Gunter Schmidt, who took our course in West Germany,
told of an employee in the food store he managed
who was negligent about putting the proper price tags
on the shelves where the items were displayed. This
caused confusion and customer complaints. Reminders,
admonitions, confrontations, with her about this did not
do much good. Finally, Mr. Schmidt called her into his
office and told her he was appointing her Supervisor of
Price Tag Posting for the entire store and she would be
responsible for keeping all of the shelves properly
tagged. This new responsibility and title changed her
attitude completely, and she fulfiled her duties satisfactorily
from then on.
Childish? Perhaps. But that is what they said to Napoleon
when he created the Legion of Honor and distributed
15,000 crosses to his soldiers and made
eighteen of his generals “Marshals of France” and called
his troops the “Grand Army.” Napoleon was criticized
for giving “toys” to war-hardened veterans, and Napoleon
replied, “Men are ruled by toys.”
This technique of giving titles and authority worked
for Napoleon and it will work for you. For example, a
friend of mine, Mrs. Ernest Gent of Scarsdale, New
York, was troubled by boys running across and destroying
her lawn. She tried criticism. She tried coaxing. Neither
worked. Then she tried giving the worst sinner in
the gang a title and a feeling of authority. She made him
her “detective” and put him in charge of keeping all
trespassers off her lawn. That solved her problem. Her
“detective” built a bonfire in the backyard, heated an
iron red hot, and threatened to brand any boy who
stepped on the lawn.
The effective leader should keep the following guidelines
in mind when it is necessary to change attitudes or
behavior:
1. Be sincere. Do not promise anything that you
cannot deliver. Forget about the benefits to yourself
and concentrate on the benefits to the other person.
2. Know exactly what it is you want the other person
to do.
3. Be empathetic. Ask yourself what is it the other
person really wants.
4. Consider the benefits that person will receive
from doing what you suggest.
5. Match those benefits to the other person’s wants.
6. When you make your request, put it in a form
that will convey to the other person the idea that he
personally will benefit. We could give a curt order like
this: ” John, we have customers coming in tomorrow
and I need the stockroom cleaned out. So sweep it out,
put the stock in neat piles on the shelves and polish
the counter.” Or we could express the same idea by
showing John the benefits he will get from doing the
task: “John, we have a job that should be completed
right away. If it is done now, we won’t be faced with
it later. I am bringing some customers in tomorrow to
show our facilities. I would like to show them the
stockroom, but it is in poor shape. If you could sweep
it out, put the stock in neat piles on the shelves, and
polish the counter, it would make us look efficient and
you will have done your part to provide a good company
image.”
Will John be happy about doing what you suggest?
Probably not very happy, but happier than if you had not
pointed out the benefits. Assuming you know that John
has pride in the way his stockroom looks and is interested
in contributing to the company image, he will be
more likely to be cooperative. It also will have been
pointed out to John that the job would have to be done
eventually and by doing it now, he won’t be faced with
it later.
It is naïve to believe you will always get a favorable
reaction from other persons when you use these approaches,
but the experience of most people shows that
you are more likely to change attitudes this way than by
not using these principles – and if you increase your successes
by even a mere 10 percent, you have become 10
percent more effective as a leader than you were before
– and that is your benefit.
People are more likely to do what you would like them
to do when you use . . .
PRINCIPLE 9
Make the other person happy about doing
the thing you suggest.
In a Nutshell
BE A LEADER
A leader’s job often includes changing your people’s
attitudes and behavior. Some suggestions to accomplish
this:
PRINCIPLE 1
Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
PRINCIPLE 2
Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
PRINCIPLE 3
Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other
person.
PRINCIPLE 4
Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
PRINCIPLE 5
Let the other person save face.
PRINCIPLE 6
Praise the slightest improvement and praise every
improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in
your praise.”
PRINCIPLE 7
Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
PRINCIPLE 8
Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
PRINCIPLE 9
Make the other person happy about doing the thing you
suggest.
A Shortcut to
Distinction
by Lowell Thomas
This biographical information about Dale Carnegie was
written as an introduction to the original edition of
How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is reprinted
in this edition to give the readers additional
background on Dale Carnegie.
