How to Win Friends and Influence People

The title How to Win Friends and Influence People reeks of insincerity.
How many people would boast of "winning" a friend and
influencing them for their own personal gain? It just doesn't
sound nice. To a modern reader, the book conjures up mental trickery
for a dog-eat-dog world, a shonky product hawked by a Depression-era
salesman. In this case, judging a book by its cover would seem a very
reasonable thing to do. Yet the reader should consider some points in
the book's defense.
Reasons to read and like Carnegie
1 There is a strange inconsistency between the brazenness of the title
and much of what is actually in the book. When read carefully, it is
not at all a manual for manipulation, in the manner of Machiavelli's
The Prince. Carnegie genuinely despised "winning friends" for a
purpose: "If we merely try to impress people and get people interested
in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends,
real friends, are not made that way." The energy that makes the
book a great read comes from a love of people. Maybe it is still
bought by shallow egomaniacs—current editions are marketed as
tools to gain popularity, for instance—but it is about time Carnegie's
classic was seen in a kinder, truer light.
2 Carnegie wrote the book in the America of the 1930s. The country
was still clawing itself out of the Great Depression, and opportunities,
particularly for people with limited education, were scarce.
Carnegie offered a way to get ahead, taking advantage of the one
thing you owned outright—your personality. By modern standards,
the claims made in How to Win Friends do not seem too wild; motivational
psychology is now well established. But try to imagine its
impact in 1937, before the great prosperity of the post-Second
World War period. To many people it would have seemed like gold.
For many today, it still is. 3 How to Win Friends is a self-confessed manual of action, "letting
the reader in on a secret." No theory, just a set of rules that work
"like magic." Carnegie's conversational style was a breath of fresh
air to those who had tried to read academic psychology, and even
more attractive to those who didn't read books at all. Labor-saving
ideas are a hallmark of American culture, so a book promising a
transformed life without years of toil and character building was
bound to get a good reception.
4 The book was not written with an eye to bestseller glory, but as a
textbook for Carnegie's courses on Effective Speaking and Human
Relations (the "How to" part of the title is a giveaway to its course
origin). The initial print run was only 5,000 copies. Rather than
being devised as part of some master plan to profit from people's
baser instincts, the aim was to bring the messages of the Carnegie
courses to a reading audience.
The How To Win Friends phenomenon
Nevertheless, initially no doubt due to the title alone, the book caused
a sensation. It is one of the biggest-selling books ever (over 15 million
copies, in all the world's main languages) and is still the biggest overall
seller in the self-improvement field. In her preface to the 1981 edition,
Dorothy Carnegie noted how her husband's ideas filled a real need that
was "more than a faddish phenomenon of post-Depression days."
Indeed, How to Win Friends is written up in compendiums like
Most Significant Books of the 20th Century, and takes its place in
Crainer & Hamel's Ultimate Business Library: 50 Books that Made
Management, among titles by Henry Ford, Adam Smith, Max Weber,
and Peter Drucker.
The message: Education, not manipulation
The success of Carnegie's adult courses revealed a deep desire for education
in the "soft skills" of leading people, expressing ideas, and creating
enthusiasm. That technical knowledge or raw intelligence alone
does not bring career success is now a given, but in Carnegie's time the
idea that success was composed of many elements was only just starting
to be researched. In seeing that people skills could make all the difference,
Carnegie effectively popularized the idea of emotional intelligence, decades before it was established as fact in academic
psychology.
He had kept in his mind a statement by John D. Rockefeller (the Bill
Gates of his age) that the ability to handle people well was more valuable
than all others put together, yet astonishingly he could find no
book written on the subject. Carnegie and his researcher hungrily read
everything they could find on human relations, including philosophy,
family court judgments, magazine articles, classical texts, the latest
work in psychology, and biography, specifically the lives of those recognized
for superb leadership. Carnegie apparently interviewed two of the
most important inventors of the century, Marconi and Edison, as well
as Franklin D. Roosevelt and even the movie stars Clark Gable and
Mary Pickford.
A set of basic ideas emerged from these researches. Originally written
as a short lecture, they were relentlessly tested on the "human laboratory"
of his course attendees before emerging, 15 years later, as the
"principles" in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Whatever
might be said about the book, it was not written on a whim.
