Dale Breckenridge Carnegie
From BookJive
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| Born: | November 24, 1888 |
| Died: | November 1, 1955 |
| Residence: | Maryville, Missouri |
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Dale Breckenridge Carnegie (originally Carnegey) (November 24, 1888 - November 1, 1955) was an American writer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills. Born into poverty on a farm in Missouri, he was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936, a thundering bestseller that remains popular today. Along with several other self-motivational books, he also wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, entitled Lincoln the Unknown.
Carnegie was an early proponent of what is now called responsibility assumption, although this only appears minutely in his written work. One of the core ideas in his books is that it is possible to change other people's behavior by changing one's reaction to them.
[edit] Biography
“The ability to speak is a shortcut to distinction. It puts a person in the limelight, raises one head and shoulders above the crowd. And a person that can speak acceptably is usually given credit for an ability out of all proportion to what he or she really possesses.” writes Lowell Thomas, in the introduction of the original edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. After many reprintings, that same book holds as true today as it did in 1936.
Carnegie developed and taught world famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. He introduced courses to the adult student, revolutionizing the adult education movement of the early 1900’s.
Born Dale Breckenridge Carnegey, second son of James William Carnegey and Amanda Elizabeth Harbison in Maryville, Missouri, on November 24, 1888, his parents ran a small farm that barely provided sustenance and Carnegie was a full-time laborer on it from a very young age. He picked strawberries, cut cockleburs, punched cattle, branded calves, and rode fences as he struggled for a decent education. After several seasons of flooding that drowned the crops and brought the cholera that killed the hogs that were the farm’s primary product, the Carnegey family, facing foreclosure, sold out and bought another farm near the State Teacher’s College at Warrensburg, Missouri.
Desperate for an education, Carnegie enrolled in the Teacher’s College although he could not afford the room and board. Consequently, he remained on his parent’s farm as a full-time laborer and traveled approximately three miles to the college every day on horseback. Early mornings and late evenings were spent milking cows, cutting wood, feeding the hogs, and studying his Latin verbs by coal-oil lamp. At 3 a.m., every morning, Carnegie would rise to feed the farm’s pedigree baby pigs, kept by the stove to keep from freezing in the cold Missouri winters.
Due to his living situation, Carnegie became rather isolated from his peers. He was ashamed of his poverty that necessitated living on the farm (though not of his family’s need for his labor) and he rapidly formed an inferiority complex because of his tattered clothing, his lack of social life, and his lack of position within the town and school.
In an effort to alleviate this situation, he studied his fellow students, noticing those people who enjoyed the most prestige and influence within the school. These people tended to be the football players, baseball players, debating team captains, and public speaking contest winners. Realizing he did not have any discernable athletic ability, he decided to enter and win public speaking contests. It took him months to prepare his speeches. He practiced while he did his chores, and even in the saddle during his three mile commutes. As hard as he studied, he still lost these contests, bruising his ego and he settled into depression. Suddenly, however, he started winning one contest after another. Other student began to beg for training from him, and would win contests because of that training.
After graduating from college, Carnegie sold correspondence courses to ranchers in Nebraska and Wyoming. After figuring out that he was a miserable salesman, Carnegie, in lieu of fare, fed and watered two carloads of wild horses on board the train to Omaha to search for a new position. He found another job at Armour and Company, selling soap, lard, and bacon.
Carnegie’s territory was up in the Badlands and considered extremely unproductive. He covered this territory by freight train, stagecoach, and horseback, sleeping in pioneer hotels or in boxcars. He studied books on salesmanship, rode bucking broncos, played poker with the Indians, and learned how to collect money. Within two years he was considered the most productive salesman in Omaha, making his territory a national leader for the company.
That year, 1911, Amour and company offered to promote him—a position he turned down in order to relocate to New York in order to pursue his dream of becoming a lecturer with the then popular adult education courses in Chautauqua, New York. Instead of procuring that position, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He toured the country, playing the role of Dr. Hartley in Polly of the Circus. During this tour, Carnegie realized that he would never be an exceptional actor so he went back to work as a salesman—selling automobiles and trucks for the Packard Motor Car Company.
