The good teeth route to business and power
By Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times

This morning I woke up and smiled at my husband. He did not smile back, but then, maybe he was still asleep. I smiled twice at the man at the till at Tesco when I went in to buy my bagel. He did not smile back, either. I beamed at the first I saw in the office. She did return my smile, but then asked if I was all right.

The reason I've been smiling so much today is that I have just seen some research by a behaviourial scientist in Chicago proving that smiling is the key to success.

Dr Allen Konopacki of Incomm Research sent out a team of "smile researchers" to watch sales staff at trade shows. They found that those who smiled attracted four times as many people to their stands as those who did not.

Despite my experience this morning, smiling usually has a good effect on people. Unfortunately, we seem to be forgetting how to do it. According to Dr Konopacki, children smile 300 times a day, adults just 21 times.

Teenagers, he says, smile 30 times - which makes me worry about his sample group. Most of the teenagers I know make a point of never smiling.

He concludes that the reason adults no longer smile in public places is that we are frightened of being misunderstood. I can think of a better reason why we abstain from smiling as we get older: Our teeth are not up to it.

...In the world of business, it is hard to get a glimpse of those scary British smiles, as their owners tend not to expose them, especially in front of a camera. I have been flipping through old FTs and copies of Management Today and found Britain's tooth count very low.

By contrast, in Fortune and Forbes, United States businessmen are smiling as if their lives depended on it...

It is not hard to work out why Americans smile so much. Some of it is cultural, the rest financial. If you had just spent, say, $282,000 on what dentists call "smile rehabilitation", you'd flaunt it, too.

The superiority of American teeth may be a little-known explanation for the country's continued supremacy in business. It also may explain why Sir Richard Branson has done as well in the US; indeed, he is the only British businessman whom Americans have great respect for (or have even heard of).

He is shockingly inarticulate and has an odd dress sense and - worst of all - a beard. Yet, he has a large, prominent set of even, white tombstones on permanent display in a great, gleaming grin.

...The reason I received so few smiles this morning may not have been that my gums were frightening people but that I was too obviously forcing myself. The warmth simply was not there.

Indeed, the mouth-only smile can be very upsetting. I can think of one senior colleague who smiles constantly, with no clue from his eyes as to what he is doing.

...I have practised in the mirror and tomorrow morning, I'll give it a go. Maybe they'll smile. More likely, they'll laugh.