Twenty-five years ago, when he was asked to assemble a list of the “Ten Books that Shaped the American Character,” critic Jonathan Yardley summoned the works of the great ones: Thoreau and Whitman, Twain and Hemingway, Thorstein Veblen and W.E.B. DuBois. And standing next to them in this pantheon of the nation’s literary giants, Yardley also placed the man who once told America to “read his work with a crayon, pencil, pen magic marker, or highlighter in your hand – when you come across a suggestion that you feel you can use, draw a line beside it.”
Since then, more than 30 million people worldwide have been embellishing, bedecking, and otherwise disfiguring their copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.
This book is also the foundation stone of the self-improvement empire now called Dale Carnegie Training. The company has franchised in 80 countries and claims 8 million graduates, including Warren Buffett and Lee Iacocca. Buffett was motivated to take the course as a 20-year-old, when the prospect of public speaking would cause him to vomit. Iacocca claims that for the first few years of his life he was an introvert, a shrinking violet; but after being “Carnegie-ized” became one of the most visible American businessmen of the 1980’s.
Dale was raised on a pig farm in Missouri, peddled bacon in western South Dakota, hoped to make it as an actor, and finally found his niche when he began to teach a handful of students at a Harlem YMCA in 1912. One of the smartest decisions he made was changing his name in 1919 from Carnagey to Carnegie, at a time when “Carnegie” carried the same aura that “Gates” does today.
The real key to his eventual triumph was the innate connection he sensed between public speaking and professional success. It’s as if Carnegie were saying, “If you can get up in front of a crowd and hold its attention, you can accomplish almost anything.”
The traits that make all human interaction possible – manners, decency, generosity of spirit – matter as much in business as they do in private life. Carnegie himself once told a skeptical audience, “I’ve never claimed to have a new idea. Of course I deal with the obvious. I present, reiterate, and glorify the obvious – because the obvious is what people need to be told.”
The above information is taken from a feature article in FORTUNE Magazine‘s May 2010 issue –The Best Salesman in Business. FORTUNE also named three other mega sellers from the Business Book Hall of Fame:
The Man Nobody Knows, Bruce Barton, 1925. Barton repositioned Jesus Christ as the “founder of modern business’ because he ‘picked up 12 men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”
Up the Organization, Robert Townsend, 1970. An often hilarious assault on the virtues of MBA’S, search firms, HR, and other bastions of conventional business thinking by the man who built Avis.
In Search of Excellence, Thomas J. (Tom) Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., 1982. The most successful duo to ever “graduate” from McKinsey & Company, business alma mater of both authors. Like How to Win Friends, its title became a catch phrase, its authors multimillionaires, and its central doctrines the business game plan for the ‘80’s.
Let’s hear it for the ‘oldies, but goodies’ – Once again, it proves that everything can seem different, but basically – it’s all the same.