Your Greatest Good
Gain a unique insight into Professor John Beck’s recently
released book, Good vs. Good. The book draws on the
disciplines of brain science, management, moral
philosophy, public policy, and psychology to explain
how we prioritize the “8 Great Goods.”
I’ve come to believe that national conflicts, business disagreements, and even family disputes are informed—and
possibly caused—by how we prioritize our “8 Great Goods.”
If your most important Goods are different from mine, there’s
a good chance we will disagree about something. If our prioritizations are vastly different, I may believe that you are
evil. And you will probably feel the same way about me.
The 8 Goods are all really good things: Life, Stability, Relationships, Belief, Individuality, Growth, Equality, and Joy,
and they guide every decision we make. The way each of
us ranks these eight is almost certainly different from the
people around us. In a survey of 2,000 Americans, about
1,750 respondents had a completely unique ranking of priorities—they didn’t share their order of the eight with any
other person in the survey. In my five years of studying
this phenomenon, I’ve also found that this holds true with
non-Americans too.
As business school graduates, we have been through a
year or two of pretty serious indoctrination on one Good in
particular. In textbook after textbook, and case after case,
we learned that the Greatest Good in the business world
is Growth. Classroom discussions often culminated in the
conclusion that if a company wasn’t making money, all other
issues were probably pointless. Our finance courses made it
clear to us that the business world was not just about making money, but making more of it—possibly to the exclusion
of all else. We learned to say that a company’s stock prices
won’t go up unless shareholders believe in the company’s
growth potential. This is the way the business world works,
we were told.
Over my 25 years of teaching, I have interacted with
enough students to know that more than a few develop existential questions (some even crises) due to this emphasis
12
on Growth. Some students begin
to wonder if they should modify—or
even change completely—their
personal priorities so that they better
align with the school’s top Good.
“Why isn’t Growth at the top of my
list? Shouldn’t it be? Is something
wrong with me?” They begin to
seek out ways to justify their
need to change, and
they may even grasp
at philosophical arguments that stretch
beyond business
rationales to
support altering
their priorities.
But, let me
be clear: there is
nothing wrong
with Growth as
your top priority.
I have many close
friends who value
Growth above all
else. They are good
people who do
good things. They
are true philanthropists, and they
genuinely want to
make the world a
better place.
If you’ve long suspected that Equality, Joy, Relationships,
or Belief is at the top of your list, rather than Growth, it is very
easy to feel out of place in a business environment. You may
feel like you have to subvert your most important personal
Good when you go to work every day; during team meetings,
projects, or conversations with colleagues. But it doesn’t
have to be that like that.
Whatever your top Goods are, there is an organization
somewhere with employees who share your priorities, or that
operates in line with the priorities you value the most. If Equality or Individuality is your thing, government service may be
for you. If Belief tops your list, there are NGOs and religious
organizations in need of people with business backgrounds
and acumen.
Within corporations, some functions lend themselves more
to one Good than another. Human Resource employees may
be more focused on Equality and Relationships. Marketing
departments are big on Individuality (and given the trend toward more creative office environments, some might even
emphasize Joy). Accounting departments value Stability,
and perhaps Individuality. CEOs realize that the right mix of
diverse people within companies is the key to high performance, innovation, and success.
“ hatever your top Goods
W
are, there is an organization
somewhere with employees
who share your priorities.”
But each organization, each country, even each family has
its own culture surrounding these priorities. My experience as
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