| 400 of the top Fortune 500 companies can't be wrong!
by
Scot Giambalvo
MODE went on a quest to find out about interpersonal communications in the
workplace. Among other concepts and written texts, one book and course stood above the
rest remarkably. It has been a guiding light for professionals and individuals since the
early 1930’s. Dale Carnegie’s 15 million copy best seller How To Win Friends and
Influence People, and the Dale Carnegie Training courses, offered by B.E. Bresnick and
Associates in Harrisburg, are clearly the leaders of proactive interpersonal development
training.
In reading the book How To Win Friends and Influence People, it is easy to understand why
it has become such a staple over the decades. Dale Carnegie writes in a very personal
style, directly to the reader. He sites many personal and professional examples to
reinforce his principles of becoming a better communicator (see sidebar). Most of all,
every concept he conveys is easily tried by the reader, and can be integrated into a
person’s lifestyle with little effort, and great reward.
The book is broken into four sections, Part One - Fundamental Techniques in Handling
People, Part Two - Six Ways to Make People Like You, Part Three - How To Win People to
Your Way of Thinking, and Part Four - Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving
Offense or Arousing Resentment. Each section offers insightful advice to achieving the
goal effectively, and most of all pleasantly.
Reading this book you feel yourself trying to apply some of the principles to situations
occurring in your life right now. It is a very comforting and relaxing read, and one can
easily lose track of time. It also reads in a very contemporary tone. If it weren’t
for the obvious examples from the earlier part of this century, this book could have been
written this year.
The end of each chapter and section summarizes the principle to be learned in that
chapter, and the end of the book has a short biography on Dale Carnegie called: Shortcut
to Distinction, by Lowell Thomas.
Finally, be sure to read the Preface by Dorothy Carnegie, Dale’s introduction: How
This Book Was Written - And Why, and especially the "Nine Suggestions on How to Get
the Most Out of This Book" section just before Part One. All in all, I strongly
suggest reading this book cover to cover, at least twice. My total read time was about 6
hours, including daydream-projecting all the principles into my life.
Once the text was read, it was time to find out why 400 of the top Fortune 500 companies
consistently use Dale Carnegie training for their executives. After speaking with Buddy
Bresnick, owner of the Harrisburg Dale Carnegie office, it became clear.
MODE asked Mr. Bresnick to sum up what benefits Dale Carnegie has for it’s course
graduates. He responded: "Most people, as they go through life, have to make choices.
Most people also tend to, if they’re not careful, make their decisions based on the
way they did it last time. Only because that way was comfortable, that way was safe, and
then they find themselves back at the same point. At Dale Carnegie we believe in the
business axiom: If you keep doing things the same way, you can’t expect different
results. What we try to do in our program is get people to try a new way of doing things.
We want people to increase their skills, improve their confidence, and do things to make
themselves better people. We want our graduates to be confident in making new decisions.
By learning how to do this, our graduates are willing to do more of the things they feared
to do before."
"Dale Carnegie training can help people of all kinds. We have demonstrated proven
results over and over, especially for professionals who want to do even better. And
we’re talking about improving skill development areas, not just feel good areas. It
takes development in three areas for people to be productive and successful in their jobs:
1. It takes a foundation of product knowledge, which can only come from the company or
field that the person wants to excel in. 2. It takes a certain amount of skills to get the
knowledge across. Skills that can be considerably improved in almost every person. 3. It
takes a positive attitude, and this is what sets Dale Carnegie apart from the others. In a
one or two day seminar you can load people up with a binder full of skills, but
attitudinally, if they are not confident enough to use them, or change anything, or break
that pattern, they immediately go back to the old, comfortable way of doing things.
That’s why Dale Carnegie Training is 12 weeks long. It has to be, to be
effective."
Dale Carnegie Training’s strives to influence discipline in three areas:
Enthusiasm, Dealing with Stress, and Confidence. They believe that if they cannot impact
those attitudes, all the material in the world, product or skill oriented, will have
little effect, if any.
All Dale Carnegie Training courses are college accredited, and backed by ACCET. The
programs change with the times, and
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