How to Win Customers and Influence Markets

There is a fantastic book that I re-read almost annually: "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. The principles in this book will allow you to enjoy your life regardless of your circumstances and it will allow people around you to enjoy you more.

The trick is this: be sincere as you focus on other people's interests and ego. If you are selfless in identifying and referencing other people's interests and you stroke rather than threaten another's ego, you then have an opportunity to selfishly pursue your own interests with that person. Of course, you cannot be malicious or greedy with a person while remaining sincerely interested and humble, so Carnegie is not teaching techniques for bad people to gain influence.

I find that he is re-teaching me to be good. I learned most of this stuff in church and from my parents when I was little. Maybe not the specific techniques, but the underlying principle of humility, suppression of self-interest, politeness, and sincere interest in other people's interests. I rejected it in my teen years and continued to ignore the lessons as an adult because I was surrounded by selfish, greedy, cynical people who would throw their own mother under any moving bus to achieve a perceived benefit or promotion.

What Carnegie adds to the lesson of manners and morality is the selfish benefit to me. I had no idea that being polite and humble could benefit me directly. I thought I was just doing it to please my parents, the "authorities", and a God who seemed not to like me. I thought that if I did not counter the meaness of life with more meanness, I would get taken advantage of. If I had known that there were tremendous benefits to being a nice guy, I would have stuck with it a long time ago. As it is, being cantankerous and cynical while feeding off of negative energy was simply leading me down a lonely road of alcoholism, depression, and future ulcers, cancers, heart-attacks, and black-eyes.

We do everything for selfish reasons. We give to charity because we feel warm and fuzzy, because we hope to benefit from that charity in the future (Hospice, Cancer Society, Red Cross, Blood Bank), or because it puts our name on a placard, list, brick, or building. We sacrifice for our kids so that they do not end up in jail, living with us, embarrassing us, or to make sure they beat the neighbor's kids at whatever they do. We give our spouse backrubs and cook their dinner in hopes that they will soon do something nice for us (or do something nice to us.)

To sum up, Carnegie has taught me that it is okay to let the other person think that they have the upper hand or think that they are more important than me; in the end, I will get what I really want from the relationship. Being nice, humble, and sincerely interested in the other person pays off in selfish ways, and does so more effectively than deception or force. There are more benefits and less consequences to convincing people to willingly give you their favor, money, support, or permission than in forcing it from them or tricking them out of it.

However, I am not writing a book report here. I want to synthesize the information I read and reapply it in a new way. Dale Carnegie has written a manual for the application of a corporation's CSR philosophy. As I listened and thought about how I could improve my game with Carnegie's principles I kept thinking of how these principles could help a company gain market share, improve vendor relations, lower costs, increase employee loyalty and productivity, enhance the public image, and so many other applications.

Therefore, the next few posts will talk about how Dale Carnegie and CSR can make a company more profitable, stable, recognizable, and resilient to negative events and forces.