How to Treat Your Enemies

Editor's note: Welcome to our weekly column on business etiquette. If you have a pressing question for Miss Conduct, please send her an email.

When she read that E.B. White observed, "One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy," Miss Conduct wanted to address this unseen menace to business productivity.

Now, Miss Conduct has no enemies -- at least that's her story and she's sticking to it -- so she asked two of her most gracious acquaintances about the topic. Since these friends also happen to be experts in very different types of business conduct -- initial salesmanship and turnaround management -- their experience represents the full chronology of commerce, too. They broke having an enemy down into two phases: before and after.

Pre-Enemy: Assess Personalities

It's universally agreed that it's best if your enemies don't know they're your enemies, mostly because it makes you a more formidable adversary yourself. So how do we keep from making enemies in the first place? ...