Business Book Reviews – for the Busy Business Owner

How to Win Friends and Influence People – By Dale Carnegie, Simon & Schulster, rev. edition 1981, 320 pp. (including index), $26.00 (Hardcover)*

Capsule review:
Rating: 

Pluses: Timeless, common-sense observations about human nature and advice about how to deal with one’s fellow humans, presented in a folksy, homespun style. A good primer on communication and civility, and the author’s humility and sense of humor seem genuine. This book’s status as a classic self-help volume is well earned and it is worth reading for the historical value alone, as it emerged at a time when America was in crisis, influencing countless prominent and ordinary people alike, and was one of the books that set the modern self-help movement in motion.
Minuses: Some of the text seems a little dated despite modernization attempts in later editions. Though often touted as a book about handling all relationships, it is geared more towards business relationships than personal ones. Some readers might have ethical qualms about the fact that in essence the book is about manipulating people to do one’s bidding. Missing from the book is the chapter Carnegie intended to include about cases in which the fine principles he teaches simply don’t work.

Details: The year 2011 marks the 75^th anniversary of the debut of Dale Carnegie’s classic work, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Though the book didn’t really hit the public consciousness (and the best-seller list) until the following year, its official publication date was October 1936. It couldn’t have come at a better time; America was still in the throes of the Great Depression, and Carnegie’s cheerful, motivational message struck a chord that still echoes today. It’s no exaggeration to say that How to Win Friends, along with the Dale Carnegie courses that inspired the book, helped set the modern-day self-help industry in motion.  Indeed, the mid to late 1930s was a ripe time for motivational messages; as it happens, yet another self-help/motivational classic was published five months after How to Win Friends came out: Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Due to negligence on the part of Hill’s foundation, the copyright for his seminal work was not renewed on a timely basis, and the book was released to the public domain. The result, easily evident from a quick Google session, is that today there are hundreds of versions of Think and Grow Rich offered for free or otherwise by every motivational guru and wannabe imaginable. Carnegie’s people were more attentive to his intellectual property rights, no doubt because of the association of the book with the hugely successful Dale Carnegie courses. At the time How to Win Friends was published, Carnegie had been teaching his public speaking courses in one form or another for 24 years, and they had made him a very rich man.

It could be said, and in fact Carnegie himself said as much, that he wrote How to Win Friends – and taught his courses – for himself as much as for anyone else. In their 1989 biography of Carnegie, Giles Kemp and Edward Claflin quote a letter he wrote to the editor of his hometown paper. Said Carnegie, “I realize now that healthy people don’t write books about health. And, in the same way, people who have a natural gift for diplomacy don’t write books on How to Win Friends and Influence People. The reason I wrote the book was because I have blundered so often myself, that I began to study the subject for the good of my own soul.”

In his earlier years, few would have voted Dale Carnegie as Most Likely to Succeed. Born Dale Breckenridge Carnagey, he was dirt-poor growing up, and was self-conscious about everything from his family’s poverty to, of all things, his prominent ears, about which he was mercilessly teased by some of his crueler schoolmates. By the time he was in high school he was quite sure that he didn’t want to be an impoverished Missouri farmer like his father. Early on, he was inspired by something called the Chautauqua movement, named for the town in New York State where it began in 1873. The Chautauqua movement was sort of a traveling spiritual infotainment show: adult education classes with a generous helping of religion and uplifting moral messages thrown in. One particular Chautauqua presenter who was a world traveler and a mesmerizing speaker inspired the adolescent Carnegie, offering a vision of how the latter could escape his fate as “a poor farm boy who saw nothing ahead of him but years of dull toil.”

That poor farm boy was not to become a mesmerizing speaker right away. After attending State Teachers College in Warrensburg, Missouri (now the University of Central Missouri), he spent several years in sales, and was fairly successful at times. But sales were not where his heart was, and in 1911 he quit to pursue other dreams. He never did become a Chautauqua lecturer as he’d often fantasized, but instead attended a drama school. Apparently he wasn’t cut out for acting either, and he ended up in New York, unemployed, broke, and living in a room at the YMCA on 125^th Street. It was at the Y that he first got the idea of teaching classes about public speaking and self-confidence, and with the blessings of the Y’s manager he began teaching at that venue. The classes took off, and within a couple of years Carnegie was a wealthy man. A few years later he changed the spelling of his name to Carnegie, in honor of steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was widely viewed as the paragon of American success. It was a shrewd marketing move; to this day many people wrongly assume that Dale was one of “the” Carnegies.

How to Win Friends is a compilation of the wisdom Carnegie gained in his many years of developing, teaching, and refining his course. He often described the course itself as a laboratory of human relationships; it was always a work in progress, and he was continually tweaking it. The book that grew from this course first hit the bestseller lists in 1937, and Carnegie’s first royalty check was $90,000, which is the equivalent of more than $1.4 million dollars today. How to Win Friends quickly made an indelible mark on American culture, being both widely acclaimed and widely criticized – and, inevitably, satirized. It made its mark on the world as well, and has been translated into just about every known language. But what is it about this 1930s classic that still resonates today? More to the point, is it worth reading – or re-reading – for today’s business owner? From this reviewer’s perspective, the answer is a resounding yes.

How to Win Friends is refreshing in its simple wisdom and common sense advice about the things most of us were taught from grade school on, but often forget in our day-to-day dealings with our fellow humans. We know, for example, that most people don’t like to be criticized, or that we can often dispel conflicts by making a genuine effort to see things from our adversary’s perspective. In our everyday dealings, though, we often act as if these concepts were foreign to us. How to Win Friends is a no-nonsense reminder of these principles. In many places in the book Carnegie states – and re-states – the obvious, much to the annoyance of numerous readers over the years. To Carnegie’s credit he was always honest about this point, noting that the “obvious” is the truth that is hiding in plain sight and easily overlooked. He said that even though dealing with other people is a skill that should come naturally to all of us, it doesn’t – hence the necessity for a book like How to Win Friends.

