The Art of Dealing with People by Les Giblin Book Review
The Art of Dealing with People by Les Giblin is a 48-page paperback published in 2001 by Les Giblin Books. It compresses his human relations material into eleven short chapters built on one claim of his: the human ego decides how every conversation goes, and skill with people is learned rather than inborn. Kevin Trudeau teaches from the same premise, that success is a procedure and not a personality type, which is why the book sits on the shelf here. Read it if you want Giblin's method with nothing attached. Skip it if you want evidence, or already own one of his two longer books.
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Forty-eight pages. No case studies, no filler, no warm-up chapter.
What The Art of Dealing with People Actually Teaches
Giblin opens by naming the stakes. His line is that "the one common denominator to all success and happiness is other people," and he attaches two figures: learn to deal with people well and you have gone "85% of the way down the road to success" and "about 99% of the way to personal happiness." Those are his numbers, offered as his claim rather than as measured findings. The criticisms section deals with where the 85 percent figure came from.
His publisher puts the promise on the cover copy: successful people share one thing, and it is that "They have mastered the art of dealing with people!" Giblin's version inside is harsher. "The reason 90% of people fail in life," he writes, "is a failure to deal successfully with people." Successful people, in his telling, deal successfully with people. That is the whole causal chain, and he names one successful way to get what you want from life. Not talent. Acquired skill.
What follows is a method, not an argument. Giblin's premise is that skill in human relations works like skill in any other field. In his words, "success depends on understanding and mastering certain basic general principles." Learn the basic general principles, apply them to the individual person in front of you, and results follow. Any other field is learned the same way, and success depends on the basic principles before the personality. That is the knowledge based case for the book, and a knowledge based case is the only kind a salesman with no laboratory could make.
The Human Ego Is the Whole Mechanism
Chapter two is "Understanding the Human Ego," and everything after it depends on that chapter landing. Giblin's reading of human nature is that people act to protect how they feel about themselves, and that most failed conversations failed because somebody's ego got stepped on before the content arrived. People act on feelings before facts, and the feelings they guard hardest are about themselves. Strip the mid-century vocabulary from his account of human nature and he is describing self esteem, and how fast a threat to somebody's self esteem shuts down the room.
The practical instruction is unglamorous. Make the other person feel important. Recognize that they are a separate individual rather than an audience for you. Every separate individual you meet arrives carrying pet ideas, and pet ideas do not drop because you disagreed. Speak to what they are concerned about, and speak plainly. Giblin's claim is that this is not flattery, because flattery is aimed at the flatterer and this is aimed at the other person's feelings.
The human psychology on offer is shallow by design. Giblin never explains why the ego behaves this way. He tells you what to do about it in the next five minutes of human interaction, and that narrowness is the only reason a 48-page book can carry a method. Want the human psychology explained and you should go elsewhere. Want a rule for the next human interaction and you are served exactly.
Two things about the mechanism. It is the same insight the whole genre runs on, so nobody should read this and think Les Giblin invented it. And it holds up better than most self help mechanisms, because it costs nothing to test and one conversation tells you whether it worked.
An Art, Not a Gimmick
The strongest paragraph in the book is Giblin's warning about technique. "Influencing people is an art, not a gimmick," he writes. "When you apply gimmicks in a superficial, mechanical manner, you go through the same motions as the person who 'has a way,' but it doesn't work for you."
That distinction separates this from the worst of the people skills shelf. A gimmick applied in a mechanical manner reads as a gimmick. The same motions without the understanding behind them are visible to everybody except the performer. People who apply gimmicks that way conclude that the methods presented in books like this do not work, when what failed was their superficial copy.
He is equally blunt about the two failed strategies people fall back on. Force does not work, because "the one thing they cannot force is the thing they want the most: they cannot force people to like them." Nor does the opposite. The two approaches he rules out are coercion and excessive deference. Begging fails, in his reading, because nobody has respect for the person who constantly kowtows and goes around asking to be liked, and that constantly kowtows figure is the one readers remember. Begging is the failure mode of pleasant people. Forcing people is the failure mode of everyone else. What is left is to acquire skill, and acquire skill is the only route he leaves open.
