How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to Win Friends and Influence People collects the techniques Dale Carnegie developed teaching public-speaking and human-relations courses to working adults, a practice he started around 1912. First published in 1936, it argues that most of what looks like natural charm or leadership is really a set of learnable habits.

The book runs in four parts. The first covers basic techniques for handling people without provoking resentment, including the story of Lincoln drafting a furious letter to General Meade after Gettysburg and then never sending it. The second lays out six ways to make people like you, from smiling and remembering names to talking in terms of the other person's own interests. The third turns to persuasion: Carnegie argues that winning an argument rarely gets you what you actually wanted, and that leading someone through a string of small agreements works better than trying to talk them out of a position. The fourth part is aimed at managers, and covers how to correct people without humiliating them, using stories like Charles Schwab handing out cigars instead of scolding workers he found smoking under a No Smoking sign.

A revised edition appeared in 1981, overseen by Dorothy Carnegie and Arthur R. Pell after Carnegie's own death in 1955, updating some of the book's examples for later readers. It has sold more than 30 million copies since 1936 and remains one of the standard references in business and self-help writing.