Recommended Reading

Widely regarded as the father of the modern self-help book, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (Simon & Schuster, 1937) provides commonsense advice on creating convivial business and personal relationships, peppered with real-life examples from the lives of influential figures in history and the business world.

The following books are recommended to anyone who wants to learn more about techniques for improving social interaction, affecting the opinion of others, and maximizing their potential in the workplace.

Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, revised edition (Simon & Shuster, 1984)

In his early career, Carnegie focused on fixing interpersonal relationships. Here, he takes on a major obstacle to personal health and well-being: uncontrolled stress. Beginning with the premise that uncontrolled worrying kills, he quickly defines the prevalent forms of stress and addresses methods of controlling them in his folksy, commonsense, anecdote-filled style.

Dale Carnegie, Public Speaking for Success, revised updated edition (Tarcher, 2006)

Before arriving at his defining theme of influencing people, Carnegie was a public-speaking instructor, with many books on the subject under his belt. This modern revision of his teaching takes his trademark approach of delivering homespun common sense in a persuasive manner that both informs and encourages the reluctant speaker.

Robert B. Cialdini, PhD, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, revised edition (HarperBusiness, 2006)

Based on more than thirty years of psychological research, and a focused three-year study on what moves people to change behavior, Influence condenses Cialdini’s findings into six principles of ethical persuasion—reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, and commitment or consistency—and breezily introduces people to techniques for using (and resisting) them.

Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, revised edition (Free Press, 2004)

Like Carnegie, Covey focuses on making people more effective at work. Of the titular seven habits, three focus on how to deal with other people, taking a Carnegie-like approach to empathy. Habit number five in particular exemplifies this: “think win-win” suggests that a solution in which all sides walk away from a conflict having won something is better than one in which a single party gets everything he or she wants.

Kevin Dutton, Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)

Dutton is a Cambridge psychologist and research fellow. Split-Second Persuasion starts with a breakdown of what makes people persuasive, which Dutton reduces to the acronym SPICE: simplicity, perceived self-interest, incongruity, confidence, and empathy. He goes on to examine these traits in successful persuaders, including the business elite, scam artists, bees, and frogs.

Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, second edition (Penguin, 1991)

Written by two academics from the Harvard Negotiation Project and revised a decade later with the help of Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes touts a technique called principled negotiation, in which both sides establish their fixed and inflexible needs from the negotiation and those that are more flexible. A strong seller for more than thirty years, the book is based around five nonadversarial negotiating techniques: separating the people involved from the problems they may cause, focusing on people’s interests and not their positions, inventing options for mutual gain, using objective criteria, and knowing the best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (Prentice-Hall, 1952)

The Power of Positive Thinking is the work of a Protestant pastor and broadcaster who demonizes negativity and trains people to take the opposite approach. Although controversial because of its anonymous anecdotes, pop psychology, and tendency to exaggerate, the book remains popular for its techniques, some of which resemble those used in cognitive behavior therapy.