Les Giblin Wrote Three Books About Dealing with People. This Is the Short One.
The three titles are easy to mix up, and two of them are reviewed separately on this site.
| Book | First published | Shape | Read it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People | 1956, Prentice-Hall | Full length, fourteen chapters, organised by situation | The reasoning behind the method, at length |
| Skill With People | 1968 | Booklet, fifteen chapters, rules with no padding | The rules, fast, with nothing explained |
| The Art of Dealing with People | 2001, Les Giblin Books | 48 pages, eleven chapters, organised by principle | One sitting, principle first, the middle option |
Read the table as a spectrum. How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People is the argument. Skill With People is the checklist. The Art of Dealing with People by Les Giblin sits between them, organised by principle rather than by the situation you happen to be in.
They overlap heavily. Own the 1956 book and you do not need this one. Own Skill With People and you are buying explanation rather than new material. What you should not do is buy all three expecting three methods, because there is one method here at three lengths.
How the Book Is Organized
Eleven chapters across 48 pages, roughly four pages each. The titles are the index.
The Eleven Chapters
- Thinking Creatively About Human Relations
- Understanding the Human Ego
- Making People Feel Important
- Controlling the Actions and Attitudes of Others
- Creating a Good Impression
- Developing an Attractive Personality
- Learning to Communicate Effectively
- Listening
- Getting People to Agree
- Giving Praise
- Criticizing Without Offending
Chapters one and two set the frame. Three through six cover what you project, and chapter six tells you to develop an attractive personality rather than wait to have been born with one. Seven through nine are effective communication. Effective communication in Les Giblin's usage is mostly restraint: listening gets a chapter, talking does not, and that is the clearest signal of where he thinks the work is. Ten and eleven are praise and correction, the two hardest tasks in any workplace, and they close the book because everything earlier is what makes them possible.
The Chapter Nine Problem
One caution, and it is a real one. Chapter nine appears as "Getting People to Agree" in the Open Library catalogue record for this book. Giblin's own publisher lists that chapter on its product page as "Convincing Others." Same book, same position, two titles in circulation.
The content is the same either way. The strategies are the ones you would expect: let the other person state their case, pause before answering, do not insist on winning the whole argument. Old strategies, still working. But if you are citing this book, check the copy in your hand rather than a summary, because the printings do not agree with each other.
The Art of Dealing with People at a Glance
| Detail | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Author | Les Giblin, born 1912 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa |
| Published | 2001 |
| Publisher | Les Giblin Books; some printings list Executive Books |
| Length | 48 pages |
| ISBN | 9780937539583 |
| Format | Paperback |
| Chapters | 11 |
| Central claim | "The one common denominator to all success and happiness is other people" |
| Stated stakes | Giblin's figures: 85 percent of the road to success, 99 percent of the road to personal happiness |
| Core mechanism | The human ego |
| Stated method | Master certain basic general principles, then apply them to the individual person in front of you |
| Named distinction | An art, not a gimmick |
| Where the methods came from | Giblin's own human relations seminars, in his words "tested on thousands of people who have attended my human relations seminars" |
| Companion books | How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People (1956), Skill With People (1968) |
| Our rating | 3.5 out of 5 |
Who Les Giblin Was
The biography matters here, because it is the only evidence the book offers.
According to his publisher's author biography, Les Giblin was born in 1912 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, served in the military, and took a sales job with the Sheaffer Pen Company in 1946. He was twice named national Salesman of the Year. He then spent decades running human relations seminars for companies including Mobil, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, and Caterpillar, and he published Skill With People in 1968.
That is a door-to-door salesman's career and the book reads like it. No laboratory, no citation apparatus. What there is instead is a man who tested his material on thousands of strangers he had to meet cold, in person, for money, across a working life. He had mastered one narrow thing and wrote it down. Whether that counts as evidence is what the criticisms below turn on.
Common Criticisms of The Art of Dealing with People
Almost nothing critical has been written about a 48-page booklet. Reader reviews run warm and professional reviews barely exist, so what follows is checkable rather than quoted. All of it is specific, and none of it rests on reviews you cannot look up.
