Etiquette and Auditors
Advocates training in business etiquette for auditors: an important “people skill” especially where the relationship of auditor and auditee is a delicate one. Discusses the basic principles underlying good manners and business protocol, trust, respect and mutual concern, and their expression in conversational aptitudes, order, propriety and convention. Also considers how to recover from lapses. Reports on a survey of the ranked concerns, with respect to etiquette, of 14 auditing executives.
The Recent History of Professionalism in Relation to Social Structure and Social Policy
The professions, conceived as a select body of superior occupations, have existed from time immemorial, although their identity has often been in dispute. The ancients wrote and argued about them, while Herbert Spencer traced their origin among primitive peoples. The earliest view to which we need here pay attention was that occupations should be judged and valued according to their compatibility with the good life. They were to be tested by their effect on the giver of the service rather than on the recipient. The professions were, in English parlance, the occupations suitable for a gentleman. This idea naturally flourished in societies which distinguished sharply between life lived as an end in itself, and life passed in pursuit of the means which enable others to live as free civilized men should. The professions in such a society were those means to living which were most innocuous, in that they did not dull the brain, like manual labour, nor corrupt the soul, like commerce. They even contained within themselves qualities and virtues which might well find a place among the ends of the good life itself. Leisure, based on the ownership of land or of slaves, was the chief mark of aristocracy, and here too the professions were but slightly inferior. For leisure does not mean idleness. It means the freedom to choose your activities according to your own preferences and your own standards of what is best. The professions, it was said, enjoyed this kind of freedom, not so much because they were free from the control of an employer—that was assumed—but rather because, for them, choice was not restricted and confined by economic pressure. The professional man, it has been said, does not work in order to be paid: he is paid in order that he may work. Every decision he takes in the course of his career is based on his sense of what is right, not on his estimate of what is profitable. That, at least, is the impression he would like to create when defending his claim to superior status.
Right coronary artery stenosis associated with tricuspid valve ring annuloplasty
A 70-year-old man with severe symptomatic functional mitral valve regurgitation underwent successful mitral valve repair combined with tricuspid valve ring annuloplasty. Pre-operative coronary angiography (CAG) showed no significant stenosis. One-and-a-half years later, the patient presented with an acute exacerbation of heart failure. Repeat CAG demonstrated tight stenosis in the right coronary artery (RCA) with arterial kinking that corresponded to the same point as the stenosis where the RCA is the closest to the tricuspid valve ring. The new lesion probably occurred as a consequence of the tricuspid valve ring annuloplasty.