
EDITOR’S NOTE
Great leaders are individuals who are passionate about and confident in the work they do, and they inspire others to do so in the process. Dale Carnegie’s vision extends from corporate team building, to improving the leadership qualities within each individual. Being it on a professional or a personal level, Dale Carnegie has been a great source of inspiration and guide strengthening all with a positive approach towards self- assessment of taking command on one’s life.
He has been extremely successful in igniting enthusiasm in people’s views and vision towards their professional and personal lives.
By bringing out this edition of the book for our readers, we have ensured Dale Carnegie’s approach is well-directed to the reader with sheer precision, as the way author would have wanted to be presented.
The Leader in You is an expressive step-by-step guide; demonstrating tips, ideas, and strategies on principles to have Editor’s Note
INTRODUCTION
The Human-Relations Revolution
Keep your mind open to change all the time. Welcome it. Court it. It is only by examining and reexamining your opinions and ideas that you can progress.
– DALE CARNEGIE
As the twenty-first century approaches, the world is undergoing enormous change, a process of great upheaval and great possibility. In just a few short years, we have witnessed the dawn of postindustrial society, the advent of the information age, the rush to computerization, the birth of biotechnology, and not the least of these changes, the human-relations revolution.
With the end of the cold war, the business environment has grown dramatically more intense. Competition has become more global and more energized. And technology races on. No longer can businesses safely ignore their customers’ wants and needs. No longer can managers simply issue orders and expect them to be mindlessly obeyed. No longer can personal relationships be taken for granted. No longer can companies be less than obsessed with constant quality improvement. No longer can so much human creativity go so scandalously untapped.
To survive in the years to come, successful organizations-in business, in government, in the nonprofit World-will have to undergo a profound cultural change. Their people will have to think quicker, work smarter, dream wilder, and relate to each other in very different ways.
Most important of all, this cultural change will require a whole new breed of leader, a leader quite unlike the bosses most of us have worked for and some of us have perhaps become. The day has long since passed when a company could be run with a bullwhip and a chair.
The leaders of tomorrow will have to establish a real vision and a sense of values for the organizations they wish to lead. These leaders will have to communicate and motivate far more effectively than did leaders of the past. They will have to keep their wits about them through conditions of near-constant change. And these new leaders will have to mine every ounce of talent and creativity that their organizations possess from the shop floor to the executive suite.
The roots of all this upheaval can be traced back to the decades that followed World War II. In the postwar years American companies seemed to prosper almost regardless of what they did. The economies of Europe and Asia were hobbled by the war’s destruction, and the world’s developing countries were not much of an economic factor yet. Big American-based companies, backed by big labor and big government, set the standards for everyone else. It wasn’t that these companies were so beautifully run. They never really had to be. With their steep hierarchies, their rigid job descriptions, and their we-know-best attitudes, they cruised right through the middle years of the century-fat, happy, and as profitable as could be.
What lovely cocoons these companies provided for their employees! A job with a decent corporation was for many people a job for life-not so different from the civil service, but with a better salary and sweeter fringe benefits.
Layoffs? Who ever heard of layoffs for people who wore suit jackets or dresses to work? Maybe for factory workers, but definitely not for the managerial set. People spoke often about “the ladder of success,” and that’s how they would progress in their careers, one rung at a time, neither slower nor faster than the people above or below. In hindsight we see that those were the days of easy affluence; eventually they had to end.
While America was enjoying the fruits of the postwar era, the Japanese were thinking ahead. Their economy was destroyed, much of their basic infrastructure was in ruins, and that was just the beginning of what the Japanese had to overcome. They also had a worldwide reputation for producing cheap, shoddy goods and delivering second-rate customer service.
But after all the hardship they had suffered, the Japanese were ready to learn from their mistakes. So they went out and hired the best advisors they could find, among them Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a statistician who had worked in the United States Army’s quality control office during the war.
Deming’s message to the Japanese: Don’t try to copy the intricate structures of big American corporations. Instead, Deming and others advised, build a new kind of Japanese company-a company dedicated to employee involvement, quality improvement, and customer satisfaction-and work to unite all the employees behind those goals.
It didn’t happen overnight, but the Japanese economy was reborn. Japan became a leader in technological innovation, and the quality of Japanese goods and services soared. With this new spirit in place, Japanese firms didn’t just catch up with their foreign competitors. In many important industries, the Japanese rolled right past. It didn’t take long for their approach to begin spreading around the globe-to Germany, to Scandinavia, across the Far East, and along the Pacific Rim. America, unfortunately, was one of the last to catch on. This delay proved costly.
