There are - put it this way - numerous self-help gurus it's easier to like than Napoleon Hill, author of the 1937 classic Think And Grow Rich. One of his associates, a man with a German accent, once threatened to sue him over a business matter - so Hill reported him to the FBI as a suspected enemy agent; he ended up spending most of the first world war in a detention centre. Hill's own son described him as an "unscrupulous, holier-than-thou, two-timing, double-crossing good-for-nothing" and his various wives apparently couldn't stand him. Rosa, his second, wrote the book How To Attract Men And Money, boasting of life with her "famous husband, with whom she is perfectly happy at all times," as the publisher's blurb put it. But the year it came out, they divorced. It's not even clear that Hill was good at his signature skill, creating wealth: he'd signed his assets over to Rosa to shield them from angry former business partners, and when they separated she got most of his money.

So finding the wisdom in Hill's outlook on life is a challenging task. But that's partly what Megan Hustad sets out to do in How To Be Useful, published this month, a book that presents itself as a guide to workplace success but that is really a (frequently hilarious) meditation on the notion of ambition. She argues that clever, sensitive, thoughtful people - you know, like you and me - have gone too far in disdaining career ambition as a somehow embarrassing trait and corporate climbers as shallow types who miss the point of a happy, worthwhile existence. We could all learn something, she suggests, from the much-mocked American "success literature" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - books including Hill's, and Emily Post's etiquette guides, and others with titles such as Getting On In The World, or Pushing To The Front, an 1890s bestseller.

Ambition has become unfashionable. ("She's ambitious," Hustad quotes a workplace gossip saying of a colleague. "[It was] inflected the way you might say, 'She has hepatitis B.'") We're cynical about the idea of finding fulfilment in a corporate setting, yet many of us work in one anyhow; to cope with that contradiction we adopt a detachment that ultimately leads to stagnation and unhappiness. Yet there's something refreshing about the old-fashioned success books and the zest with which they explain the art of working - how to pay compliments strategically, how to seek out mentors, how to dress for success. "[I] wanted to reclaim professional climbing for the smart and sensitive," Hustad says.

That's not an argument for craven submission to The Man. And we can retain our appreciation of the fact that more money and power won't bring lasting happiness. But if we're going to play the game, what's the upside in refusing to try to do so with relish? Many people have truly horrible jobs, with little scope for enjoyment. But it's privileged middle-class people you hear saying "I don't live to work, I work to live." The strange thing is that they say it with pride.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com