Being Good: Irrelevant at This Time
September 29, 2025
Sadly I am a dinobaby and too old and stupid to use smart software to create really wonderful short blog posts.
I read an essay titled “Being Good Isn’t Enough.” The author seems sincere. He provides insight about how to combine knowledge to create greater knowledge value. These are not my terms. The jargon appears in “The Knowledge Value Revolution or a History of the Future by Taichi Sakaiya. The book was published in Japan in 1985. I gave some talks shortly after the book was available. One of the individuals whom I met after one of my lectures at the Osaka Institute of Technology. I recommend the book because it expands on the concepts touched upon in the cited essay.
“Being Good Isn’t Enough” states:
The biggest gains come from combining disciplines. There are four that show up everywhere: technical skill, product thinking, project execution, and people skills. And the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to contribute to each.
Sakaiya includes this Japanese proverb:
As an infant, he was a prodigy. As a student, he was brilliant. But after 20 years, he was just another young man.
“Being Good Isn’t Enough” walks through the idea of identifying “your weakest discipline” and then adds:
work on that.
Sound advice. However, in today’s business environment in the US, I do not think this suggestion is particularly helpful; to wit:
Find a mentor, be a mentor. Lead a project, propose one. Do the work, present it. Create spaces for others to do the same. Do whatever it takes to get better…. But all of this requires maybe the most important thing of all: agency. It’s more powerful than smarts or credentials or luck. And the best part is you can literally just choose to be high-agency. High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait. And if you want to progress, you can’t wait.
I think the advice is unlikely to “work” in the present world of work is calibrating as if it were 1970. Today the path forward depends on:
- Political connections
- Friends who can make introductions
- Former colleagues who can provide a soft recommendation in order to avoid HR issues
- Influence either inherited from a parent or other family member or fame
- Credentials in the form of a degree or a letter of acceptance from an institution perceived by the lender or possible employer as credible.
A skill or blended skills are less relevant at this time.
The obvious problem is that a person looking for a job has to be more than a bundle of knowledge value. For most people, Sakaiya’s and “Being Good’s” assertions are unlikely to lead to what most people want from work: Fulfillment, reward, and stability.
Stephen E Arnold, September 29, 2025
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