During my advertising agency days when I worked with Asian car companies, I had countless business meals with Asian men who had been schooled by experts in the art of American dining. Their training was evident; when faced with four forks at the first course of our meal, my companions were astute enough to know to take the second fork from the outside. (The rule, for dining idiots, is, when in doubt, use the utensil farthest from the plate, which in this case was the appetizer fork.) With every meal thereafter, I learned a little more about dining from them, and they learned a little more about server-side technology from me, until none of us needed each other anymore and a final “Check, please” was uttered.

Since then, I’ve gathered tips for business meals. I’m not perfect — in fact, I still don’t know why people use chopsticks for sushi when it seems like finger food — but I have learned a few things that can help keep meals moving smoothly. And I received a few e-mails last week suggesting that I write a column about table manners during business meals, so here goes.

Don’t dive for your food. I think the rule about not being the first to eat comes from the idea that you shouldn’t dis the Queen by eating the good stuff before her. Or something like that. Then, I think, this rule came to mean, Don’t look like you’re starving as if we were living in Depression-era times. Now, I think, it’s more about being interested in the people at — instead of the food that’s on — your table.

Don’t order soup. It splashes. It’s hard not to slurp. If your soup is hot and everyone else has a cold appetizer, they will have to wait while your soup cools. And in case your mom never told you this — when you tip the bowl to get the dregs of the soup, tip away from yourself, not toward. Also, spoon away from yourself, not toward, unless you want to drip-dry later.

Don’t sit facing a mirror. You will not be able to stop looking at yourself, which people might mistake for vanity or disinterest in the people around you. Both may be true, which would make things even worse. Don’t sit facing the sun. You will squint, which is never attractive. You will see your dining partner as a silhouette and you will miss facial expressions, which are crucial to reading moods.

Don’t cross your legs under the table. Sitting this way tilts your body a little bit. The tilt looks fine to those who can see your sheer stockings with a seam running up the back, but when your companions see no legs, just body, the tilt makes you look like you have either bad posture or no equilibrium.

In groups of more than five people, there is likely to be more than one conversation at a time. Sit near the person you want to talk to, but not next to her — it’s so much easier to talk across the table. That said, you must say a few words to those on either side of you. No matter how large the party, it is rude to talk only to the person on one side of you.

Drink. I’m not saying go wild, but if everyone else is drinking, unless you’re in a 12-step program, give in to peer pressure. It’s like wearing a suit when everyone else wears a suit. This goes for dessert also. I’m not saying you should initiate ordering the banana split flambe, because part of being a good executive is not being out of control, which means not being fat, which means not eating desserts. But if everyone else is getting one, don’t ruin the fun. How hard is it to take a bite in a show of camaraderie?

When in doubt, take your cue from those around you. For example, you probably don’t know how to use a finger bowl. I, in fact, do. But when my grandma trotted them out for my sweet-16 birthday party, my friends ate the floating carrot-fish out of the bowl. Are others ordering an appetizer? In what price range are their entrees? By the way, fingertips are dipped daintily into the finger bowl then patted dry with the napkin.

These tips may not land an account or close a deal, but I’ve found they are extras I bring to the table.

My column was late. Not to you, but to my editor. It is surprising, really, that my column was late, because the time zone difference is in my favor. But this week I would have needed my editor to be in another galaxy.

I will not tell you why I was late because the only thing worse than being late telling why you were late. I am not talking about being late because your family's house burned down. I am talking about being late because of slow traffic, a late babysitter, a presentation that ran too long. Upward mobility requires that people can depend on you to be on time.

If you are a person who is always late, you will get in trouble. People who are always late think they are only sometimes late, so if you think you are sometimes late, you are probably in trouble.

There is no need to give advice on how to be on time, because everyone knows how to be on time. (Here's the proof: If the President of the United States invited you to dinner would there be any risk that you'd be late? No.) But perhaps there is a need to show why *all* deadlines and appointments are as important as dinner with the President.

