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How to Make Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie’s often-maligned self-help book not only stands the test of time, it also demands to be read again. By / Daniel Akst When I was a young man, I discovered a magic trick. I found that by listening patiently and remaining calm, I could convert angry callers from enemies into friends during a single fraught phone conversation. Turns out, I had merely reinvented the wheel. One of the 20th century’s greatest psychologists discovered that trick long before I was born. His name was Dale Carnegie. It’s a name that inspires cynicism. Although his best known work, How to Win Friends and Influence People, has won countless acolytes, from the outset his detractors saw him as little more than a proselytizer for sycophancy. Worse, they blamed him for a supposed shift in the nation’s business culture from Puritan rectitude to shallow likability, and from character to personality. One critic, writing about Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, argued that Carnegie’s book was just the sort of thing that might have influenced Willy Loman in ways that led to his tragic end. Yet How to Win Friends and Influence People—the title itself has entered the cultural lexicon as the basis for parodies and spin-offs—remains in print 85 years after its initial publication. Translations have carried its message around the world. Revised editions have taken account of changing times. There is even 14 » Partners in Progress » www.pinp.org
a version called How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age. How could a text so widely reviled retain such enduring appeal? To find out, I decided to read it—and to track down the original, or as close as I could come, to better grasp what the author was getting at in the first place. Chalk up another member of the cult of Dale Carnegie. How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the bestselling business books of all time because it is one of the best and most useful you will ever encounter. And it is perhaps even more useful today than it was in 1936. Carnegie’s insights are unerring and his folksy style irresistible. Most of all, How to Win Friends and Influence People has a deeply moral core that challenges readers to do better in business by being better people. “You might think his techniques are superficial and manipulative, appropriate only for salespeople,” writes Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “But Carnegie was, in fact, a brilliant moral psychologist.” Calling his book self-help is like calling Moby-Dick a book about a whale. Carnegie understood that the purpose of insight is action, and that we are what we do. So why shouldn’t he help us change for the better? Instead of concocting fanciful theories like those of Freud and Jung, Carnegie relied on observation
