Good Work

PREFACE
How We Came to Write This Book

In 1994–1995, we three authors spent a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Palo Alto, California, each working on a separate book. Although we had known each other and admired each other’s work for many years, we had never collaborated on a project. Our fields of interest overlap but are different. Gardner, a cognitive psychologist, is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, which led him to study creators and leaders in different realms. Csikszentmihalyi, a social psychologist who writes from an evolutionary and motivational perspective, is best known for discovering the psychological state called “flow,” in which an individual’s skills and challenges mesh in absorbing ways. His studies of flow have included groups ranging from surgeons to mountain climbers, and like Gardner, he has a special interest in creativity. Damon is a developmental psychologist who has long focused on social and moral issues. He has written definitive texts on moral development and, with Anne Colby, has carried out a pioneering study of individuals who have led exemplary moral lives. Despite our different foci in psychology, we had enough in common to enjoy exchanging ideas whenever we ran into each other on the cloistered CASBS grounds, overlooking nearby Stanford University.

One afternoon, our conversation turned to the question, If you had the choice, what sort of problem would you work on for the next ten years of your professional life? As we talked it became clear, first, that we did have the choice; and second, that our envisioned projects were in many respects very similar. Each of us had begun to struggle with the relationship between high-level performance and social responsibility, between excellence and ethics. We had been thinking about several key questions: Is it true that most creative scientists and artists are selfish and ambitious, unconcerned with the common good? Why is it that experts primarily teach techniques to young professionals, while ignoring the values that have sustained the quests of so many creative geniuses? Is the impact of science, technology, and communication predetermined—for good or ill—or do we have some control over it?

This set of questions revolving around excellence and ethics proved so seductive that we returned to it again and again, gradually refining how we could study what we first (somewhat clumsily) called “humane creativity.” We envisioned interviewing and observing professionals at the cutting edge of perhaps a dozen fields that are essential to individual and social well-being—fields ranging from journalism and genetics to law and theater. The idea was to take stock of the kind of people who entered such professions and succeeded in them. We wanted to learn about their backgrounds, values, and goals. We planned to look at the ways they approached their work, as well as the opposition they encountered and the strategies they used to overcome it. We envisioned asking them to describe their dreams and nightmares about the future course of their chosen pursuit. Given our collective backgrounds in the study of creativity, leadership, and moral excellence, we were particularly interested in learning more about those persons who succeeded in melding expertise with moral distinction.

After leaving CASBS, we started assembling research teams at our respective universities and began applying for financial support to carry out our plans. At first, fundraising met with little success, perhaps because of our own inarticulateness in laying out the project, perhaps because the issues that engaged us were not yet seen as important by outsiders. Within a few years, however, our ideas seemed to gain momentum and garner gratifying interest among funders, whose support is gratefully noted in the Acknowledgments. The increasing interest in our work reflected a growing realization within our society: leading professionals currently face a particular challenge as they attempt to carry out their central missions, since conditions are changing rapidly, market forces are extremely powerful, and our sense of time and space is being radically altered by technological innovations like the Internet.

As our ideas coalesced and our planning proceeded, we moved away from the notion and terminology of “humane creativity” and toward that of good work—work of expert quality that benefits the broader society. What, we asked, promotes or impedes good work today? The first two fields we decided to investigate in depth were genetics and the media. At first we thought of these as two important but distinct fields—two professions in which the practitioners are grappling with how to do top-quality, socially responsible work at a time of extremely rapid change. But as our work progressed, we began to see instructive analogies and discrepancies between them. We came to conceive of the present book as a “parallel study” of two professions, one poised to control the composition of our bodies, the other with the potential to control the content of our minds. And we decided to focus on what it means to carry out “good work”—work that is both excellent in quality and socially responsible— at a time of constant change. Thus was born what we now call the Project on Good Work.

From the beginning of the project, our concerns have spanned diverse professional realms—law, medicine, theater, higher education, philanthropy, and more. In all of these we have recognized the same set of forces operating: the emergence of powerful and still dimly understood technologies; the overwhelming power of market forces and the concurrent decline of various competing ideologies and “isms”; the waning of an agreed-upon set of principles and of an ethical framework that has been designed to govern the decisions and behaviors of all members of a profession; the loss of powerful “heroic” role models that inspire the younger members of a profession and a concomitant foreboding sense that the future course of the domain is wrapped in uncertainty. Accordingly, throughout this book, we draw in examples from a variety of professional realms, because we are convinced that the challenge of “good work” confronts every professional today.

We knew, however, that an in-depth analysis of selected professional realms was necessary to tease out answers to our central questions and to gain a nuanced view of the challenges professionals are facing—hence our decision to focus on genetics and journalism. From the time of our initial interviews, we viewed what was happening in these two realms as being of signal importance for the future.