Slowly, imperceptibly at first, America’s cruise of easy af- fluence was running out of gas. Through the 1960s and the 1970s, the roar of the postwar economy was loud enough to drown out the occasional sputters, but the hints of trouble grew increasingly hard to ignore. Oil got expensive. Inflation and interest rates shot up. And competition wasn’t coming only from a reinvigorated Japan or Germany anymore. Dozens of other countries overseas, little blips on the economic land- scape, suddenly arrived at the cutting edge of technology with newly sharpened competitive skills. Before long they too were capturing major market shares from General Motors, from Zenith, from IBM, from Kodak, and from other slumbering corporate giants.
By the mid-1980s the growing trouble was becoming difficult to contain. Real estate took a tumble. Corporate debt and the national deficit ballooned. The stock market started doing peculiar things. The nagging recession that settled over the early 1990s showed once and for all how different the world had grown.
For the people caught in the middle, all this change seemed to arrive at white-knuckle speed. If companies weren’t under- going a corporate merger or acquisition, they were restructur- ing or taking a dip in the chilly waters of bankruptcy court. There were firings. There were layoffs. The change was brutal. It was swift. And it wasn’t just blue-collar anymore. Profes- sionals and executives all across the white-collar ranks were coming face to face with a narrowing future, and they were not quite sure what to do.
Predictably, change of this magnitude and speed has very much affected how people feel about themselves and their careers. From one end of the economy to the other, it has produced unprecedented waves of dissatisfaction and fear.
Some people have placed their faith in technology, figuring the world can simply invent its way out. of this current state of affairs. And there’s no denying the contribution that technology can make.
“I can walk into my office in New York and use the exact same data that someone in Japan is using-at exactly the same moment,” says Thomas A. Saunders III, general partner at Saunders Karp & Company, a private merchant bank. “We’re connected to the same data system, twenty-four hours a day. People everywhere in the world are hardwired together in a communications network that is far more sophisticated than anyone envisioned. Capital markets and currency markets are beyond government control. And I don’t need a newspaper to tell me anything about any of those markets.”
“What you see are the profits of evolution at work, increasing the potential so that more can be done in a shorter period of time,” says Dr. Jonas Salk, medicine’s great researcher. “We’ve got more people collaborating at greater distances, so at this point more is possible in a shorter period of time than a hundred years ago. The more resources you have, the more means you have to progress.
“Remember when computers first appeared?” asks Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., editor-in-chief of the business magazine that bears his family’s name. “They were feared instruments of Big Brother. Television was feared to be an instrument of propaganda. But thanks to high technology, they’ve had the opposite effect. The computer became smaller and much less of a mainframe. Power grew astronomically, so you weren’t tied down anymore.be
“The microchip is extending the reach of the human brain the way machines extended the reach of the human muscle in the last century. Today software is becoming the slabs of steel. Fiber optics and digital screens are becoming the railroads and the highways for transportation, and so information is raw material.”
“Now,” Forbes goes on, “you can do your messaging and your computer work on a little, two-pounder on your lap and More people have more access to more information. “People can do it anywhere you can find a plug or a satellite.” The result? see what’s happening in the rest of the world,” Forbes concludes
“It’s a very democratizing influence.”
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet- bloc, the uprisings in China, the struggles for democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, the ongoing industrialization of the developing world-all these changes signal a new industrial free- dom and a new recognition that the world is a community. Every one of these changes has been pushed along by wider access to communication technology.
Striking images of this change are now routinely beamed around the world. Chinese students wave English-language banners for the cameras. Saddam Hussein-and for that matter, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff-both followed the progress of the Persian Gulf War on CNN.
But technology alone is never enough in difficult times. Just because the means of communication are readily available doesn’t mean that people have learned to communicate well. Far too often today, they haven’t. This is one of the ironies of modern times: the great capacity to communicate, the great failure to do so. What good is all this information if people don’t know how to share it?
Not long ago the Graduate School of Business at Harvard University conducted a survey of its students, alumni, and recruiters. Given the pressing need for communication today, the results should come as no surprise. “What we are finding,” says Harvard business school professor John A. Quelch, “is a large measure of satisfaction with the technical competence of the graduating students.
These bright young people can crunch numbers, analyze markets, and devise business plans, but whenit comes to teaching mhuman-relations skills, Harvard is stepping up its efforts. “That seems to be the area where improvements are needed,” Quelch observes. “Oral and written communication, teamwork, and other human skills.”