The 85 percent figure has no source attached
Giblin's opening numbers are the weakest thing here. The excerpt his own publisher prints gives 85 percent and 99 percent with no study named.
The 85 percent number has a long history in this genre and a shaky one. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching keeps a standing FAQ about it, because people write in asking for the report. Its answer: the widely quoted interpersonal-skills figure was extrapolated from A Study of Engineering Education, written by Charles Riborg Mann and published by the foundation in 1918, from pages 106 and 107. A study of engineering students, more than a century old. Whatever it supports, it does not support a clean claim about success and happiness in general.
Dale Carnegie got there in 1936
Three of Giblin's eleven chapters are Making People Feel Important, Giving Praise, and Criticizing Without Offending. How to Win Friends and Influence People published all three instructions in 1936, and Dale Carnegie's book gave them more room. Carnegie got there first and Giblin never claimed otherwise. A reader who owns Carnegie is buying compression, not discovery.
The genre-level objection lands on Les Giblin too. The novelist Sinclair Lewis attacked Carnegie's method as teaching people to "smile and bob and pretend to be interested in other people's hobbies" in order to get things out of them. Giblin's answer, written a quarter century before anyone put the question to him, is the art-not-a-gimmick passage. His influence on this shelf is real but second-hand influence: he refined what Carnegie built rather than replacing it.
Seminars are not evidence
The methods presented here were, in Giblin's own description, "tested on thousands of people who have attended my human relations seminars." That is a sales record, not a test. Forty-eight pages contain no data and no account of a case where the method failed. Nobody has attempted a controlled comparison against doing nothing. A reader who tries this on a genuinely hostile counterparty is on their own, and advice on how to recognize that situation early does not appear.
Two ISBNs, two page counts, two chapter nines
The publishing history is a mess and buyers should know it. The edition linked here carries ISBN 9780937539583. A second 2001 printing circulates under ISBN 9780961641634. Catalogue records give the length as 48 pages in some places and 58 in others, list the publisher as Les Giblin Books in some and Executive Books in others, and the publisher's product page and the Open Library record disagree about chapter nine. None of it changes the method. All of it makes the book annoying to cite.
The criticisms at a glance
| What the book claims | The objection | Who made it |
|---|---|---|
| Dealing well with people takes you 85 percent of the way to success | The 85 percent figure in this genre traces to a 1918 study of engineering students, and the publisher's excerpt prints it with no source | The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, citing A Study of Engineering Education by Charles Riborg Mann, 1918 |
| Make people feel important, give praise, criticize without offending | Dale Carnegie published the same three instructions in 1936, with more room to explain them | This review, against How to Win Friends and Influence People |
| Influencing people is an art, not a gimmick | The genre-level charge that this teaches performance rather than regard | Sinclair Lewis, on Dale Carnegie's method |
| The methods were tested in thousands of seminars | A seminar record is not a test; no data, no named cases, no failure cases in 48 pages | This review |
| This is a fixed text you can cite | Two ISBNs, two recorded page counts and two different chapter nine titles are in circulation | This review, comparing the publisher's product page with the Open Library record |
Why Kevin Trudeau Points People Toward This Book
The link is not the subject matter. It is the shape of the claim. Giblin's position is that people skills are learnable, that dealing with people rests on basic principles anybody can acquire. Trudeau's position across his material is that success is a procedure rather than a gift you were born holding. Both men came out of selling rather than research, and both wrote as practitioners handing over a method.
Run the book through Trudeau's Teachability Index, willingness to learn multiplied by willingness to change. Giblin scores unusually well on the second term, which is rare. The instructions are small, physical and immediate, and you develop them by use. Listen without interrupting. Say the person's name. Praise the specific thing. None of it requires believing anything, and the method is testable by tomorrow afternoon.
What Trudeau adds is counterintentions, the subconscious programs he says run against the goal you just set. A reader quietly certain that people do not like them will perform every one of Giblin's instructions and still transmit the thing underneath. Giblin treats that as a training problem. Trudeau treats it as a programming problem, and his Training Balance Scale argues the visible action is the smallest part of what is happening.
Where It Sits Next to the Global Information Network
Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009 as a private membership club, built on his claim that the most useful knowledge about wealth and success was deliberately kept out of circulation. His own teaching material, including Your Wish Is Your Command, is structured as a sequence.
