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.
