Miss Manners on Wall St., page 3

     While a social introduction defers to age and gender, Thomas says a business situation generally respects status and power. But, she says, there is one big exception to that rule. It is that, in a business setting, the customer is the most important person. Thus, the introduction in the example at the top of this story was wrong. It should have gone this way: "Mr. Wallet, I would like you to meet our president, Mr. Bigg."
     "It sounds silly to say it, but I didn't realize there was a pecking order and an etiquette to this, " Erica Feldblum, 35, a funds representative at Fleet Bank's Prudential Center office, said later. Shaun Murphy, 29, her counterpart in Waltham, said this lesson, and the one about where to wear a nametag, were eye-openers. "These are things you usually have to learn on your own, and it is easy to learn the wrong things," he said.
     Thomas operates as Protocol Advisors Inc. She began the business in 1995, after working in corporate sales for Tiffany & Co. There, clients buying gifts for overseas visitors often also asked for tips on how to impress these people. Thomas, who had made etiquette a hobby after attending a talk during the early 1980's by Judith Martin, the "Miss Manners" columnist, had answers. She owns 30 books on the subject and uses libraries and the Internet for additional research.
     Thomas is among those who trace current interest in business manners to the 1960's and 1970's, when schools stopped teaching such skills. "By the late 1980's, the world began to perceive that we had a whole generation coming into adulthood and postions of power and who were also understanding that they were not well equipped to go out into the business world," she said.
      Judith Re, who teaches the "Social Savvy" classes for children at Boston's Ritz-Carlton hotel and is adding classes for adults this winter, agrees. "People now in their 40's and 50's, they were busy with the Vietnam War then, either protesting it or fighting in it," Re said. Now they run corporations and want to make sure they know they are doing the right thing--and be sure their employees can learn, too.
     Colleges were early to understand the problem, seeing that their students didn't know how to make a good impression in a job interview. Northeastern Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among those that offer short courses on etiquette students may never have learned at home.
     Travis Merritt, a literature professor at MIT who acts as the de facto "dean" of the one-day Charm School MIT runs each January, cites the way students walk. "I noticed several years ago that MIT students don't have any style" when they walk, he said. "I teach them walking, strolling, sauntering, and striding--and then we climax with the power walk." Other classes cover dining manners, proper behavior in a crowded elevator, and a session called "How to Butter Up a Big Shot."
     At NewsEdge Inc. in Burlington, a provider of customized business news reports to clients at more than 1,200 companies, an ongoing program offers employees four communications-based courses that address etiquette issues from several perspectives.
     Employees in a company such as NewsEdge need help to "round out the edges" of their acknolwledged technical expertise, Marilyn Hoyle, the company's vice president for marketing, said. One of her biggest concerns is their reliance on e-mail, "which can exacerbate a bad communication situation," Hoyle said.
     Grace Andrews, whose Cambridge consulting firm, Training by Design, handles clients from hig-tech firms to casinos, runs part of NewsEdge's program. (continue on next page)