CNBC.COM
When Gorick Ng was starting out, he didn't know the rules. He didn't even know they existed. But as he soon found out, there are a whole slew of "unspoken rules" that are essential to achieving career success.
"My mother used to say that getting ahead is all about hard work," Ng writes in "The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right." It turns out, he adds, that "my mother was wrong."
Before Ng was a bestselling author and career advisor at Harvard, he was the son of a single mother and a first-generation college student. He went to Harvard for both undergrad and business school, and worked at Boston Consulting Group and Credit Suisse.
He got where he did by learning these unspoken rules, or "certain ways of doing things that managers expect but don't explain and that top performers do but don't realize," he writes. "They aren't taught in school. Instead, they are passed down from parent to child and from mentor to mentee, making for an unlevel playing field between insiders and outsiders."
Ng started off as "one of the outsiders," he writes, but now he's making sure you don't have to.
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 we chose "The Unspoken Rules" as our January book club pick.
In the book, Ng lays out rules including, among others:
- Know when to follow, bend, or reject
- Do your homework and show it
- Understand the end goal and work backward
- Look for patterns
- Understand hierarchies, dynamics, and expectations
He tells readers what they are and then dives deeper to explain how you can apply them in your own career. His goal, as he puts it, is to "pull back the curtain on the secrets of high performers that take years to figure out alone."
Ready to dive in? Start reading, request to join our LinkedIn group, and come chat with us and Ng on Wednesday, January 28, at 10 a.m. ET, at our next CNBC Make It Book Club discussion.
Any questions for the author? Drop them in the comments of this LinkedIn post (you'll need to join our private group first, which you can do here). Or email them to us in advance at askmakeit@cnbc.com, using the subject line "Question for Gorick Ng."
Hoping to get ahead? Our February pick is "New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That's Got It Wrong" by Stephanie Harrison.
Have suggestions for future picks? Send them to us at askmakeit@cnbc.com, using the subject line "Make It book club suggestion."