‘Nice is about telling people what they want to hear. Kind is about telling people what they need to hear.’
Graham Allcott’s back on the podcast and all is well with the world once again. This time he’s talking about the transformative power of kindness in the workplace. Many assume that leaders need to belong to Team Screw-Them-All-And-Be-Evil to come out on top, but Graham demonstrates that being kind (which is NOT the same as being ‘nice’) is is a smart move if you want to be successful too.
There’s a deeply personal story behind this which particularly resonated with me: Graham’s own experience of the way his son’s additional needs create a ‘vessel for kindness’ all around him. We talk about salted caramel, ‘badass’ kindness, how leading a course leads to writing a book, why two authors means twice the work, and how this is definitely the last book he’ll write.*
We also talk about what writing does for us – we write what we need to read – and why delegating it to AI is a poor strategy. Writers write.
This is a conversation that will make you think, and which I hope will inspire you to be a little kinder, in life and work.
*I for one do not believe this.
Graham’s site: https://www.grahamallcott.com/
Graham on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamallcott/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Substack: https://extraordinarybusinessbooks.substack.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: Well, it’s brilliant to be back here with Graham Alcott. I think this is maybe your third appearance on the podcast. We’re going to have to start giving you a parking pass or something.
Graham Allcott: I think it is. It’s definitely second, but I think it is third, yeah.
Alison Jones: Graham, in case you haven’t met him before, is a speaker and the author of multiple books, hence the multiple appearances on the podcast, including the global bestsellers, How to Be a Productivity Ninja, and his latest book, Kind: The quiet power of kindness at work. He’s also the founder of Think Productive, one of the world’s leading providers of personal productivity training and consultancy.
So yeah, lovely to have you back, Graham. And and can I just start by saying how much I love this book and how much the world needs this book?
Graham Allcott: Oh, thank you.
Alison Jones: It’s beautiful. Kindfulness. It’s beautiful. It’s a really lovely concept. You, you had me right from the start because you started talking about quite a personal story and I’d just like to invite you to just kind of tell people how, how your kind of personal experience fed into your corporate experience.
Graham Allcott: Yeah, so should I, should I tell the story?
Alison Jones: Why not?
Graham Allcott: Okay, so my son was born with a unique chromosomal disorder and we found this out through a very rough period in the pregnancy. We actually nearly lost him at 21 weeks. It was a pretty horrendous period. And the thing about unique is that So everybody likes to think of their kid as unique, and everyone’s kid is unique, obviously.
But when it comes to genetics…
Alison Jones: …it’s such a positive word, right?
Graham Allcott: When it comes to genetics, you don’t want unique. Because unique basically means there’s no rules and they have to give you very wide parameters about what it could look like or what else it could look like. And it’s just yeah. And there’s just there’s no one really to go to, to say, what was this like for you?
So that’s been our experience of parenting. He’s now 10 coming on 11. But what’s really wonderful about him… So he has autism, he has developmental delay, he has scoliosis. So we have two major spinal surgeries a year where we have to sign his life away in the paperwork. It’s like, you know, it’s pretty full on.
But he’s also a gift. And what’s really wonderful about him is that he’s… Firstly, he role models kindness. He is just a very kind thinker. He really connects well you know, particularly with adults. He’s always thinking about, you know, how to be kind to the people around him. But then what’s really exciting is that he becomes the vessel for other people’s kindness.
So every time he gets invited to a kid’s birthday party, there’s like a text from the parents saying, how do we make the party autism friendly? There’s going to be some sounds, is that going to be okay? Should we send photos of the room? And I think autism awareness, even in the last 10 years has come along a long way.
So it really feels like people are more aware of what to do and what could help. You know, and I sort of say in the, in the book, there’s all these little characters in his life. Like he’s got this real obsession with Costa Coffee. And so we go to a particular Costa Coffee, you know, like very regularly on a Saturday and he’ll take one of his plastic trains to show the people who work there.
And they’re always just like, Oh, have you got a train for me today? And it just becomes this like beautiful thing. And there’s just so many things in his life that are like that, where he is the vessel for lots of other people’s kindness. And so you know, that’s been a real joy personally, as a parent to be able to witness kindness so often and so regularly.
