The business book you need to read this month: How to win friends and influence people

Name of business book: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
As recommended by: Charlie de Rusett, founder of Idea Drop

What is How to Win Friends and Influence People about?

This book is one of the first best-selling self-help books ever published. It was published more than 80 years ago and it is still relevant today.

It is full of practical instructions on how to handle people, win friends, bring people to your way of thinking and how to be a great leader.

Target audience?

Every person who is interested in self-improvement, especially people who deal with business relationships and are in sales. It’s a framework that many will find useful.

Likewise, if a person is struggling with friendships this book provides a pretty clear and simple guide for getting better in social situations as well.

What’s the best bit of How to Win Friends and Influence People?

This book offers readers a lot of practical and essential principles that are easily applicable in our everyday lives.

By following these tips, readers will be rewarded with rich and enduring friendships, influential connections and compelling leadership skills. Isn’t this something that we are all eager to learn?

Why should business owners read How to Win Friends and Influence People?

Every business owner has to be a great leader. However, not all successful entrepreneurs are natural born leaders – most of them are self-taught. Leadership is an art and Dale Carnegie recognised the demand for its’ training more than 80 years ago.

Every leader has to know how to treat people and how to influence them as well as how to maximise their potential which essentially leads to maximising a business potential.

This book does exactly that – it teaches business owners how to achieve their own and their business’ full potential by empowering employees, closing business deals, navigating small talk, negotiating and getting exactly what they want.

3 top takeaway points for start-ups:

1. Talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person. When something goes wrong, taking responsibility can help win others over to take your side. People do not like to shoulder all the blame and taking credit for mistakes helps to remove the sting from our critiques of others.
2. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view. Other people may often be wrong, but we cannot condemn them. We must seek to understand them. Success in dealing with people requires a sympathetic grasp of the other person’s viewpoint.
3. Dramatise your ideas. In this fast-paced world, simply stating a truth isn’t enough. The truth must be made vivid, interesting, and dramatic. Television has been doing it for years. Sometimes ideas are not enough and we must dramatise them.

Excerpt business owners can learn from?

“How to be a leader – in a nutshell. A leader’s job often includes changing your behaviour and attitudes. Some suggestions to accomplish this:

• “Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
• Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
• Talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person.
• Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
• Let the other person save face.
• Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.
• Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
• Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
• Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.”