Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How to Win Friends and Influence People, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Self-Interest vs. Selflessness
Importance and Humility
Positivity vs. Negativity
Sincerity and Appreciation vs. Insincerity and Flattery
Summary
Analysis
Many years ago, the Philadelphia Bulletin was being maligned by people saying it had too much advertising and too little news. To combat this, the Bulletin clipped reading matter from one day and published it as a book containing 307 pages—dramatizing the fact that it carried an enormous amount of interesting reading matter. Showmanship can help when truth alone doesn’t work.
This chapter focuses on dramatizing one’s ideas, and this example connects to Carnegie’s idea that positivity works better than negativity. Rather than trying to argue or combat the rumors about the Bulletin, they instead focused on how to prove that they did have a lot of substantial material and found that dramatization was an effective way to create that positive image.
Themes
Experts in window displays and TV commercials understand dramatic techniques in advertising products, which help sell those products. It is just as easy to dramatize one’s ideas in business or in other aspects of life. Jim Yeamans, who works for the National Cash Register company, demonstrated this. He approached a grocer who had very outdated cash registers and told him he was throwing away pennies each time a customer went through the line, which he dramatized by throwing pennies on the floor. This got the man’s attention immediately, and he ordered replacements for all his machines.
In this example, Yeamans used dramatization as a way to call attention to the fact that he was trying to do something in the grocer’s interest—that is, to save the man money. In this way, dramatization is just a strategy to heighten or highlight many of the other principles that Carnegie has outlined in the book.
Themes
Dramatizing works in personal situations as well, like kneeling down on one knee when proposing. Or, in another case, it worked for a man who invented a “train” using his children’s tricycle and wagon and getting them to load the “coal” (their toys) in the train every night as a way of cleaning their room.
Again, dramatization works in tandem with Carnegie’s other strategies. In the example of the toys, by considering the activity from the children’s perspective and thinking about how to make it fun, the father was able to get what he wanted—for his children to pick up the toys.
Themes
Mary Catherine Wolf was having problems at work: her boss refused to see her to discuss problems she was having. So instead, she wrote a letter in which she asked him to fill out a form stating when she could see him—this got him to respond to her immediately, because she dramatized the fact that she really wanted to meet with him.
In this case, Wolf used dramatization to approach the situation positively rather than negatively. In using the form, she acknowledged that her boss might be busy and provided him with an easy way to set up a meeting with her—a positive and understanding attitude that made him more likely to want to meet with her.
Themes
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James Boynton prepared a lengthy market report for a leading brand of cold cream with data about the competition in the market. At first, the person he prepared the report for was uninterested and argumentative. So, he came into a second meeting with 32 jars of cold cream and printed information on the tag about each competitor. He was much more interested and asked questions for much longer than the meeting was originally scheduled for.
Here, Boynton also uses dramatization to take a positive spin on a conflict. Whereas his boss was initially uninterested and critical, Boynton used the cold cream jars to make him more attentive to the information without getting into an argument. As a result, Boynton was able to achieve much more with his boss than if he hadn’t found a way for the man to positively engage with the material.
Themes