And there’s definitely some crossovers and so, and some ways of correlating that with work too. So I talk a lot in this book about the idea of kindfulness, which is basically, Yeah, be kind yourself, but also think about how can you create the vessels for other people to be kind. And really, kindfulness is just about saying, how can I make kindness a part of the culture around me?
How can I support others to be kind? How can I look for the opportunity for kindness in everything? Which is a slightly, you know, bigger approach and a slightly wider approach than just saying, I’m a kind person, I do some kind things. It’s just really thinking about how can I make it the fabric of, of everything I do.
Which, you know, really the book came about because that’s what I’ve been doing for many years with Think Productive. So we’ve built this business with kindness very much at the heart. One of our corporate values is ‘trust and kindness are our rocket fuel’. And the real origin of the book was sharing that at a keynote of investment bankers and just seeing how it polarized the room.
So you had like most people in the room were on my side going, Oh yeah, kindness makes total sense. Really great for business. And then there were other people on the other side. Team Kind on the one hand, and then Team Screw Them All And Be Evil on the other hand.
And this smaller team, the Team Screw Them All And Be Evil, were saying things like: But what about Donald Trump? And what about Steve Jobs? And you know, these are really successful people and they’re really evil. So is kindness even a thing that we should think about?
And so just really noticing this absolute, like, polarisation, just from this simple concept of kindness, just really got me thinking and here we are, the book is done, it’s about to be launched in the world and yeah, it really came from that, that moment in the keynote to be honest.
Yeah.
Alison Jones: One of the things that’s most interesting about the word, I think it’s, it’s an Anglo Saxon word, isn’t it? It’s an ancient word that’s kind of always… and I think sometimes when words are so woven into the sort of warp and weft of our lives, we stop thinking about them. What you forced me to do in this book is think about that word, kind, which… everybody likes to be kind.
Kind’s nice. Kind’s nice. And one of the things that you did that really struck me was that you differentiated kind does not equal nice. And, and I think that, I mean, I’m sure that came out of that conversation that you were having with the investment bankers, like, wait a minute, we are not equating kind and nice here.
So just tell us what the distinction is.
Graham Allcott: Well, the distinction is, comes about because a lot of people mistake kindness for weakness or they mistake kindness for softness. And what I often say is, no, that’s not kindness. That’s niceness. And they are different. So, you know, very, very broadly speaking, you know, kind is about, nice is about telling people what they want to hear.
And kind is about telling people what they need to hear. So, you know, when you truly act with kindness, when you, when you’re truly kind, what you’re doing is bringing in the combination of truth and grace. So when you have truth and grace operating together, it means that you’re totally for the other person, but you’re going to deliver the truth that they really need to hear.
So that might be when someone’s in a, you know, you’ve been in a meeting and they’ve, they’ve done their presentation and then afterwards they come to you and they go, How was that? How did I do? And, you know, it didn’t go very well. And the nice response to that is, yeah, it was great. And then the kind response is, there were some good things.
There were some less good things. Shall we have a chat? Why don’t we spend a few minutes and I’ll, I’ll give you some, some notes and some pointers that I think might really help you in the service of you being better next time, and that’s a more awkward conversation to have. And so I think we need to really reframe kindness as being skillful brave and often really badass.
You know, we think of kindness as being this soft thing. It’s actually really hard to be kind a lot of the time
Alison Jones: It’s quite costly.
Graham Allcott: And costly. Yeah. And, and, and particularly having negative consequences if you don’t do it well. So it also requires some skill and practice. And a real kind of sense of agency around it to do it well.
So I think we need to start reframing it as not being a soft skill, but actually being a really fundamental hard skill that we, that we just have to get better at and practice.
Alison Jones: And it’s interesting you saying soft and hard, though, which obviously, you know, metaphorical use of language and you make the point about how so many of our business metaphors are grounded in, well, frankly, military…. even strategy is a sort of military metaphor, isn’t it? And we talk about winning and advantage and we almost need a new, we need new metaphors for this stuff.