The basic problem with being late is that you reveal too much about yourself. In the end, being late reveals either disrespect or incompetence, both of which are important things to not have at work, and if you do have them, hide them by being on time, always.

If you are late to a meeting, for example, you are disrespectful to everyone in the room. If your boss is there, forget the promotion. If your direct reports are there, imagine ten years from now when everyone has new jobs at new companies, and your bonus depends on cutting a deal with someone who used to report to you, and that person remembers how disrespectful you were. No bonus.

Sometimes people are on time to the meeting but they don't have the report. Forget the excuses because everyone in the room will see you as incapable. There are shades of incapable. There is incapable of doing the report so you procrastinate. There is perceiving that you are incapable even though you are capable which makes you incapable with low self-esteem. There is overloaded and did not get to the report which really means you cannot set limits at work, which translates to low self-esteem, or worse yet, no knowledge of your own limits.

How can you fix the problem? Being honest with yourself goes a long way in the late arena. Once I was late to dinner and someone at the table said to me, “You must be a time optimist.” I had no idea what he was talking about. But then he explained that most people are late because they are too optimistic about how quickly they can do things — which is a nice way of saying that people are late because they are not honest with themselves about how long things really take. So if you really want to be on time, you will start being a better judge of how much time tasks really take — and you will add some time to each estimate.

I used to teach a college-level business class, and some days I would give a pop quiz during the first five minutes of class. The quiz would be easy but it would count for a significant percentage of a student's overall grade. Some students would approach me after class to tell me that they had an excuse for lateness and that my surly pop quizzes were ruining their chance of getting into law school. I told the students that the quiz was my way of emphasizing that it doesn't matter how much you know about business, if you're late, you will undermine your success.

Luckily, my editor does not quiz me, and luckily, I am not applying to law school.

My friend Ann has a really deep voice. Not a sexy, deep voice like at a 1-900 service. It’s more like Oscar the Grouch with a sore throat, or maybe even like Darth Vader on Prozac. Her voice, the result of a birth complication, is a disability that she must deal with daily, and for the most part has overcome. I know that now, but I didn’t always see things that way.

I knew Ann in grade school where I confess to having had evil thoughts:

  1. Why is she first chair in saxophone and I am last chair in oboe? She has a weird mouth and I don’t. It’s not fair.
  2. Why is she class president and I am not even getting invited to boy-girl parties? How is someone with such an awful voice so much more popular than I am?

In high school, Ann and I were on the track team together and we became close friends. I spent so much time with her that I stopped noticing that her voice was different. It seemed normal to me.

But there were constant reminders: People in restaurants stared when they heard us talking. Often sales people did not understand her question at first because they were so stunned by her voice. Ann never lost patience, never looked uncomfortable. I never knew how she did it.

In the track world, you meet tons of kids from schools all over the state, and when Ann walked by, I heard lots of them say: “What’s wrong with her voice?”

When I asked Ann if she felt uncomfortable about how she sounded, she’d say no. “A deep voice sounds authoritative,” she’d tell me.

Ann flourished in college. She learned to be extra nice to people because they usually would be extra nice back. She became very loyal to friends who stuck by her because so many other acquaintances walked away after hearing her speak. Naturally, she knew she was different, so she concentrated hard in school since good grades would help her overcome prejudices.

After college she went to a top advertising firm. I assume that her voice was not a problem during interviews, or at least that the interviewers believed Ann could overcome her voice impediment enough to impress potential clients.

But then she was assigned to a manager who hated her. He berated her intelligence, made sexually explicit comments in her presence and generally let her know he did not want her around. In truth, his actions amounted to harassment. But harassment is usually thought to occur when a man in power is attracted to a woman with less power. No one would have thought of anyone harassing Darth Vadar girl. Then, too, her harasser was powerful in the company, so Ann didn’t have much leverage.