It was a cold January night in 1935, but the weather
couldn’t keep them away. Two thousand five hundred
men and women thronged into the grand ballroom of the
Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Every available seat
was filled by half-past seven. At eight o’clock, the eager
crowd was still pouring in. The spacious balcony was
soon jammed. Presently even standing space was at a
premium, and hundreds of people, tired after navigating
a day in business, stood up for an hour and a half that
night to witness – what?
A fashion show?
A six-day bicycle race or a personal appearance by
Clark Gable?
No. These people had been lured there by a newspaper
ad. Two evenings previously, they had seen this
full-page announcement in the New York Sun staring
them in the face:
Learn to Speak Effectively
Prepare for Leadership
Old stuff? Yes, but believe it or not, in the most sophisticated
town on earth, during a depression with 20
percent of the population on relief, twenty-five hundred
people had left their homes and hustled to the hotel in
response to that ad.
The people who responded were of the upper economic
strata – executives, employers and professionals.
These men and women had come to hear the opening
gun of an ultramodern, ultrapractical course in “Effective
Speaking and Influencing Men in Business”- a
course given by the Dale Carnegie Institute of Effective
Speaking and Human Relations.
Why were they there, these twenty-five hundred business
men and women?
Because of a sudden hunger for more education because
of the depression?
Apparently not, for this same course had been playing
to packed houses in New York City every season for the
preceding twenty-four years. During that time, more
than fifteen thousand business and professional people
had been trained by Dale Carnegie. Even large, skeptical,
conservative organizations such as the Westinghouse
Electric Company, the McGraw-Hill Publishing
Company, the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, the
Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, the American Institute
of Electrical Engineers and the New York Telephone
Company have had this training conducted in
their own offices for the benefit of their members and
executives.
The fact that these people, ten or twenty years after
leaving grade school, high school or college, come and
take this training is a glaring commentary on the shocking
deficiencies of our educational system.
What do adults really want to study? That is an important
question; and in order to answer it, the University
of Chicago, the American Association for Adult Education,
and the United Y.M.C.A. Schools made a survey
over a two-year period.
That survey revealed that the prime interest of adults
is health. It also revealed that their second interest is in
developing skill in human relationships – they want to
learn the technique of getting along with and influencing
other people. They don’t want to become public
speakers, and they don’t want to listen to a lot of high
sounding talk about psychology; they want suggestions
they can use immediately in business, in social contacts
and in the home.
So that was what adults wanted to study, was it?
“All right,” said the people making the survey. “Fine.
If that is what they want, we’ll give it to them.”
Looking around for a textbook, they discovered that
no working manual had ever been written to help people
solve their daily problems in human relationships.
Here was a fine kettle of fish! For hundreds of years,
learned volumes had been written on Greek and Latin
and higher mathematics – topics about which the average
adult doesn’t give two hoots. But on the one subject
on which he has a thirst for knowledge, a veritable passion
for guidance and help – nothing!
This explained the presence of twenty-five hundred
eager adults crowding into the grand ballroom of the
Hotel Pennsylvania in response to a newspaper advertisement.
Here, apparently, at last was the thing for
which they had long been seeking.
Back in high school and college, they had pored over
books, believing that knowledge alone was the open sesame
to financial – and professional rewards.
But a few years in the rough-and-tumble of business
and professional life had brought sharp dissillusionment.
They had seen some of the most important business
successes won by men who possessed, in addition
to their knowledge, the ability to talk well, to win people
to their way of thinking, and to “sell” themselves and
their ideas.
They soon discovered that if one aspired to wear the
captain’s cap and navigate the ship of business, personality
and the ability to talk are more important than a
knowledge of Latin verbs or a sheepskin from Harvard.
The advertisement in the New York Sun promised that
the meeting would be highly entertaining. It was.
Eighteen people who had taken the course were marshaled
in front of the loudspeaker – and fifteen of them
were given precisely seventy-five seconds each to tell
his or her story. Only seventy-five seconds of talk, then
“bang” went the gavel, and the chairman shouted,
“Time! Next speaker!”