Graham Allcott: Yeah. And I talk about this in the book that there’s there’s quite a strange origin to a lot of this. sort of military talk, you know, you think about touching base and being caught in the crossfire and all these bits of terminology. And it goes back to in the 1960s and 70s, a lot of management consultants were reading The Art of War, bringing that into into corporate life and trying to take lessons from that as, as, you know, perhaps a way to, to run businesses. But actually a lot of the experts on that book, The Art of War, say that it’s not a book about war at all. It’s actually a book about peace. It’s actually a book that really sets out how war is the most costly and most destructive choice that you can make, and that actually, what the conclusion of that book basically is, is anything you can do to keep the peace, do that, right?
So actually even the origin of that is really misguided. But yeah, when you start to look out for it, all that military terminology that we have, you know, It really is so pervasive in how we work, and it completely misses the fact that behind a lot of these gung ho, militaristic, you know, ‘business bastards’, as I talk about in the book, leaders, are lots and lots of kind people walking behind and clearing up the mess, you know. And we don’t hear so much about that because it’s quiet, and it’s restorative, and it doesn’t make headlines, but, you know, ultimately, kindness is the glue that quietly is fixing stuff together behind the scenes, Whereas a lot of the, the big stories, the Donald Trump and the Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den and all that stuff, they make the headlines because they’re remarkable and interesting.
And, and let’s face it, in, in movies and, and, and, you know, fiction and all, and all these places, the baddie is always a more interesting character than the goodie, because part of us thinks, Huh, that’s not like us. That’s a slightly more interesting way to think about things. What would my life look like if I indulged that sort of darker side of me, or if I was behaving without the rules?
And so, of course, bad is more interesting. It’s just not, it’s just not a way that we…
Alison Jones: …really not helpful…
Graham Allcott: …go about you know, really building trust and psychological safety that, that really, you know, makes the world go around in terms of organizations.
Alison Jones: And you do make it practical, don’t you? So it’s kind of, you want to understand this. You want to understand that I’m not talking about being nice, that I’m talking about something really quite muscular. And And you deliver that also as well as the explanation and the models and the metaphors and the analogies.
I love the salted caramel analogy, by the way, as a fan of salted caramel.
Graham Allcott: know? Yeah. So that one is the truth and grace, right? I’ll explain the salted caramel.
Alison Jones: Salt and sweet.
Graham Allcott: Chocolate hobnobs, best biscuits in the world. And when you think about why it’s, it’s truth and grace, it’s the essence of kindness. So you have that kind of sharp truth of the salt. And then you have the grace of being for that other person, which is kind of like the niceness bit.
And so if you had, if your meal was just salt, it’d be pretty toxic pretty quickly. So delivering lots of truth, people often have this thing of like, well, I’m just going to say it like it is. I’m just going to deliver the truth and think that it’s heroic. And the truth on its own is salty and toxic.
But yeah, on the other end of the scale, if, if you’re just acting with grace and there’s no truth in there, it gets sickly very, very quickly. And that’s a ‘nice’ culture where things don’t get done. So yeah, jumping in on that one. But yeah, I think that, that salted caramel thing is yeah, it’s a, it’s a good one to get across, I think.
Alison Jones: It’s such a good one. And I apologize if you’re now really hungry and have a craving for salted caramel, as soon as this finishes, you can go and indulge that. But you, you took, you do exercises in there as well, not exercise, you call them challenges, kindness challenges. I really liked the formulation of that because it brings home the message that A, it’s practical and B, it’s not easy.
So yeah, how did you land on that?
Graham Allcott: Well, for the last two or three years, I’ve been running a thing called Kindful Leadership, which is a six week program. We run it once or twice during the year, we’re going to certainly run it in the early part of 2025, once the book’s out. And it’s myself and a colleague, Chris Kisley, who is an American organizational development consultant.
She’s 35 years in the game. And I don’t know anyone who knows humans as well as Chris Kisley. She’s just a remarkable person to work with. And I just, I always learned so much doing that with her, but yeah, we just hit on this idea of at the end of every session, we’ll run a challenge and then that will run for a week.
So, you know, in between the weekly session, everyone’s on the WhatsApp group sharing their progress on the challenges. And then when it came to writing the book, I was thinking, well, wouldn’t it be nice to put those challenges in at the end of chapters? And then if people want to, the invitation is to use the book as a kind of 10 week program, you know, with their partner or with a small team or with the whole company or however you want to do it.
