MANNERS AND OTHER MATTERS

This morning The West Australian newspaper published an article about Notre Dame University fighting the spread of "digital stress"by urging staff to switch off their email for one morning a week and talk to each other instead. The Chancellor was quoted as saying that apart from being distracting and time-consuming, emails had a higher likelihood of being misinterpreted because they were not accompanied by eye contact, body language or facial communication. The term "digital stress"has been coined to refer to information overload caused by too much multi-tasking on digital devices.  The article resonated with me because I have had a interesting week presenting The Percy Institute's  Strive for Corporate Success program to an international humanitarian organisation, and also a top tier legal firm. My program content is tailored for each client but there are a number of areas of interest which are common to two such diversified organisations. When t...

Forget standing when women enter the room or calling all men “sir”. Modern western society would suggest that is behaviour from a forgotten time.  But what are the modern manners every child should have? When I was thinking about this post I returned to the memory of my father answering the telephone…the sort which was attached to a  wall and was shared among all members of the family. “Is Louise there?” would ask the tentative teenage male voice.  “Yes” was the response of my father as he put the telephone handset back into its cradle. Oh, the humiliation!  Whoever  the new “boyfriend” of the moment was, he had not asked the correct, and polite by my father’s standards, question: “Good evening…may I speak with Louise please”.   Then the answer would have been, perhaps:  “No, we are in the middle of dinner.  Why don’t you call back in half an hour”.  And then I would have to suffer through another half hour of polite family...