Ann left the company. And once you leave a high-profile company without recommendations, you can forget going to another company in that industry. So she went back to where she flourished: school. She took programming classes and impressed a classmate so much that he got her a job. His software firm needed someone who knew advertising and someone who knew programming, and the company liked the idea of Ann wearing two hats.

The company went under in the tech meltdown of 2002, but Ann found that by switching gears, she had developed a new specialty in a very narrow niche that she dominates. She would not want me to say that in this column because she didn’t even want me to write the column in the first place. But the bottom line is that things are good for Ann. She weathered many storms and is successful despite her disability. Her tips for others who are struggling with some kind of impediment amount to good advice for any of us:

  1. Convince yourself you are great. Then convincing other people is so much easier.
  2. Don’t blame other people for your failures. Take responsibility for your life and move past people who don’t help you.
  3. Have patience with yourself if you don’t choose the right career on your first try. Trust that you will find a place that is right for you, and keep looking.
  4. Don’t make friends with a writer. They never stop using their friends’ lives as fodder.

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, acknowledge that you are not a leprechaun and that you have to create your own luck. Sure, luck can make or break a career, but those who make their own luck can make their careers shine. St. Patrick's Day is a great day to assess where you stand in the lucky-person parade.

1. Being lucky is a way of looking at the world.

You can look back? on your life and see the luck in it or see the failure. But all good interviewers know that past performance is the best indicator of future performance. They want to know about your successes, so why doom yourself from the start? View yourself as having lead a charmed life, and you will find yourself becoming the recipient of more lucky charms. Optimists know this intuitively. Our lives unfold the way we see them. If you expect bad things to happen, they will. But if you expect good luck, it likely will come your way.

2. Know what luck looks like

The luckiest people knock on the door of opportunity and it opens. Throughout your life, though, you’ll knock on hundreds of these opportunity doors. Sure, this is a figurative statement, but put on your metaphorical walking shoes.

One caveat: You must be clear on what you want for this rule to work. Doors will open to you constantly, and unless you know what you want, you won't know if you have been lucky enough to get it.

To be a lucky person in this world you must have a vision of your life. Otherwise you will walk through any door, and whims, aimlessness and fate will direct your life. [I didn’t understand this last phrase]

3. Entourages make opportunities for luck

You’ll find more four-leafed clovers if everyone is hunting them for you, than if you're searching alone. So invest in yourself by hiring people to help you create luck. An assistant at work, a cleaning person at home — whatever you need to free up clover-hunting time. Examine every task you do that does not, in some way, allow you to knock on doors that might open to big-time luck. Delegate the luckless work so you can concentrate on your vision. Consider using the money you might spend on movies or lattes to pay an assistant. And every entourage should include trusted advisors – a mentor who will steer you to the good clover patches. Don't go picking without one.

4. Surround yourself with lucky people.

Successful people have successful friends. There is, of course, the chicken and egg question. For example, did Sam Waksal befriend Martha Stewart *because* she was rich and famous or because he liked her? You and I will never know, but they did hang out together — along with all their other rich, successful friends (whether either is truly lucky is debatable and probably depends on your personal value system). And that's where the odds come in. Don't worry about why or when lucky people find each other. Just play the odds, and make sure you are hanging out with lucky people now.

5. Don't tell other people they were lucky

We all want to believe that we have accomplished some great feat through personal skill and ability — not luck. If you say it was because of luck, then it seems as though we had nothing to do with making something happen. So don’t tell someone who’s just achieved an important goal that they are lucky. Maybe they are, but you should focus on the skill they used to make their luck Besides, showing respect and admiration for others — not to mention hanging around with a winner — makes you look good..

If you hate your acquaintance for being lucky, stifle that feeling until you get home and can curse and scream until you feel better. But remember that no one seems very lucky while jealously screaming about his or her neighbor. And don’t forget Rule No. 4. Stop screaming and go out hang out with this person.