Minding manners: experts from around the country give advice on how to make the best impression at business meetings, dinners and at the office.

• Author: Wissmann, Carol

"There ya' go," said the waitress as she handed me my change, slammed shut the cash register and twirled on her heels, leaving me alone.

What ever happened to a simple "thank you," I wondered--or a "please," such as in "Please come again."? Ah, yes, there it was on the back of my bill, now impaled on a spindle by the bill. That hardly seemed to qualify, I sighed.

I left the coffee shop, and my mind fell back to my childhood. Nothing short of a full-fledged please and thank you would have passed muster with my mother. Those were the days when parents regularly responded with, "What do you say?" when their offspring failed to "mind their manners."

Little did I then understand that, besides the social graces, I was receiving the start of business basics. People pay for polite, from hometown customer service to international trade. And not knowing what's customary or lacking in courtesy costs.

PRESENTATION PAYS

Earl Statler is president of Statler Media Group, a print and electronic media consortium. From conducting million dollar press launches for companies such as Hewlett Packard, Beckman and Hitachi, to staging Nixon's second inaugural gala at the Kennedy Center, to 25 years as a protocol and etiquette trainer, Statler understands impression-making.

Agreeing with a U.S. News & World Report study seeing incivility as a problem--which 78 percent of respondents perceived as worse in the last 10 years, Statler says we're lacking in even the basics. "If I see another moron eating a meal while wearing his baseball cap--forward or backward--I'll scream," he says.

If a decline in manners is a contemporary phenomenon, manners themselves certainly aren't. Statler says 2,500-year-old writings in the Egyptian pyramids warn that when sitting with your superiors, laugh when they laugh. Not bad advice when you answer to pharaohs or company presidents. He adds that our current etiquette evolved from the courts of England and France and was brought to this country by Benjamin Franklin, when, as ambassador, he returned from Europe.

If you think today is different, and there is no need for formal manners, then forget about breaking bread with the big boys and girls. Statler has dined at the White House and knows. International corporations employ protocol officers, such as Statler, to train their executives to be at ease in any social situation. Not sure which little things mean a lot? Statler says, "Follow the lead of the host." In fact, always wait for the...