If You Want to Gather Honey (February/March 1985 | Volume: 36, Issue: 2)

If You Want to Gather Honey

AH article image

Authors: Peter Baida

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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February/March 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 2

What does Dale Carnegie, the author of an enormously successful book that few people read any more, have to do with In Search of Excellence, the management book that everyone is reading these days? A great deal, as I discovered recently when, purely by accident, I read both books in a single weekend.

As millions of people know by now, In Search of Excellence is a study of American companies that do things right. Its authors, Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., led a task force on organizational effectiveness sponsored by the renowned management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

In Search of Excellence has made the best-seller lists for more than a year, but it still has a way to go to match the record of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Published in 1936, Carnegie’s book has run through more than two hundred hardback and paperback printings, sold more than 15,000,000 hardback copies, and ranks close to the Bible among all-time nonfiction best sellers. It spent ten years on the best-seller list of The New York Times and has been translated into more than thirty languages and dialects, including Afrikaans, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Burmese.

Carnegie himself did not have fancy academic credentials and was never affiliated with a prestigious consulting firm. He was born in 1888 on a farm in Maryville, Missouri, picked strawberries for five cents an hour as a boy, and earned a reputation as a debater at the State Teachers’ College in Warrensburg, Missouri. In 1912, when he began to teach public speaking at the 125th Street YMCA in New York, his primary business experience had been a job selling bacon, soap, and lard for Armour & Company in the Bad Lands of South Dakota.

The Dale Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking became probably the most successful venture in the history of American adult education. Carnegie’s share of the gate soon exceeded the two dollars per night that the YMCA had refused to guarantee him, and before long he took his act on the road—first to cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, and eventually to London and Paris. He seems to have been one of the most patient men who ever lived. By 1936, according to Ripley’s Believe It or Not , he had listened to 150,000 student speeches. As of 1985—30 years after Carnegie’s death—3,000,000 people have graduated from courses offered by the Dale Carnegie Institutes, and approximately 2000 new students enroll weekly.

 

Peters and Waterman begin In Search of Excellence by reminding us of some basic psychological truths. “All of us are self-centered, suckers for a bit of praise, and generally like to think of ourselves as winners…. None of us is really as good as he or she would like to think, but rubbing our noses daily in that reality doesn’t do us a bit