How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to Win Friends & Influence People in the Digital Age, from Dale Carnegie & Associates, Simon and Schuster 2011

Adapted from the 1936 best seller, this book is a positive surprise because it preserves and expands on Dale Carnegie's original four guidelines while casting the challenges in stories and characters from the digital age - Steve Jobs, for example,  - as well as the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln's strategy for dealing with failed Northern generals. The challenges of instant digital communications and messaging, reputation exposure and lawsuits, along with organization change that is heavily weighted toward failure, will resonate with current readers.  

The new book, for example, holds true to Carnegie's foundational principles - don't criticize, condemn, or complain; talk about others' interests; if you are wrong, admit it,; let others save face.  But the book also mirrors the life lessons poverty taught him, from his birth into a poor Missouri farm family, to his enormously successful business empire built on books, training, and public speaking. Like many entrepreneurs, Carnegie, who changed the spelling of his name to more closely suggest the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, although there was no family connection, hit bottom several times.  Finally finding himself rooming at the 125th street YMCA in New York City, things started to turn around for him, starting with teaching people how to do public speeches.  Within five years he had published his first best seller, which by his death sold 5M copies!

Business readers will find particularly useful "Part Three, How to Merit and Maintain Others' Trust," especially Section 2, "Never Say, "You're wrong."  How often do we repeat this dangerous declaration?  Taken in total, Part Three is a recipe for wrapping negative messages in a positive cloak, showing us how to manage a difficult speech or debate, without losing the audience.  

"While it's easy to see why we want credit for successes for which we labored, claiming the credit will never win you friends.  It will also diminish your      influence quicker than just about any other action."

The authors argue that surrendering the credit engenders a feeling of reciprocity.  We don't give in order to get in a transnational sense.  But we do give in order to foster relationships -and by doing so we know there will be rewards. How many business leaders made it to their top positions by stealing credit and deflecting blame?  Chances are, say the authors, that their rise was eventually limited by these behaviors.

This is essential reading for anyone struggling with failure of the latest change initiative, whether it is a lean journey, a stalled career, or even a high level systems integration project resting on flawed human systems.