Arthur Brooks — ACB Ideas
Founded: 2021
Headquarters: Washington, DC
CEO: Candice Gayl
What Role We Played
Since stepping down from his role as CEO of the American Enterprise Institute, and taking up his place as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, Arthur Brooks has become one of the most influential public intellectuals in America.
In 2022, Carter Research was asked to figure out how Arthur Brooks and his leadership team could leverage his creative process to shape a new kind of “products and services business” powered by his immensely imaginative social science research. At the center of Arthur’s award-winning Atlantic columns, his leadership course at Harvard Business School, and his New York Times best-selling books, there is a geyser of creative activity. The question was: how best to build that out into a publicly influential and scalable business understanding that all this creativity and insight was was both designed and delivered by a single man?
Why This Matters
- Arthur’s focus on the science of human happiness and its sources in positive psychology is an immeasurably important anecdote to much of the dreary social sciences of our time. Somehow we have all but forgotten how the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are revealed in millenia of wisdom literature and Arthur is resurrecting this in a multitude of life-giving ways that everyone needs to know about.
- Arthur is also a social scientist deeply interested in and formed by the Scripture, Tradition, and Sacramental Life of his Catholic faith. It is especially important today that the rigorous and vibrant dialogue between science and religion that has developed in both Eastern and Western traditions continue to be prosecuted precisely as a means of bringing us all closer together. It is a deep appreciation of any one tradition that best provides us access to others more alien and Arthur is especially qualified to do this very well across a wide variety of different backgrounds.
- Arthur’s work is bridge-building, constructive, and deeply healing at a time that is almost impossibly polarized, hurting, and longing for salving messages of peace. Helping Arthur to popularize his work was both rewarding and fun. But when the mechanics of how we learn to “love our enemies” is quickly fading from view, it turns out to be deadly important work as well — whether or not you are a follower of Oprah, a reader of the Economist, or about to check out from public conversation altogether.
