CONCEPT
The Good Work Project
The multi-year research program by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon — with Nakamura's close involvement — that studied how practitioners in various domains maintain work that is excellent, ethical, and engaging simultaneously.
The Good Work Project was a large-scale research initiative launched in the late 1990s by Howard Gardner at Harvard, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon at Claremont Graduate University, with Jeanne Nakamura as a key collaborator. The project investigated how practitioners in fast-changing domains maintain work that meets three criteria simultaneously: excellent (technically proficient), ethical (responsible in its consequences), and engaging (personally meaningful). The research involved in-depth interviews with over 1,200 practitioners across journalism, genetics, business, theater, law, medicine, and philanthropy. The findings shaped Nakamura's subsequent work on mentoring, vital engagement, and the developmental conditions for sustained creative commitment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The project's central empirical finding was that practitioners maintained good work primarily through embedded participation in communities with shared standards — not through individual virtue, abstract principles, or regulatory oversight. The communities provided what the project called 'moral memory': the transmitted understanding of what the domain's work was for, what