How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to Win Friends and Influence People

In 1935, a steel company executive named Charles Schwab was earning a million dollars a year at a time when the average American worker made less than a thousand. This was not because he understood metallurgy better than anyone else in the industry. Carnegie Steel employed men who knew the technical side of the business far more deeply than Schwab did. He would have admitted that himself. What Schwab had -- and what Andrew Carnegie paid a million dollars a year to keep -- was the ability to handle people. He could walk onto a factory floor where workers were underperforming and, without raising his voice or issuing a single threat, turn the situation around. He did it by making each person feel genuinely valued. He did it with honest appreciation, delivered specifically and sincerely, not as a management technique deployed from a manual but as something that had become a natural reflex. Carnegie told a reporter that Schwab's gift for dealing with people was worth more to the company than all the technical expertise on the payroll combined.

Dale Carnegie heard that story and built a course around it. Not around manipulation. Not around tricks. Around the straightforward observation that most people spend their entire lives trying to change others through criticism, argument, and coercion -- methods that almost never work -- while ignoring the approaches that actually do. His book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, was published in 1936. It went through print run after print run so fast that Simon and Schuster could barely keep it stocked. By the time Carnegie died in 1955, more than five million copies had been sold. Today, nearly ninety years later, the number stands at over thirty million. Warren Buffett took Carnegie's public speaking and human relations course in Omaha in 1951 at age twenty. The certificate of completion still hangs in his office -- the only diploma on the wall. He has said it changed his life more than any business school could have.