introduction; how to be a good host or guest; how to become a good conversationalist. But it will also cover a range of subjects particularly relevant to corporate life: when to use office stationery for extracurricular matters; how to act at a meeting; how to behave at a business lunch.

There is, for example, the matter of etiquette on corporate jets. Given the pressure to take off on time, "guests should arrive early," Miss Baldrige said, "and they should be very polite to the crew." The host's obligation is to serve "healthy, good food - not cold quiche" and to have an up-to-date annual report on board. "There are little details that make corporate jets exceptional," she said.

The quality of a company's stationery can be telltale, too. "A really first class company uses really fine stationery," Miss Baldrige said. From the chairman's office down to the executive vice president level, genuine engraved stationery is de rigueur. "Fake engraved stationery is like fake furs," she said.

She is enthusiastic about letter-writing for joyful occasions (a colleague's daughter is admitted to Harvard) or somber events (family illness). If an executive has just emerged from a meeting at which he came under fire, Miss Baldrige said, a well-mannered colleague peer or subordinate - should drop him a solicitous line: "Dear George, I understand that you had a tough time, and hope your spirits are up."

In the cutthroat corporate world, admittedly, such commiseration might be regarded a trifle suspiciously. "I'd kill anybody who did that to me," Mr. Korda said. "First of all, who needs it? Secondly, maybe the man deserved to have a tough time."

While he is "in favor of good manners," Mr. Korda insisted, he doubts that social niceties can be transferred to business. "Manners in corporations are for people in positions of power so that they don't misuse their power," he said. "For the rest, I'm not sure it comes up. Business is not necessarily nice. It's competitive and harsh, it has to do with excellence and self-interest."

Miss Baldrige disagrees. For every Machiavellian prince at a company, she maintained, there are a dozen true princes. "It's like taxi drivers," she explained. "If you take five taxis a day, one driver will be nasty and the other four are perfectly nice. You remember the nasty one. But you should remember the four who were nice. And we just have to look at corporate America that way." – By S. Salmans, 1983

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