When Gorick Ng was just starting out, he didn’t know the rules. He didn’t even know they existed. However, he soon realized that there are many “unspoken rules” that are essential to achieving career success.
“My mother always said that getting ahead in the career requires hard work,” Ng writes in “Unspoken Rules: The Secret to Getting Your Career Started on the Right Way.” As it turns out, “my mother was wrong,” he added.
Before becoming a best-selling author and career advisor at Harvard University, Mr. Ng was the son of a single mother and a first-generation college student. He attended Harvard University’s undergraduate and business school and worked at Boston Consulting Group and Credit Suisse.
He achieved his goals, he writes, by learning these unspoken rules, “certain ways that managers expect but aren’t explained and that top performers don’t realize they’re doing.” “They are not taught in school. Instead, they are passed down from parent to child and mentor to mentee, creating an uneven playing field between insiders and outsiders.”
Ng started out as “one of the outsiders,” he writes, but now he doesn’t have to be that way.
CNBC Make It readers tend to be ambitious professionals who want to be happier, smarter, and more successful in their careers and lives. That’s why I chose Unspoken Rules as my January book club pick.
In his book, Mr. Ng specifically explains the following rules:
Know when to follow, bend, or refuse Do your homework and show it Understand the end goal and work backwards to find patterns to work on Understand hierarchies, dynamics, and expectations
He explains to readers what they are and then digs deeper to explain how they can be applied to your career. His goal is, as he puts it, “to pull back the curtain on the secrets of high performers that take years for one person to unravel.”
Ready to dive in? Start reading, request to join our LinkedIn group, and chat with us at the next CNBC Make It Book Club discussion on Wednesday, January 28th at 10am ET.
Do you have any questions for the author? Post it in the comments section of this LinkedIn post (you’ll need to join the private group first; you can join here). Or, send an email in advance to askmakeit@cnbc.com with the subject line “Question for Gorick Ng.”
Want to move forward? February’s pick is New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That’s Got It Wrong by Stephanie Harrison.
Do you have suggestions for future picks? Send them to askmakeit@cnbc.com with the subject line “Make It Book Club Suggestions.”
