How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie
In 1936, the son of poor Missouri farmers, having never worked a corporate job in his life, wrote the ultimate guide to getting ahead in the corporate world. It was a handbook on pleasantries - encouraging politeness and appreciation always in your dealings with people, reminding you to smile to get people to like you. It was an instant success. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People went through 17 editions in its first year of publication, selling some 250,000 copies in its first three months. It has been used by social climbers, cult leaders and billionaires - all using its lessons to try and get ahead. In 2013, it was ranked as the seventh most influential book in American history and has sold 30 million copies.
Carnegie himself would seem to be an unlikely prophet of corporate success. He spent his childhood trying to get out of doing the farmwork (his job was milking the cows before school) as his family just barely scraped by. He initially planned to be a teacher - enrolling in a free university and joining one of the school’s literary fraternities, which hosted public speaking tournaments. He bombed in his first competition, so he worked tirelessly on his skills by reciting famous speeches and learning rhetorical techniques until, in his third year, he won his school’s debate championship. He later became a travelling salesman, selling across the Midwest and at the age of twenty-three had saved up enough money to enrol in the American Academy of Arts
Aside from his experience in public speaking, Carnegie supports his advice by drawing on the stories and achievements of great men like Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. He writes that true leaders tread softly; they ask questions and never bark orders; they are self-effacing and encouraging and never imperious or cruel. To further convince his readers, Carnegie went to the tops of 1930s American society to interview scores of the wealthy and powerful. He interviewed people like Thomas Edison and Franklin D. Roosevelt to add to his book their lessons in interacting with people. All were well chosen and successful American examples that found their way into the book to convince readers of Carnegie’s wisdom, with impressive results.
One of the other persistent features of Carnegie’s writing is its, potentially surprising, optimism. The book was written in 1936, when America, along with much of the rest of the world, was deep in the mire of the Great Depression
Yet the book retains its popularity, still selling copies to the tune of hundreds of thousands a year. Maybe its advice encouraging emotional intelligence is still applicable in a workplace that will, for current and future generations, most likely be increasingly unstable as people take on many different jobs in their lifetimes, making the ability to get along with people a vital skill. Or maybe it is the books lasting imprint upon culture. The book has been referenced in episodes of popular TV shows such as Cheers and Supernatural and the billionaire Warren Buffet credits a course he took based on the book for his success, keeping his diploma from the course on his office wall to this day.
