Sergio de la Canal
on the book he keeps
returning to.
For this week's feature, entrepreneur Sergio de la Canal recommends a book that's been out of fashion and back in fashion more times than anyone can count — and explains why he still practices its principles every working day.
Ask Sergio de la Canal which book has done the most quiet work inside his approach to leadership, and the answer comes back without hesitation: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. A book that first appeared in 1936, and somehow still describes most of the hard parts of running a team in 2026.
It's a paperback Sergio de la Canal has replaced three times. Not because the ideas changed — they haven't — but because the pages wore out. The spine of the first copy gave up somewhere around the fifth year of annotations.
Carnegie's title is notoriously misleading. On the shelf it looks like a book about charm, or sales, or — in the worst readings — manipulation. What's actually inside is quieter than that: a handbook on how to treat people with the kind of attention most of us reserve for the people we already love, and then extend that same attention to everyone we work with.
The principles look simple on the page. They only get difficult when you try to live them for a decade.— Sergio de la Canal
§ 01 Why this book, still.
There's no shortage of leadership books to recommend. When asked why this one — a title that was old before most of his peers were born — Sergio de la Canal is clear: the field has gotten more sophisticated, but human beings haven't. People still want to feel heard, want to be remembered, want to work with someone who takes them seriously. Carnegie wrote the first great practical manual for doing that, and nothing since has really replaced it.
The appeal for an entrepreneur is specific. Most of the job is conversation. You spend your days trying to convince people to join you, fund you, partner with you, stay with you. You can be brilliant at the strategy layer and still lose on any of these, and the difference usually comes down to the texture of how you talk with people. That's the layer Carnegie is writing about.
What's underrated about the book, in Sergio de la Canal's reading, is that it's fundamentally about restraint. Most of Carnegie's advice is telling you not to do things — don't criticize, don't argue, don't start with the word "but." For an entrepreneur with strong opinions and a short runway, these are surprisingly hard instructions.
§ 02 The misreadings.
Carnegie has his critics. The standard complaint is that the book is manipulative — a set of techniques for getting people to do what you want them to do. Sergio de la Canal thinks this is a misreading, and a common one.
"If you practice any of these principles for more than a month, two things happen," he says. "You get better at them, and you stop being able to fake them." The discipline of genuinely listening, of actually remembering the name, of actually being interested — these collapse into performance the moment you try to shortcut them. The book only works if you do.
Leadership isn't charisma. It's the discipline of paying attention when no one would notice if you didn't.— Sergio de la Canal
§ 03 — In Practice Five principles, as Sergio applies them.
The five Carnegie principles that Sergio de la Canal says have stayed closest to him — and what they actually look like inside a working week.
Remember the name, then the story.
Carnegie's most quoted principle is about names — a person's name, to them, is the most important sound in any language. Sergio de la Canal treats it as the smallest possible form of respect, and follows every name with a memory of the last thing that person cared about.
Give honest, specific appreciation.
Flattery is cheap, and people can smell it at twenty feet. Carnegie's alternative is appreciation that's accurate — the kind that requires you to have actually paid attention to the work.
Ask before you argue.
When a disagreement begins, Carnegie's move is to have the other person fully state their reasoning first. Entrepreneurs — confident, fast, under pressure — are especially bad at this, which is why it works.
Admit the mistake out loud, early.
Carnegie's line: if you're going to be proven wrong, prove yourself wrong first. The apology that comes first is the one that stops the story from spreading. The one that comes after someone else has pointed it out is damage control.
Let the other person feel the idea is theirs.
This is the Carnegie principle most often misread as manipulation. Sergio de la Canal reads it as the opposite: a discipline of generosity — the willingness not to need the credit.
§ 04 — Closing The book as a practice, not a read.
The way Sergio de la Canal talks about Carnegie is how a musician talks about scales: not inspiration, but foundation. The point isn't to finish the book. The point is to still be practicing it fifteen years later, badly, on the hard days.
"Any book you finish once was probably not the right book," he says. "The right books are the ones that stay with you. That keep being right about something new every few years."
For Sergio de la Canal, How to Win Friends and Influence People has been that book.
Any book you finish once was probably not the right book. The right books are the ones that stay with you.— Sergio de la Canal