Something to readWorking with others
How to Win Friends and Influence People
A 1936 book of rules for getting along with people and changing minds without a fight
Why it’s worth your time
How to Win Friends and Influence People turns the adult course Dale Carnegie taught in the 1930s into plain rules for dealing with people: take a real interest, listen, skip the criticism, let others save face. A good deal of later advice on working relationships echoes it, which makes the original worth knowing firsthand, along with the old charge that it teaches faked interest. The rules tend to matter most when your work depends on people you can't simply instruct.
How to get along with people at work
The book · About 5 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
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- Start with the part on handling people.
In current editions it opens the book with three short principles, on criticism, appreciation and what the other person wants, and the chapters on getting people to like you follow it. Depending on your edition, many of the stories date from the 1930s, so read them as illustrations.
- Swap one complaint a day for a question.
For the next five working days, when you catch yourself about to complain about a colleague or another team, ask that person one question about what they're dealing with instead, such as what's making this part hard right now. Write down one thing you learned each day.
Good moments for this: when a working relationship has gone sourwhen you join a new teambefore a run of tense meetings
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
A colleague who keeps missing your deadlines may be under pressure you can't see from your side, a target, a manager or a backlog, and a request timed around it tends to go further than the same request made harder.
What might make this harder
Keep the week's experiment for the rest of your colleagues, and raise the specific issue with that person directly and privately: what happened, what it affected, and what you need. Carnegie's part on leading is about raising faults without breeding resentment, not skipping them, though his route is more indirect than this one.
Questions people ask
What is How to Win Friends and Influence People about?
It's Dale Carnegie's 1936 book of principles for dealing with people, built from the adult courses on human relations and public speaking he taught in New York. It covers handling people, getting them to like you, winning them to your way of thinking, and changing their behavior without resentment, each principle illustrated with stories.
What changed in later editions of How to Win Friends?
The core principles are in all of them. A 1981 revision updated the language and examples and dropped the original sections on business letters and home life. A 2022 revision, overseen by Carnegie's daughter Donna Dale Carnegie, restores some of the 1936 material.
What are Dale Carnegie's six ways to make people like you?
Show real interest in others, smile, use people's names, listen and let them talk about themselves, talk about what matters to them, and help them feel important, sincerely.
How do I get along with a coworker I find difficult?
Ask about their work before pressing your own: what they're dealing with, and what would make things easier for them. If one behavior keeps causing problems, raise it with them directly and privately.
What it says, and how it holds up
Much of what makes someone easy to work with is small and learnable, and that's the book's whole premise. Carnegie had been teaching adult classes in New York since 1912 when Leon Shimkin of the publisher Simon & Schuster took one of his courses and had a stenographer take down one of his lectures; Carnegie revised the transcript into the book, which became one of the best-selling books ever published. Carnegie's bet is that people respond to how you treat them more than to how right you are. At work that translates into small habits: asking before telling, admitting a mistake quickly, letting the other person feel an idea is partly theirs.
Some friction at work isn't about how anyone is treated. If two teams are measured on targets that pull against each other, speed for one and zero errors for the other, warmer conversations may ease the mood without touching the clash, and the conversation that tends to help is with whoever sets those targets.
The objection has been the same since soon after it came out: that it's a manual for faking interest to get what you want. The novelist Sinclair Lewis mocked it in roughly those terms, and in a 1977 American Quarterly essay the scholar Gail Thain Parker took up Carnegie and what she called the problem of sincerity. It's a fair worry about how the rules get used, and several of Carnegie's principles carry the words honest or sincere. One of its simplest rules, take a real interest in the other person, has support from later research. A 2017 set of studies led by Karen Huang at Harvard found that people who asked more questions in conversation, especially follow-up questions, tended to be better liked.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.