Dale Carnegie’s Idea of Leadership and Comparison

Running head: DALE CARNEGIE’S IDEA OF LEADERSHIP AND
COMPARISON
Dale Carnegie’s Idea of Leadership and Comparison
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DALE CARNEGIE’S IDEA OF LEADERSHIP AND COMPARISON
Abstract
The paper has elaborated the main theme of the book ‘how to win Friends and influence
people’ by Dale Carnegie. The idea of this book has been evaluated and compared with
leadership theories described in course. The course text book has various levels of similarity
with Carnegie’s idea. Considering both the ideas the most contemporary and effective
leadership approach has been discussed towards the end of this paper.

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DALE CARNEGIE’S IDEA OF LEADERSHIP AND COMPARISON
Part 1
Similarity of Books ideology with the leadership theory
Leaders possess different qualities than a common man have and likely to perform
even within most complicated situation. There are several traditional forms of leadership
theories including great man’s theory, trait theory, transformational theories and many more.
Whereas, great man’s theory suggest a man possesses leadership qualities right from his
birth. Characteristics like, intelligence, self-confidence, and ability to handle people are some
of the qualities of great leader. Trait theories believe whatever a man possesses it’s a slow
process of evolving a gathering traits like intelligence, potential of being communicative,
focused nature comes from regular experiences. The most inspirational and effective
leadership theory is more contemporary as well as an adaptive approach. Dale Carnegie in his
book How to Win Friends and Influence People before discussing about leadership has
elaborated various characteristics which initiate an individual to become a leader (Carnegie,
2017).
Similarity has been found on the context with provided text book Robbins and Judge
(2018), as both the leadership theories and the authors’ perspective of being a human being
with power of influencing people. It must be remembered that the job of a leader is to
influence people to think the way he/she wants. Therefore, it can be clearly spotted before
beginning with chapter four, where actually Carnegie discusses how to ‘Be a leader’, long
before that he has written tactics on how to handle people and how to influence their way of
thinking and perception too. Another similarity can be found when the author highlights a
leader’s characteristics to handle emptions of their people with the same weightage as a
leader invests time to influence them to a certain objective. As the most effective way of
influence both the contemporary theory and author has highlighted the role of
communication.
Part 2
Difference between two theories
Carnegie’s idea of leadership is to generate result from people without being
offensive. According to him, leaders’ must address mistakes indirectly and appreciation must
be honest. However, according to contemporary theory leaders as described in Robbins and
Judge (2018), leaders must have a consistent interactive relationship with workers. Through
communication, leaders can discuss both a victory and failure with same straight forward
manner with their people. Although, there is theories of dictatorship yet Carnegie suggests,
dictatorship reflects an offensive approach so asking questions and for opinions a leader can
approach in a better way.