How to Brown Nose Friends & Manipulate People
Written as a textbook, Dale Carnegie used this book to supplement his seminars to encourage self-confidence and public speaking skills. It is divided into four parts: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People; Six Ways to Make People Like You; How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking; and Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment. Sounds like a miracle in a book, doesn't it?
The gist, as I mentioned above, is to get people to like you. How do you do this? Find out what they like and get them talking about it. Ask them questions about their stamp collection, monacle polishing or thoroughbred breeding, but make sure you don't come of as fake. Carnegie, in all his cheery confidence, truly believes that we can make a genuine connection to each person we meet if we only try, but he correctly observes that acquaintances can readily detect B.S. and will react accordingly, so we had better at least look like we're sincere during our interactions.
Furthermore, it is imperative that we develop empathy so that we can better understand each other's motivations and experiences, thus giving us some insight to how to better exploit them. I'm sure Carnegie would disagree, but that's how I read it. I must be the pessimistic yin to Carnegie's almost nauseatingly optimistic yang.
Carnegie puts a nice, positive spin on what is actually happening here: he is teaching the reader to manipulate people, particularly if you are a man. This book has been through several revisions throughout the years (it was originally published in 1936), so a few bits have been changed to show the evolving influence of women. Where most anecdotes spoke to women in the domestic realm, a few stories have been added to depict women working as bank tellers or even-- gasp! -- bank managers, but alas, the people who actually own the bank or other sundry business is always a man.
I really shouldn't be so quick to judge; this is, after all, a book that is nothing more than a product of its time. This is exactly what it bills itself to be -- a 1930s business school textbook --and it is wrong of me to expect anything else.
From a modern perspective, if you remove the misogyny, the overarching theme is to just plain be nice to people. You can get whatever you want from folks -- be it friendship or the new plastering contract -- if you are just diplomatic and polite. There really isn't anything wrong with that.
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