carnegie-win-friends

Read [runtime](../../content/RUNTIME.md) and [advisory rules](../../content/policies/advisory.md) before applying this skill. Other Foreman layers and the catalog are in `../../content/`, relative to this SKILL.md. # Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People Published in 1936, Dale Carnegie's *How to Win Friends and Influence People* has sold over 30 million copies, been translated into dozens of languages, and remained continuously in print for nearly nine decades. A time-travel thought experiment clarifies why this matters: if you transported Carnegie's principles to a modern tech startup -- replacing "telegrams" with "Slack messages" and "salesmen" with "founders" -- the advice would require almost no adaptation. The principles work because they address something that has not changed in ninety years: human psychology. People still crave recognition. They still resist being told they are wrong. They still respond to genuine interest more readily than to polished pitches. The surface of business transforms every decade; the social operating system of human beings upgrades on evolutionary timescales. Carnegie mapped that operating system with a precision that keeps his Depression-era book selling in the age of AI. The question is not whether these principles still apply. The question is why so few founders -- drowning in frameworks for product, growth, and fundraising -- bother to master the foundational skill that underlies all of them: the ability to make other...