Our basic approach can be quickly sketched. We conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with leading practitioners in several areas of specialization within journalism and genetics. Our initial sample consisted of 56 geneticists and 60 journalists, but we have now spoken to well over 100 individuals from each professional realm, including 40 mature professionals and a score of young practitioners. Most of the subjects in each group were well-known figures who had been nominated by experts in the domain; but in each realm we also spoke to a handful of “midlevel practitioners”—long-term professionals who would not be widely known. Interviews lasted about two hours; they covered a wide range of themes, from the backgrounds of the practitioners to their current aspirations and concerns, to their predictions about the field. The interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim, reviewed by the interviewees who then stipulated the use that could be made of their words. In what follows, we identify all speakers by name unless they indicated that they did not want to be so identified. Further details on the procedures are found in the opening chapters of Parts Two and Three and a detailed discussion of our methods and data-analytic procedures can be found in Appendix B.

When we began the interviews in the mid-1990s, we could not foresee the unfolding of these two professions nor the new issues confronting their practitioners. Since that time, genetics has emerged as a profession in which the scientists, the general public, and the shareholders of corporations agree substantially about their goals. In sharp contrast, journalism has emerged as a profession in which the reporters, the general public, and the shareholders of corporations differ sharply in their aspirations. And since the mid-1990s, these two realms have come increasingly to dominate public discourse. We could not then anticipate that the human genome would be mapped by the turn of the millennium; that experiments in genetic therapy would lead to an unanticipated death; that genetically modified foods would become suspect. Nor could we foresee that the Internet would become a principal source of the news; that a major newspaper like the Los Angeles Times would secretly split the profit of its magazine with an advertiser; that Time-Warner and AOL would lead a set of mega–media mergers; that the lines between news and entertainment, between faithful and contrived photography, would become even more blurred. We became aware that what had begun as a series of casual conversations on an academic campus had thrust us into central issues of our time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Support for the work reported in this book was generously provided by initial grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ross Family Charitable Foundation, supplemented by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford Foundation. We owe special debts of thanks to Ray Bacchetti, David Gardner, and Courtney S. Ross-Holst, who were the first to see promise in still incipient ideas. Support for the additional phases of this project, some of which is reported in this book, has been provided by the following:

The Bauman Foundation

Berger-Mittlemann Family Trust

Carnegie Corporation of New York

Nathan Cummings Foundation

J. Epstein Foundation

Fetzer Institute

Ford Foundation

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation

Thomas H. Lee

Pew Charitable Trusts

Jesse Phillips Foundation Fund

Louise and Claude Rosenberg Jr. Family Foundation

Ross Family Charitable Foundation

Spencer Foundation

Thrive Foundation

John Templeton Foundation

For useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this book, we thank Sissela Bok, Jay Gardner, George Klein, Bill Kovach, Jonathan Levy, Tom Rosenstiel, and Ellen Winner.

We wish to thank our literary agent, John Williams, for his help in conceptualizing this project and for his support throughout the writing process. At Basic Books, we thank Jo Ann Miller, our energetic editor, her able assistant Jessica Callaway, our thoughtful copyeditor Sharon Sharp, our responsive production manager Lori Hobkirk, and our capable production copy editor John Taylor Howard. Lisa Bromer and Alex Chisholm provided exemplary support for Howard Gardner, as did Kathy Davis for William Damon.

We have been blessed with an extraordinary set of researchers who have carried out the brunt of work on this complex project. Our outstanding managers have been Lynn Barendsen, Anne Gregory, Jeremy Hunter, Paula Marshall, Mimi Michaelson, Jeanne Nakamura, Heather Ross, Becca Solomon, Jeff Solomon, David Shernoff, and Susan Verducci. Assisting them over the years have been several excellent researchers: Kim Barberich, Veronica Boix-Mansilla, Jennifer DiBara, Dan Dillon, Greg Feldman, Molly Galloway, Francie Green, Yael Harlap, Jonathan Heller, Mara Krechevsky, Grace Lam, Marcy LeLacheur, Kaley Middlebrooks, Laurinda Morway, Jenna Moskowitz, Liza Percer, Kimberly Powell, Sara Simeone, David Stevens, Bernadette Sibuma, Barbara Tollentino, Evan Zullow, Nicole Brodsky, Lynn Chan, Christopher Csikszentimihalyi, David Gortner, Shelli Greenslade, Charles Hooker, Jeremy Hunter, Eleni Makris, Purvi Patel, Barbara Simeon, Leanne Stahnke and Shonali Tejwani.

Finally, a word about the dedication of our book to John W. Gardner (no relation to Howard). John Gardner has been one of the great leaders of America during the twentieth century. The nation is in his debt for his outstanding service in the 1940s and 1950s at the Carnegie Corporation and in the U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare during the Johnson Administration; we are all beneficiaries of his founding role in such organizations as the Urban Coalition, Common Cause, Independent Sector, and the White House Fellows. Millions have been inspired by his wisdom as expressed in Excellence, On Leadership, Self-Renewal, and other writings. The authors had the privilege of getting to know John Gardner personally during the year that we spent at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He counseled us about the issues that we wanted to study; he helped us to secure funding; and in our view he continues to exemplify Good Work. It is our honor to be able to dedicate this book to our friend John W. Gardner.