So it’s kind of set up to, to work as a kind of, you know, book club, you know, study group format if people want.
Alison Jones: As a group course? Yeah, I love that.
Graham Allcott: And then the idea is that we’re trying to make as many of the business models within this whole ecosystem as kind as possible. So the idea is you don’t need us. You don’t need to buy anything else. This is as accessible as it can be. The whole course can cost you the price of a book if you want it to.
Or if you want more than, you know, come back and we can you know, you can be part of our program or something different. But the idea was just to give as much of it out as possible. So that it spreads, you know, that’s really the, the aim of this book is to, is to get the ideas and get the the debates and the discussion just happening as, as, as often as I can in as many places as I can.
Alison Jones: You used a really interesting word there that I want to pick back up on, because I think it’s so central to how business books really work well, which is ecosystem. So the book is, is not everything. It’s the fullest expression of it. As you say, it stands alone and it’s incredibly cheap. I mean, books are ridiculously cheap and there you are, you have everything and it’s right in front of you, but it works best as part of something bigger. So when you come up with it, when you think of the, you know, the kindness course, the kindfulness course, what are you thinking in terms of speaking, training, book, is there a kind of a set of things that your immediate thinking house is going to play out in that ecosystem?
Graham Allcott: I’ve got slightly better at that over the years. I think generally I do that in a very instinctive way. I don’t really follow rules. I don’t really follow blueprints. I have a lot of cynicism around, you know, these people that sell online courses saying, Hey, like turn your book into this and I’ll put you join my mastermind group.
And what you find is lots of people selling the idea of setting up the program that you’ve just been on. And so, and so it’s just like everybody’s teaching themselves the same stuff. So I’m not very, I’m not very like scientific with these things. I don’t really follow rules with it, but with this one, it started from the Kindful Leadership Program.
That was the first thing we did. And that was really because Chris Kisley is someone who I’ve known a long time. She was really interested in the topic. We wanted to do something together and we figured that was the best place to start. And actually this might be useful to any budding business book authors out there.
We got so, we crystallized so many of the ideas for this book and we got so much good material and case studies and some of the quotes that you read in the book actually came from the first Kindful Leadership courses. So whereas most people will say hey, you know, you write the book and then you turn it into a course and then you have a lead magnet over here and all this stuff… we actually sort of did it slightly flip reverse where, you know, it’s one of those topics where the more you teach about Kindful Leadership, the more you learn about kindness because you’ve got all these smart people in front of you sharing their ideas. And so we did it that way around.
And yeah, like I say, the plan really is that we want this to be as open source as available and just for money to not be the barrier for the ideas getting out. And then the way I think about that financially so that I make a living is that when people then call me in to do keynotes, that’s the place where I really make money. And you know, like with Productivity Ninja, which you mentioned at the beginning, it’s been a global bestseller and it’s been out in the world a long time.
And I was on a call today with somebody talking about Kind, and then suddenly they’re like, Oh, I’ve got two copies of Productivity Ninja. I’ve bought loads of people copies over the years. And I’m just like, Oh, wow. I didn’t even really know that you knew what that was. And so it does… it gets out there and it’s in lots of places, but even having that, even having it translated into lots of languages, I couldn’t live off the money that Productivity Ninja makes, right?
So you know, you really have to look at it as being when someone is such a fan of Productivity Ninja that they bring you in to speak. And when they bring you in to speak, it’s like, you know that, you know, that fee is, is, is what’s going to pay your bills. Like that’s, that’s the way that you’ve got to look at it.
Alison Jones: I think even the, even the most prolific authors, even the big, big author names, they don’t make their money out of the sales of their books. Books are such low price things. They make the money out of the speaking, the training, the stuff that goes, the stuff that the book makes possible.
Graham Allcott: Yes, and I think obviously the the four outliers in the world skew the industry, right? So, you know the JK Rowlings and, I don’t know, Matt Haigs maybe, but just that those big selling fiction authors will make a living from writing, you know. For most of us It’s where you make your living is the the stuff that people find because they found the book first.