Yet those are exactly the skills that will go farthest in deter- business leaders. mining the success of these Sure, technological sophistication will still be important as the world races ahead, but that is just the price of admission to the new business arena. In the end the winners and losers will not be divided by their bytes and RAMS. The winners will be the organizations with smart and creative leaders who know how to communicate and motivate effectively-inside the organization and out.
“Good human-relations skills have the ability to change people from managing others to leading others,” says John Rampey, director of management development at Milliken & Company, a leading textile manufacturer. People can learn to move “from directing to guiding, from competing to collaborating, from operating under a system of veiled secrecy to one of sharing information as it’s needed, from a mode of passivity to a mode of risk taking, from one of viewing people as an expense to one of viewing people as an asset.” They can learn how “to change lives from resentment to contentment, from apathy to involvement, from failure to success.”
No one ever said these skills would come naturally, and frequently they do not. “It isn’t that easy to know how to provide superior human relationships,” says Burt Manning. chairman of J. Walter Thompson Company, the worldwide advertising firm. “There are a few people who do it instinctively. But most people have to be educated. They have to be trained. It takes as much training-and as much sophistication-as it does to be an engineer in a car company and to design a better piston. “Those companies that can create a cadre of human beings who act in a way that advances the company’s cause are going to beat the other guy.” Manning says.
“Those are the easy are going to be a huge differentiator in success.
companies that understand that service and human relationship Dale Carnegie didn’t live long enough to see the days of e affluence give way to the days of explosive change. And he never witnessed the arrival of this new human- relations revolution But long before anyone had ever heard the terms corporate r quality-improvement processsion, employee empowerment, or Carnegie was pioneering some fundamental human-relations Carnegie arrived in New York City in 1912, a young man from northwest Missouri trying to figure out what to do with his life. He eventually landed a job at the 125th Street YMCA teaching public speaking to adults at night.
concepts that lie at the center of those important ideas.
“At first,” Carnegie wrote many years later, “I conducted courses in public speaking only-courses designed to train adults, by actual experience, to think on their feet and express their ideas with more clarity, more effectiveness, and more poise, both in business interviews and before groups.
“But gradually, as the seasons passed, I realized that as sorely as these adults needed training in effective speaking. they needed still more training in the fine art of getting along with people in everyday business and social contacts.”
So Carnegie broadened his course to include some basic human-relations skills. He had no textbook, no official syllabus, no published course guide. But he had built a growing list of practical techniques for getting along in the world, and he was testing those techniques every day.
“Look at things from the other person’s perspective,” he told his students. “Give honest and sincere appreciation. Become genuinely interested in others.” He showed his students how to weave these basic human-relations principles into the fabric of their lives.
In the beginning, Carnegie just scribbled his rules on three-by-five-inch cards. Soon those cards were replaced by a leaflet, which was replaced by a series of booklets, each one larger than the last. After fifteen years of painstaking experimentation, Carnegie gathered up all his human relations principles and put them in a book. How to Win Friends and Influence People, which appeared in 1936, was Dale Carnegie’s straightforward guide to dealing successfully with others.goo
The book took off. Thirty million copies later, How to Win Friends was one of the best-selling books in the history of the written word. It has been translated into several dozen languages, and it is still selling today.
Carnegie formed a company. Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc., to spread his human-relations message, and he found an eager audience around the world. He appeared regularly on radio and television. He taught others how to teach his course, and he wrote two more human-relations books, The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, best sellers both. Even Carnegie’s death in 1955 did not impede the spread of his ideas.
Today the Dale Carnegie Course is offered in more than a thousand cities and towns across America and in seventy other countries. Each week another three thousand people enroll. The Carnegie organization has now grown to the point that it custom designs training programs for more than four hundred of the Fortune 500 firms.
With each new generation, the Carnegie message has shown an uncanny ability to redefine itself to meet the needs of a changing world. Communicating effectively with other people, motivating them to achieve, discovering the leader inside everyone these were the primary focus of Dale Carnegie’s insight. With the world in its current state of turmoil, his time has again arrived. In the pages that follow, Carnegie’s human- relations principles are applied to the unique set of challenges people face today.
demand no special education or technical skill. What they These principles are basic and easy to understand. They require is practice and a genuine willingness to learn.
Are you prepared to challenge some long-standing views of the world? Are you ready to manage your relationships with greater ease and success? Would you like to increase the value of your most precious possession, the people in your personal and professional life? Are you willing to find and release the leader
in you?
If so, read on. What comes next might just change your life.