Good Work

Over the past four years, in our annual Who's Fast issue, Fast Company has profiled more than 50 leaders from all walks of life and all parts of the world. But there's been one core message behind these varied stories: Ordinary people with enough brains, passion, and conviction can achieve truly extraordinary results. The most powerful force in business isn't money or technology or naked ambition -- it's a commitment to doing good work.

Enter now three eminent academic psychologists whose important and compelling new book makes much the same point. The title says it all: Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books, 2001). The book, written by Harvard University professor Howard Gardner, Stanford University professor William Damon, and professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, testifies to the power of a commitment to professional excellence and to the challenges of meeting those commitments in the face of fierce marketplace pressures.

Of course, September 11 and its aftermath have raised the issue of good work to even greater prominence. Suddenly, all of us want to feel that what we do actually means something. But doing that seems harder than ever, what with a society gripped by uncertainty, an economy gripped by recession, and each of us struggling as individuals to make sense of what's happening.

In an exclusive panel discussion, the authors of Good Work offer ideas and advice to help you stay focused on your work.

The horror of September 11 has our readers asking themselves tough questions: In a world shattered by terror and death, what genuinely matters? In the face of so much heroism and sacrifice, how do I make sense of what I do for a living? Whose contributions truly count? What are the valid sources of satisfaction and pride in terms of work? My question to you is, What does good work mean in light of these sorts of questions?

William Damon: In every conversation I've had since September 11, in almost any context, people have asked, What meaning does my work have now? And unless you're in the military or one of the security forces, it's not always easy to make a connection to this kind of cataclysmic event. But what we are trying to say is that anybody who's doing work -- whether it's in law, medicine, journalism, engineering -- needs to get in touch with the original mission of their field, the reason that profession was developed to begin with. Because all of those professions serve a public interest, and individuals who go into those fields originally have a clear sense of that, which why people speak about having a sense of a calling in life.

The problem is that all too often, such a sense of calling diminishes over the years as you get caught up in the kinds of career incentives that move people on a day-to-day basis -- especially when those incentives pull people in the wrong direction, as they frequently do. For example, a lot of journalism these days is driven by sensationalism or work that's written so briefly and out of context that you don't really get the story across. Those practices pull you away from the mission of giving people information they need to live good lives and to support a democracy -- the classic issues and missions of the field.

We're trying to show people a way to get in touch with the fundamental purpose and mission of the field they're working in, and to overcome the sense that to survive or to have a good career, you've got to compromise, you've got to cut corners, you've got to go along to get along. We think that's bad advice. We're trying to give examples of people who have become highly successful by being purposeful, by being ethical, by doing it the right way.

Howard Gardner: September 11 was a wake-up call. We often call our project "Good Work in Turbulent Times" to capture just that sentiment -- although we didn't quite imagine how turbulent the times would be. There really are three different kinds of wake-up calls. One wake-up call is the individual wake-up call -- like Saul on the road to Damascus -- where something happens in your own life. You lose something, or you get fired, and it throws you back to the fundamentals of your field.

The second one is a wake-up call for the profession itself. The picture that Bill portrayed of journalism -- where journalists still have ideals, but they feel that the conditions of work make it impossible to achieve those ideals -- is a wake-up call for the profession.

But the third kind of wake-up call, which none of us had in mind at all while writing the book, is a societal wake-up call. All of a sudden, the assumptions that we've all been making about what human beings are like, and about America's place in the world, have been ripped to shreds. So we're now experiencing a kind of a triple wake-up call.