Alison Jones: Right. And so we’ve sort of established, I think, the value of the book within the ecosystem. Let’s talk about the value of writing itself. You do quite a bit of it. Why? What does it do for you?
Graham Allcott: That’s definitely a more interesting and comfortable topic for me than talking about do I have a business strategy. Yeah, so I don’t know. I think, I think in, in our little world, there’s kind of two, there’s two types of, of people. So there’s the people who are really natural speakers and then they write a book.
So that their speaking gigs go better. And there’s the people who are much more natural as writers and then they learn how to be speakers. So I think it’s very rare that you have someone who is equally at home in both. And I try, but I honestly think where I’m most at home is writing. Yeah. Like I’m definitely the sort of stereotypical, like introvert in the shed sort of writing away.
Yeah, I’ve done six books. I keep saying to everyone this, this is the last book and I, I genuinely think it’s the last book. I sort of have an idea. Yeah, you’re laughing because they are..
Alison Jones: Oh, I’m sorry. Did I laugh out loud?
Graham Allcott: I do have an idea for another book which will not involve me writing more words, which I’ll tell you about in a second.
But I think in terms of the last, it’s, for me, it’s the last book that is. me putting an idea out into the world for a couple of reasons. One, I think this is the idea that I want to focus on for a long time. And once I’ve written that book, what I need to do is get out of my comfort zone of sitting in the shed and go and put it out there in the world.
So it’s a very deliberate thing to say that because it stops me hiding behind Kind Book Two or Kinder.
Alison Jones: Ooh I have a new idea.
Graham Allcott: Yeah, right. But you know, I’ve, I’ve definitely been guilty of that in the past. So yeah, it stops you from hiding. But then also the other reason I think it’s the last book is that when I first wrote Productivity Ninja, it was before I’d had my son and I could take a month and go and sit in a beach hut in Sri Lanka and write a first draft in four or five weeks.
I remember that. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Yeah.
you know, and people do that now. People go Hey, I’ve just come back from a trip and I’ve written my book. And I was like, you’ve written a first draft? And they go, yeah. I was like, how many words is it? And they go 60, 000, I guess. You’re about a third of the way there. Well done. But yeah, I used to be able to do that when, you know, when Productivity Ninja came out and I did Study Ninja like that as well.
And then I did, and then I did another book like that. And then I did two books that were co authored and I thought, Hey, two authors, half the work. It’s actually twice the work. I don’t know why, just is. But those two co authored books were both when I had my son and I’m a single parent as well. So, you know, just juggling that, just impossible.
And this book’s taken me four years one way or another, mainly because I’m juggling lots of, you know, personal family stuff alongside it. So I kind of feel like I don’t want to have, because when you’re in the middle of a book, you just have the little voice in your head. Which I’ve had now for basically four years.
The book, the book, there’s something more to do for the book. There’s another idea for the…
Alison Jones: …you should be writing. You should, what are you doing? You should be…
Graham Allcott: Yeah, you should be writing. It’s like, you know, you need to get that bit better or that bit happens. And so I’ve had that voice constantly in my head for four years. And I’m very much looking forward to on publication day being like, okay, so it’s that book, that voice is now silent.
Lovely. I’ll have a breather from that. Yeah. And…
Alison Jones: …if anybody would like to join a sweepstake on Graham not writing another book, I shall be opening that at the end of this podcast.
Graham Allcott: Let me tell you where there might, there might be a book seven. But the books, what book seven might well be that for the last four years, what I’ve been doing alongside writing this book is every Sunday to a deadline been putting an email out into the world. And that email is one positive or productive idea for the week ahead.
It’s called Rev Up for the Week. And that has become, so back to your original thing about writing, that’s become like my, the sort of cornerstone really of my writing practice in that all the time while I was writing Kind, I was also writing something else every week, you know, to a sort of task and finish deadline.
It’s done, you know, next, next kind of thing, just keep rolling. And so I honestly think this is a way better written book than any of my other books. And I think it’s because. I was writing about lots of other topics. So I write Rev Up for the Week. It comes out every Sunday, 4:05 PM, I just picked a time at random, and the idea is that whatever I’m doing, wherever I’m in the world, I still have this accountability to write one thing that week.
