As academics, we like to believe that our research leads and informs the best practice of industry. Much of what is taught in college classrooms in business and economics departments is the application of the theoretical work of our colleagues past and present. Three examples of this pattern are Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Malsow, 1954) Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene theory (Herzberg, Mausnar & Snyderman, 1959) and Emotional Intelligence (Salovey & Mayer, 1990, Goleman, 1995). This paper shows that all of these theories were in the popular press years before they were discovered and studied by academics. Each of these theories is at least partially explored in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936