Les Giblin has no sequence and no cosmology. He has eleven chapters about the human ego and a flat refusal to promise anything beyond what practice delivers. That makes this the least metaphysical book on the shelf, and a reasonable place to send somebody who finds the rest of it hard to swallow. Frank Bettger's sales memoir is the other book in that category, and the two work well together.
Who Should Read It, and Who Should Skip It
Read it if you want the method and nothing else. Read it if you manage people and keep having the same conversation go wrong. Read it if longer books on this subject have defeated you, because 48 pages is a length you will finish. Read it if you need something to hand to someone who would never accept a self help book.
Skip it if you own How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People, since this is that book compressed. Skip it if you want proof, because there is none. Skip it if your problem is one hostile person rather than a general habit, because these principles assume both sides would prefer to get along.
Our rating: 3.5 out of 5. High marks for compression, for the art-not-a-gimmick distinction, and for a chapter on listening in a genre obsessed with talking. Deductions for the unsourced figures, for material Carnegie published in 1936, and for a publishing record that cannot keep its own chapter titles straight.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Art of Dealing with People by Les Giblin worth reading?
Yes, if you want the method with nothing attached. Eleven chapters across 48 pages, no padding, and every instruction is testable in the next conversation you have. It is worth less if you already own How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People, because this is that argument compressed rather than new material.
What is the difference between The Art of Dealing with People and Skill With People?
Skill With People, published in 1968, is a booklet of rules with almost nothing explained. The Art of Dealing with People is longer, organised by principle rather than by rule, and spends its pages on why the human ego makes the rules work. Buy Skill With People for the checklist and this one for the reasoning behind it.
How long is The Art of Dealing with People?
48 pages, in eleven chapters, which is roughly four pages per chapter. Most readers finish it in a single sitting. Be aware that catalogue records for the various printings list the length as either 48 or 58 pages, so the copy that arrives may not match the listing exactly.
What are the chapters in The Art of Dealing with People?
Thinking Creatively About Human Relations, Understanding the Human Ego, Making People Feel Important, Controlling the Actions and Attitudes of Others, Creating a Good Impression, Developing an Attractive Personality, Learning to Communicate Effectively, Listening, Getting People to Agree, Giving Praise, and Criticizing Without Offending. The publisher's own product page lists chapter nine as Convincing Others instead.
Who was Les Giblin?
According to his publisher's author biography, Giblin was born in 1912 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, served in the military, and joined the Sheaffer Pen Company as a salesman in 1946. He was twice named national Salesman of the Year, then ran human relations seminars for companies including Mobil, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, and Caterpillar. He published Skill With People in 1968.
Is this the same book as How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People?
No. That is a separate and much longer book, published by Prentice-Hall in 1956 and running fourteen chapters organised by situation. The Art of Dealing with People is a 48-page condensation of the same method, organised by principle. The overlap is heavy, so most readers only need one of the two.
What are the main criticisms of The Art of Dealing with People?
Three hold up. The 85 percent and 99 percent figures are printed with no study attached, and the 85 percent number in this genre traces back to a 1918 Carnegie Foundation study of engineering students. Dale Carnegie published three of the eleven chapter ideas in 1936. And the methods rest on Giblin's seminar record rather than on any data, named case, or account of the method failing.
Should I read Les Giblin or Kevin Trudeau first?
Read Giblin first if your immediate problem is conversations going wrong, because his instructions are small and you can test them tomorrow. Trudeau's material starts further back, with what he says is running underneath the behaviour, and it assumes you already accept that inner state drives outer results.
The Art of Dealing with People by Les Giblin Book Review: The Short Version
Forty-eight pages, eleven chapters, one mechanism. Giblin's claim is that the human ego runs every interaction, that forcing people fails and begging fails, and that what remains is skill you acquire like any other. His best line is the warning that influencing people is an art, not a gimmick, and that gimmicks applied in a mechanical manner fool nobody. His worst is an unsourced 85 percent. Dale Carnegie published a third of this in 1936 and the printings cannot agree on chapter nine. Read it anyway, in one sitting, then use it on the next person you meet.