Affecting influence is subtle manipulation. A compliment about someone’s hair is great if you genuinely admire their hair.
But if you read a book about influencing people and suddenly start complimenting people’s hair, time for some introspection.
Strongly disagree with this sentiment. Influence can have a lot of sources, from institutional authority to simply being persuasive, which is distinct from manipulation.
In this context influence and persuasion are being used interchangeably, but persuasion is the act of winning someone over to your point of view, so they understand the topic as you do. It respects their autonomy and acknowledges that people can change their mind when presented with different perspectives. Oftentimes, being likeable (or at least respectable) is a prerequisite for getting someone to listen to you in the first place, so it's a central pillar to being influential.
Manipulation on the other hand, doesn't respect someone's autonomy. It might involve deception, threats, coercion, etc, but it ultimately aims to make someone do something that they don't want to do.
If you're getting a little kid to eat his dinner for instance, persuasion might appeal to his motivations (e.g. having more energy to run faster), while manipulation might look like saying not eating would make his mom sad (guilt tripping), or that he wouldn't get to play with his favorite toy (threat).
I'm not sure where the line between "manipulation" and "persuasion" is exactly but certainly a person's intent and how they think about themselves and other people has something to do with it. There are many feats that I can do today with ease that my evil twin coveted a few years ago and just couldn't do because he had a bad attitude.
Influence for influence sake is selfishly motivated. Doing something charitable garners influence. Influence is a side-effect and not the intended goal—unless it is, and then it’s manipulation.
The fact is correct that the word influence is a euphemism for manipulation. The very fact that people are confused about this is case-in-point on the subtlety of the notion.
> influence is a euphemism for manipulation
Surely you can see that your statements contradict each other.
> Influence for influence sake is selfishly motivated.
Hard disagree. It certainly can be, but doesn’t have to be. A person can be a positive influence for no other reason than they feel like it’s a good thing to do. You could influence your coworkers to be better engineers and not gain anything from it.
I mean, we could retreat to the “oh you feel good about it, so it’s still selfish” stance, but that’s uninteresting.
The book's also apparently about winning friends, as well. And the excerpt above seems to be about getting better at being nice to people without an agenda.
Nothing more, nothing less.
This is exactly what he’s talking about.
The premise of the book is essentially, “what if you were a generally nice person who deserved friends”.
The whole “you could only possibly pretend to care about other people” response to the book is vaguely psychopathic.
I prefer to interpret it charitably: the line between influence and manipulation can be pretty fuzzy, and some people come to a conclusion of, basically, "don't do it at all because it's always selfish."
I think it's a flawed view because it's impossible to go through life not influencing anyone and not wanting anything from anyone, so you may as well try to do it in a way that is generally win-win or at least not win-lose.
Outside of that, I can only see less charitable interpretations. e.g. The idea that the only reason someone could ever compliment another person is to manipulate them says either that the person holding the idea literally can’t imagine interacting positively with someone for non-selfish reasons (psychopathy) or that they hold such low opinion of the rest of humanity that they believe no one else could (misanthropy).