Dwight Garner
Dale Carnegie?s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which turns 75 this year, has sold more than 30 million copies and continues to be a best seller. The book, a paean to integrity, good humour and warmth in the name of amicable capitalism, is as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting. It exists alongside Dr Spock?s child-rearing guide, Strunk and White?s volume on literary style and Fannie Farmer?s cookbook as a classic expression of the American impulse toward self-improvement and reinvention. Testimonials to its effectiveness abound. It?s said that the only diploma that hangs in Warren Buffett?s office is his certificate from Dale Carnegie Training.
The book?s essential admonitions?be a good listener, admit faults quickly and emphatically, and smile more often, among them?are timeless. They need updating about as much as Hank Williams?s songs do.
Yet now comes Dale Carnegie and Associates Inc, which offers leadership and public speaking classes, with the news that it has rewritten and reissued Carnegie?s book for the laptop generation under the title How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, written with Brent Cole. It?s not the only advice classic that?s been updated this fall for the era of Facebook and Google Plus. There?s a new edition of Emily Post?s Etiquette as well, which bears the forward-looking subtitle Manners for a New World.
Both books offer sensible new advice about being a polite e-mailer and navigating the pitfalls of Twitter. But while it?s hard to blame those charged with caring for the Dale Carnegie and Emily Post brands for wanting them to remain relevant, attempts to tweak favourites are fraught with peril. And How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age in particular is such a radical?and radically hapless?retooling of Dale Carnegie?s text that it feels almost like an act of brand suicide.
How to Win Friends and Influence People has undergone previous revisions. In 1981 the book was slightly condensed, and some dated and vaguely racist language was removed. But the new adaptation is necessary, its authors write, because so much of Carnegie?s advice concentrated on how to win people over face to face. Thanks to e-mail and texting, however, the authors write, ?we lose a critical aspect of human interactions: nonverbal cues.? It?s hard to indicate a smile in an e-mail or an instant message unless you are willing to go the emoticon route, and then all is lost either way.
The authors look to place Carnegie?s advice in new contexts. They hold up Tiger Woods as an example of how not to behave when caught in an embarrassing situation. Andrew Sullivan, the blogger, is singled out for making a point of interacting with his readers. We?re advised to pay attention, at least on occasion, to our friends? Facebook postings, and to take the time to reply when appropriate. Alongside this new material, a bit of Carnegie?s original advice remains more or less intact.
The problem with How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age is that its verbal DNA has been not merely tweaked but scrambled. Carnegie?s great virtue, beyond the simplicity of his core ideas, was his unadorned prose. ?Try leaving a friendly trail of little sparks of gratitude on your daily trips,? he advised in a typical passage. ?You will be surprised how they will set flames of friendship that will be rose beacons on your next visit.?
Dale Carnegie, that master of graceful temperament, would not approve of kicking a book when it was down. So let me conclude with the good news. His original book, unmolested, can still be found on bookstore shelves. Life can go on as if this new one simply did not exist.
Emily Post?s Etiquette: Manners for a New World is the 18th edition of a book that was first published in 1922; this is the first revision since 2004. That most recent volume had small sections on e-mail and texting, but this new one scans a wider world: it deals with subjects like tattoos and piercings, working from home, the hazards of Facebook and Twitter, and how to trash talk politely while playing video games.
Emily Post?s etiquette guides are encyclopaedic; they?ve grown to be the size of battleships and thus difficult to turn on a dime. This edition, written by Peggy Post, Emily Post?s great-granddaughter-in-law, along with three younger members of the Post clan, mostly reprises information to be found in earlier versions, which is to say that it is filled with a great deal of advice few readers will ever need. But if you are invited to the White House, or to an audience with the pope, everything you will need to know is here.
It is perhaps overly packed too with advice so obvious you wonder if its authors question its readers? ability to walk down the street safely. This volume is friendly but largely humourless, and contains none of the wily advice to found in, say, the excellent books by Judith Martin.
The book?s bedrock lesson is a very old one, as true online as off. ?Whenever two people come together,? Emily Post once said, ?and their behaviour affects one another, you have etiquette.? All that?s left, she and Dale Carnegie sing across the decades, is to do the right thing. That?s an idea that doesn?t need updating at all.