He knew nothing of machinery, cared less than nothing about cars, and hated his job. What Carnegie truly wanted to do with his life was to write books. He resigned from Packard and told himself he would devote himself to writing stories and novels. Returning to New York, without even a rumor of a job and almost penniless, Carnegie rented a room at the local YMCA on 125 Street. Writing without any successes, and calling forth his experience in tutoring his fellow students in debate and public speaking, Carnegie persuaded the YMCA hostel manager to let him teach a class on public speaking for people in business.
The Y.M.C.A. knew that such courses always failed—they had tried them before. When they refused to pay him a salary of two dollars a night, Carnegie agreed to teach on a commission basis and take a percentage of the net profits. That was in 1912. By 1915, Carnegie was taking in $30 a night.
Carnegie improvised his first session. As he ran out of material to teach, he suggested to his students to talk about “something that made them angry.” Developing his own approach to human discourse, he quickly became a successful teacher, capitalizing on his practical approach to people, claiming that all people could talk when they got mad. Carnegie claimed that almost any person could speak acceptably in public if he or she had self-confidence and an idea that is boiling and stewing within.
The course grew. Other Y.M.C.A.’s heard of it, then other cities. Carnegie soon began teaching in a territory that covered New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and later London and Paris. Because the textbooks of the day were too academic and impractical for business people, in 1913, Carnegie published his first book, Public Speaking and Influencing Men In Business. Initially, Carnegie concentrated on public speaking, but because the students, who were businessmen and women, wanted immediate results, Carnegie was forced to swiftly and practically develop a system of training that was considered unique at the time. He combined public speaking with salesmanship, human relations, and applied psychology. As there were never any hard and fast rules in his development of a course, Carnegie developed some of the best public affairs courses in the world.
By 1914, Carnegie was earning $500 per week. In 1916, he was able to rent New York’s main venue, The Carnegie Hall, and his lectures were sold out. It was in 1919, that Dale Carnegey legally changed his name to Carnegie, a successful marketing move, for Andrew Carnegie, who died in that year, was a well-known rags-to-riches American businessman and revered philanthropist. Much of Andrew Carnegie’s life and philosophy inspired Dale Carnegie in his actions and his writings.
Using his own experiences of losing a fortune in the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Carnegie learned to accept the worst that could happen, and then would proceed to improve on the worse, using these events as inspiration in his books. He would write about his experiences, helping people worldwide learn about his brand of social discourse.
His works became best sellers. How to Win Friends and Influence People, had 17 printings in its first year. Dale Carnegie had become the first American Guru, developing courses on self-improvement, salesmanship, and corporate training programs. Carnegie also designed programs for improvement in public speaking skills and interpersonal skills.
After his first marriage ended in divorce in 1931, Carnegie did not marry again until November of 1944, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Dorothy Price Vanderpool, also a divorcee, had two daughters: Rosemary, from her first marriage, and then Donna Dale from her marriage to Carnegie.
Dale Carnegie died at age 66, of Hodgkin’s lymphoma complicated with uremia on November 1. 1955, in Forest Hills, New York. He was laid to rest in the Belton cemetery, Cass County, Missouri, USA.
Over 50 million copies of Dale Carnegie’s books have been sold worldwide and translated to about 40 languages. During the late 1950’s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited America with top Soviet experts in education to learn the most efficient American businesses techniques for the Soviet government. Carnegie’s books were then translated into Russian for exclusive use by the privileged leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB. It has only been since Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika” that Carnegie’s books have been available to the general population of Russia.
To this day, shy or anxious people can overcome their fears and anxieties in tough business situations by attending The Dale Carnegie Course. Millions of students in 75 countries can attest that this course is indispensable and timely in a world flattened by technological communication. Criticized by some, for its somewhat manipulative techniques and self-promotional goals, the course is still in high demand over 80 years after its development. A proponent of responsibility assumption, the course teaches students that they should be sincere and genuine in their interests to their partner or to the behavior of other people that may be changing by changing one’s own reaction to them.
[edit] The Dale Carnegie Course
The Dale Carnegie Course is a Business Program conducted using a standardized curriculum by franchised trainers throughout the world. Several variations on the course exist, including a sales course, a high impact presentation course, and a course intended for people who manage others.
[edit] Basic course
The basic course consists of twelve evening sessions lasting three and a half hours each. Courses are scheduled in the evening, one night per week. Typically there are 35-45 participants in a course.