Some critics derided Carnegie for lack of originality or over-simplification of complex principles. But he never professed to be the originator of the wisdom he shared, and never claimed to possess any special wisdom or knowledge; it was the public that chose to make a celebrity of him, and that was a role with which he was never very comfortable. (In that respect Carnegie and his work offer a welcome reprieve from the self-aggrandizing, brand-conscious egotists who seem to dominate the self-help and motivational industries today.) Once, when speaking to a gathering that included some of his severest critics, Carnegie said, “People say I’m not profound… This is true. Gentlemen, I’ve never claimed to have a new idea… The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates, I swiped them from Chesterfield, I stole them from Jesus, and I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use? I’ll be glad to listen.” Reportedly he got a standing ovation for that speech.

How to Win Friends is an easy read – perhaps deceptively easy, and Carnegie himself said that it would become more effective with repeated readings. Following a 1981 preface by Carnegie’s widow Dorothy, a note from Carnegie about how and why the book was written, and brief instructions on how to get more out of the book, the revised edition is divided into four parts: “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People,” “Six Ways to Make People Like You,” “How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking,” and “Be A Leader: How To Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment.” Each part has several chapters, and each chapter ends with a one- or two-sentence summary of the principle covered in that chapter. Carnegie illustrates his points with countless anecdotes about prominent and ordinary people alike, and shares many of his own experiences as well. His sense of humor and humility seem genuine, and he never comes across as preachy or self-righteous.

That said, How to Win Friends does have its limitations. Although the publisher promotes it as “the only book you need on the road to success,” that’s really not accurate; it’s a far from comprehensive book about either business or human nature, and to restrict one’s reading to the homespun wisdom of Dale Carnegie would be limiting indeed. Moreover, although How to Win Friends has often been touted as a book about handling all of one’s relationships, it is really geared more towards business relationships than personal ones. And there is a difference, despite the prevailing wisdom that business is at its essence all about relationships. However, this limitation isn’t necessarily a minus if one approaches How to Win Friends as mainly a business book, keeping in mind that it was, after all, a by-product of Carnegie’s sales and public speaking courses.

Even so, something is missing from the book – literally. According to the above-cited Carnegie biography, Dale Carnegie actually intended to write a final chapter about situations in which his time-tested principles simply were not effective. From his long years of experience in all types of business situations, Carnegie was well aware that there were some people for whom none of the rules he taught applied. It was simply not possible to get along with these people under any circumstances, and according to Carnegie they were best handled with a lawsuit or jail. So why didn’t he write this chapter? He said it was because he had an opportunity to take a European vacation before he had a chance to complete it, and thus sent the manuscript off to the publisher without that chapter. The authors of the Carnegie biography wrote, “Given the difficulty of reconciling such a chapter with the rest of the book, the vacation was probably the better course of action.” At least it’s somewhat reassuring to know that Carnegie was not a pie-in-the-sky idealist who touted a one-size-fits-all philosophy and had no concept of unworkable situations.

Some purists have complained because How to Win Friends has been revised so much as to be unrecognizable from the original edition. But surely this is one of those damned-if-one-does-and-damned-if-one-doesn’t situations, since if the book had not been revised, some people would be complaining because it was hopelessly quaint and out of date. It is a bit dated at that, even with the 1981 revisions. Arguably the book is weakened somewhat by the fact that it hasn’t been further modernized since the advent of the Internet and, particularly, the social media revolution. Hence some of the tactics suggested, such as taking the time to compose personalized sales letters, seem a bit passé. After all, today’s technology makes faux personalization all too easy, and too easily seen through, to be as effective as real personalization might have been in, say, 1944. That aside, there’s probably enough timeless wisdom in these pages to make the out-of-date advice negligible for most readers.

Another type of purist reading the book might also have ethical qualms about How to Win Friends, since at its essence it is about manipulating people to do one’s bidding. However, Carnegie’s basic intent seems benign enough, especially when compared to some of the content produced in more recent years, particularly the seduction/pick-up artist courses that can easily be found on the Internet.

Whatever beefs one may have with today’s motivational industry and gurus, it would be wrong to place blame for their content or their behavior on Dale Carnegie. He was a true pioneer, a humble man to boot, a man who seemed more comfortable in his role as a lifelong student than as a teacher – and How to Win Friends and Influence People deserves its status as a classic. Read it, enjoy it, take what you need from it and leave the rest, and always keep that unwritten chapter in mind. And then go watch a Frank Capra movie or two, and comfort yourself with the knowledge that even though many things have changed in the past 75 years, human nature has not.

* How to Win Friends and Influence People is available in several print, audio, and digital formats.

Amazon link for hardcover print edition: http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/1439167346

For more information about Dale Carnegie training, see http://www.dalecarnegie.com/.

For insight into what made Dale Carnegie the person he was, read Dale Carnegie: The Man Who Influenced Millions, by Giles Kemp and Edward Claflin (St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Dale-Carnegie-Man-Influenced-Millions/dp/0312028962

Based on this review, would you read this book?

The author of this review was provided the book by Capital Access Network, Inc.  The views expressed represent those of the author and do not reflect those of Capital Access Network, Inc. nor its subsidiaries. Any opinions and/or advice expressed by the author do not imply endorsement by Capital Access Network, Inc. nor its subsidiaries.