Dale Carnegie

How to Win Friends and Influence People has an off-putting title and is one of the most quietly useful business books ever written. It is about the mechanics of ordinary human dealing: taking a genuine interest, remembering names, letting the other person talk, admitting when you are wrong, avoiding argument.

The reason it has survived ninety years is that none of it depends on technology, culture or industry. It is about what people are like.

The uncomfortable framing

It reads as manipulative if you approach it as technique. Carnegie's own insistence is that it only works when the interest is real — which is either the book's saving grace or its central tension, depending on who you ask.

What they teach

Don't criticise, condemn or complain

His first principle and the hardest. Criticism produces defensiveness, not change, and it is the standard management response to a mistake.

Talk in terms of the other person's interests

The whole of selling, compressed. Most pitches describe what the seller does; the effective ones describe what the buyer gets.

Admit it quickly and emphatically when you are wrong

It disarms almost every complaint. Businesses that argue with a dissatisfied customer over who is technically right nearly always win the argument and lose the customer.

Where to start

1. Dale Carnegie & Associates — The training organisation that continues the work.
2. Our breakdown of the book — The principles, and where the book falls short, in the library.

These links go to their own work. We summarise and point — we do not republish it.

Who it suits

Everyone, genuinely — particularly anyone managing people or dealing with customers for the first time.

And who it does not

The prose and examples are of their time. Applied cynically it reads as exactly the manipulation the title suggests.

More voices