[edit] Faculty and staff
Unpaid assistants, who are "graduates" of the course (and who are often seeking to meet the experience requirements for becoming instructors), are on hand to assist participants between classes to prepare for the next class, assist with classroom logistics, and work with small groups. They are called Assistant Business Coaches.
Instructors are college graduates with a variety of professional experience who must attend rigorous training (approximately eighteen to twenty-four months) which culminates in a certification to teach the course. They must annually attend refresher courses to maintain their certification.
[edit] Course content
Much of the content of the course is based on Dale Carnegie's teachings over the years which started in 1912 as a public speaking course and then grew into controlling worry & stress. He compiled his thoughts in three books which form the basis for much of the program. They are: How to Win Friends and Influence People, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, and The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking. Participants are given reading assignments from these books, as homework, over the twelve weeks.
[edit] Course delivery
A good deal of the time each evening is spent in short presentations given by each of the participants to the rest of the attendees. Though the format varies from week to week, usually about 2/3 of the available time is spent listening to short talks by participants related to each session's objectives. The experience of speaking to a group serves to improve the participants’ self-confidence, and it allows them to share their professional insights and experiences in a positive, highly supportive environment. Presentations are always based on personal experience rather than a topic that has been researched.
The remainder of each session is spent in lecture and small group exercises. Lecture topics cover memory techniques, such as techniques for remembering names; conversational techniques; techniques for managing confrontation and problem resolution; and development of small group skills.
[edit] Relative success
The Dale Carnegie Course has achieved a high rate of success for a number of reasons. One reason is that the course is self-customizing, in that participants are asked to evaluate their own personal and professional opportunities for improvement, to write a vision statement (Business Achievement Project) of what their lives will look like when those improvements are made and to make a commitment to work towards making their vision statement a reality. Each session of the course includes steps towards achieving that vision.
[edit] Methodologies
The course is built around five objectives (course drivers), these are: developing improved (1) self-confidence, (2) communication skills, (3) people skills, (4) leadership skills, and (5) skills for controlling stress. Each session of the course addresses improvement in each of these five areas.
During the first few weeks of the twelve week course, participants are asked to focus on themselves, to look at the things they’ve done that have gone well in their professional lives (their achievements) and the things they’ve done that haven’t gone well (their lessons learned). Much of the course is built around these two life extremes. When we do something that goes as planned, we learn what works and the related behaviors we want to repeat and improve upon. When we try something, and we don’t succeed, we learn what doesn’t work and where we need to do things differently. The course uses these two extremes as a model for self-improvement and in coaching for improvement in others.
In applying relationship skills, participants are asked to first focus on existing relationships in the workplace that are working well, that could work better. Participants identify a relationship they’d like to improve with a co-worker, be it a superior or a peer, the benefits to them and to the other person in the relationship of making the improvement, steps they will take to make that happen and obstacles they expect in carrying out their plan. In a later session, participants are asked to share the goals they set for improving this relationship, how successful they were in achieving their goals, what they learned and what advice they have for others, based on their experience. Wrapping that all together helps people work on all five of the course drivers. Participants develop self-confidence from setting a goal and achieving progress towards it, communication skills in sharing their experience with the class, people skills in setting a goal to improve a relationship and making progress towards that, leadership skills in taking charge of their lives, and reducing stress by improving areas of a relationship that were probably causing stress.
As the course progresses, participants are asked to work on greater relationship challenges, including those relationships where they need enthusiastic cooperation from others and the relationships where they need to change someone’s viewpoint. The same format is followed of identifying a goal, developing a plan, making a commitment and sharing the results.
This approach for identifying and solving issues is a lesson in how to deal with life, both personally and professionally. The goal of the course is not only for participants to have a successful experience during the time they’re in class; it’s to improve the life they lead in between class sessions and after they have completed the course.
Accountability is one the chief course elements that helps participants achieve success. By developing a vision for improvement, a plan to achieve that vision and sharing that plan with others, they have established their goals, a path for getting to their goals and accountability for carrying out their plan.
In addition to working on improved relationships, the course also works on improving enthusiasm for those things we don’t have a natural enthusiasm for, and it asks participants to focus specifically on areas of their lives where they need to deal with stress and encourages them to set goals, develop plans and make commitments for using the course ideas to improve these areas.
[edit] Books
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