I never batch them up, so I always write them that week. I never use AI, even though I’ve developed an AI called AskGraham.Ai, and it’s now capable of writing those emails for me. I don’t use it. And because that writing is for me, and it’s for me in two ways. One, it helps me to sort of hone my writing skills.
And secondly, I generally write things that are the advice that I need that week, slightly selfishly. And it turns out that we’re all quite cyclical as human beings, you know. So in September, Everyone’s getting their heads back down. And then by December, everyone’s exhausted. And then in January, it’s new year, new you.
And we all work on these kinds of cycles. So it turns out that often, if I write a thing that’s for me, it tends to land really well with lots of other people. And I get lots of replies back saying, Hey, that’s totally on my mind. You’ve…
Alison Jones: …that’s what I needed to hear. That’s so funny. And…
Graham Allcott: I always write it up. Yeah. And then I always write it that week.
I don’t use AI, and that for me has been a hugely helpful thing. I used to have a post it note for years above my desk just moved house and I lost it, but it used to just say, Writers Write. And someone told me that once, I don’t know whose quote it is, but this, having this Rev Up for the Week email has been a really great way to just focus on the fact that if you want to call yourself a writer, you better write something down and you as Seth Godin talks about, ship that thing out into the world, you know, and do that as regularly as possible.
Alison Jones: It’s a Steven Pressfield thing, isn’t it, as well? The War of Art. Just, you’ve got a ship, you’ve got
Graham Allcott: to…
Yeah, if you haven’t, yeah, if you’re calling yourself a writer and you haven’t read The War of Art, then you have to start there, actually.
Alison Jones: Yeah, it’s such a good book. And I love your point as well, just to highlight it in case anybody sort of, you know, let it skip through their brain, that you don’t use AI to write, not because the output wouldn’t be good, but because the process of writing is so valuable for you as a human.
Graham Allcott: Yeah so it’s a very conscious The thing with that email is it kind of started as an idea to sort of build a mailing list and, you know, and build an audience and do it on my terms, not doing it on the social media algorithms terms. Like when someone subscribes to that email, they get it every week.
So it started from that marketing place, but very quickly it turned into, Oh, wow, like the process of this and the fact that I can sometimes be sat there on a sort of, I work Monday to Thursday and have Friday off, I can be sat there on a Thursday afternoon and I suddenly realize, oh, I skipped past my little reminder in the calendar yesterday.
I’ve not written it. I’ve got nothing, shit. And knowing that I’ve just got that afternoon or at the very least I can, I have to sleep on it and then I’ll, I’ll write it sometime in the day on Friday when I should be having my day off. But you know, generally it’s like suddenly Thursday afternoon comes and it’s like, I need to go.
And sometimes, you know, Monday morning I have the first meeting and I’m like, that’s what I’m doing Rev Up on this week. So sometimes it’s really instant, but you know, and I’ve got like two or three things on the go that will be like., in the pipeline or just ideas that I’ve written in my to-do list that I could come back to.
But generally it’s like, it goes from idea to draft to, you know, uploaded like within a couple of hours during that week.
Alison Jones: I think it’s really, I mean, it’s great that you kind of store ideas and you give yourself a, you know, that’s the really sensible thing to do. If we were wise, we’d do that all the time. But it’s also really, I don’t know, it helps your sense of, you know, efficacy, a sense of sort of self resourcefulness, to know that even if you’re sitting there looking at a blank page, once you start writing, something will come, you will have an idea worth sharing. And that I think is hugely empowering and I think people get scared of the blank page. Maybe they reach for AI too soon. There is something about leaning into that uncertainty and writing through it and coming out the other side, which is good for you.
Graham Allcott: Absolutely. And I think most of us can, if you’ve tried those AI tools for anything, even if you just tried to make social media posts out of it or whatever, then you start to be able to tell what AI writing looks like very quickly as well. So you know, I think if we want to head into a world where writing is so like throwaway and, and so expendable that there’s a million posts out there on LinkedIn and they all sound and look exactly the same, then, you know, for me, that just feels like a very sad world to be part of, and probably one that I would just unplug from very quickly.