Carnegie's principles
Did the principles work? At the start of the book Carnegie gave the
example of a man who had driven his 300+ employees mercilessly,
apparently the epitome of a bastard boss who was incapable of saying
anything positive about his own people. However, after taking a
Carnegie course and applying the principle "Never criticize, condemn,
or complain," he was able to turn "314 enemies into 314 friends,"
inspire a previously non-existent loyalty, and, to top it off, increase
profits. There's more, Carnegie told us: His family liked him more, he
had more time for leisure, and he found his outlook on life "sharply
altered."
What excited Carnegie most were not stories of the beneficial career
or financial effects of his courses, but how they made people open their
eyes and reshape their lives. They started to see that there could be
more lightness in their life, which was no longer seen as a struggle or a
power game.
The book's second chapter gets underway with a quote from the
American philosopher John Dewey, that the deepest urge in human
nature is the desire to be important. Freud's belief, Carnegie also noted,was that apart from sex, the chief desire was to be great; Lincoln said
that it was the craving to be appreciated.
The person who really understands this craving for appreciation,
Carnegie said, will also know how to make people happy—"even the
undertaker will be sorry when he dies." Such a person will also know
how to draw the best out of others. Carnegie loved telling the success
stories of the great industrialists of his day. Charles Schwab was the
first person to earn $1 million a year by running Andrew Carnegie's
United States Steel Company. He confided that his secret of success was
being "hearty in my approbation, and lavish in my praise" to the people
under him. Valuing your employees, making them feel special in the
scheme of things, is now accepted wisdom in management circles, but
in the era of Andrew and Dale Carnegie it wasn't.
At the same time, Carnegie was against flattery. That simply
involved mimicking the vanities of its receiver, whereas sincere appreciation
of someone's good points is an act of gratitude that requires
you really to see that person, maybe for the first time. One effect is
that you seem more valuable to them, the expression of value only
increasing your own. You get the priceless pleasure of seeing a face
light up and, in the workplace, are an amazed witness as excited cooperation
grows out of boredom or mistrust. Carnegie's principle "Give
honest and sincere appreciation" is ultimately to do with seeing the
beauty of people.
The book lists 27 principles, but most follow the logic of these first
couple. They include:
? Arouse in the other person an eager want.
? Become genuinely interested in other people.
? The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
? Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say "you're
wrong."
? If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
? Begin in a friendly way.
? Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
? Appeal to the nobler motives.
? Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

Final comments
Though easy to parody, the book itself is genuinely funny—quite a rare
event in personal development writing. It took Carnegie's log cabin
sense of humor to make it a text that really pulls you in. One of its
famous principles is: "Remember that a person's name is to that person
the sweetest and most important sound in any language."
How to Win Friends and Influence People will be read another 50
years from now because it is essentially about people, a subject we
assume we know a lot about but invariably don't. Before books like
this, it was thought that dealing with people was a natural ability—you
either had it or you didn't. How to Win Friends put firmly into the
public's mind the fact that human relations are more understandable
than we think, and that people skills can be systematically learned. It
also carried the proposition, in direct opposition to the book's reputation,
that we don't really influence a person until we truly like and
respect them.
Dale Carnegie
Born in 1888 in Maryville, Missouri, Carnegie was the son of a poor
farmer and apparently didn't see a train until he was 12 years old. In
his teens, though he still had to get up at 3 am every day to milk his
parents' cows, he managed to get educated at the State Teacher's
College in Warrensburg. His first job after college was selling correspondence
courses to ranchers, then he moved on to selling bacon, soap,
and lard for Armor & Company. He was successful to the point of
making his sales territory, south Omaha, the national leader for the
firm.
A desire to be an actor led Carnegie to the American Academy of
Dramatic Arts in New York, and after touring the country as Dr. Hartley
in Polly of the Circus, he returned to the sales fold, selling Packard
cars. He persuaded the YMCA to let him run public speaking courses
for business people, which were a great success, and his first book, Public
Speaking and Influencing Men in Business, was written as an aid to
teaching. Other books include How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
and Lincoln the Unknown. Carnegie training courses are now run all
over the world. The author died in 1955.