You know, I think good writing often looks nothing like the formulas and that’s the reason it’s good, you know, and there’s elements of creativity into it. So I think, yeah, having to think about it in a different way and almost like deliberately move away from AI is, yeah, I think it’s a really important choice to make.
And yeah, and the blank page can be scary. And what’s good about my Rev Up thing is that I’ve definitely kind of overcome the fear of the blank page more and more the more I’ve done it. It’s like anything. It’s a practice, right? And the more you’re doing that the easier it becomes, you know.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. And I’m not going to ask you for your best tip because I think, frankly, you’ve just probably given it to us. And also, you can go back to his previous podcast appearances and stuff like that. But I am going to ask you for a recommendation because, you know, it’s a different time, you know, you’ve read different books.
What have you read recently that you’d recommend?
Graham Allcott: Oh man. What have I read? So I didn’t, I didn’t prep these questions. I read a really good book recently and it’s called it’s I think it’s Marina Gerner and it’s called The Vagina Business. So this…
Alison Jones: …did not see that coming…
Graham Allcott: …I was actually reading this on a retreat recently. They’re like, what are you reading?
And I was like, oh, it’s called The Vagina Business, and they’re like, all right.
Alison Jones: Sorry I asked.
Graham Allcott: So this is a book about about an area of the world. I’ve never really thought about before: FemTech. And so it’s all about the technology that basically helps with women’s health and helps to close some of those gaps and problems that came up in a couple of those big books a couple of years ago. I can’t remember that. There’s a very famous book on the sort of, it was all stuff like how I can’t remember the book and I read it.
Alison Jones: Is it Invisible Women? Is it that sort of data gap? Yeah, the data gap and how it’s, how women have been just written out of medical,
Graham Allcott: And crash test studies are,
Alison Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Caroline Criado Perez. Yeah.
Graham Allcott: Yeah. So The Vagina Business is all about femtech and all the technology that’s looking to sort of overcome some of those problems and just all the, you know, all the breakthroughs that are being made in, in that sort of stuff.
So, and then probably last since I’ve last been on your podcast This is Marketing by Seth Godin. I mean, I’m just a huge fan of…
Alison Jones: …he writes beautifully, doesn’t he? And there’s a man who does the daily practice and that’s why he does it.
Graham Allcott: And his writing is so, like, it’s so insanely clear and so honed. And often when you read his daily email, which, you know, definitely has been a big influence on me, it’s one of the few emails that I get from another writer.
And so, you know, and I probably read about half of them in the week. Definitely a massive influence on how I try to write just because I think he’s so good. And I don’t think I’m anywhere near as good, but like it’s definitely an influence. But yeah yeah, This Is Marketing. And just, there’s a phrase in that book where he says, you can boil marketing down to a vulnerability, which is: here, I made this, and then you hand it over.
And that little phrase has just really stuck with me over the last couple of years, you know, since reading that book. So I think he’s, yeah, he’s definitely, for me, he’s the best, the best business writer there is. And…
Alison Jones: …over the previous 400 odd episodes, we’ve probably had a recommendation of every single one of Seth Godin’s books, and there are many of them, because he’s so good. Yeah, fantastic. And Graham, if people want to find more about Kind, more about Think Productive, more about everything that you do, where should they go?
Graham Allcott: Well very simple, if you just go to grahamallcott.com. So I’m A-L-L-C-O-T-T, so grahamalcott.com/links. Then all the links are there. Everything’s all in one place. Yeah.
Alison Jones: Subtext is: I’ve given up trying to remember them all. Just go here.
Graham Allcott: I hope you’re going to buy a copy of Kind, because you know, the idea with this book is to really start some conversations around what it means to be kind at work and how workplaces can be kinder. And yeah, it’s, I think it’s easily the most important book I’ve written and I really hope it’s the one that I’m remembered for in the future.
And yeah go check it out.
Alison Jones: I can thoroughly endorse that. I think it’s really profound. It’s beautifully written. It moved me a lot personally, and it really inspired me. So yes, thank you. Please do go and read it. Brilliant. Graham, just always lovely to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time today.
Graham Allcott: Thank you. Real pleasure. Thanks, Alison.
