Graham Allcott — Kind, Psychological Safety & the Quiet Power of Kindness at Work

**Adam Walker:** I'm Adam Walker, a biometrics consultant, and this is the Pharma Prescribed podcast, where leaders, innovators, and hidden voices in healthcare open up. No soundbites, no spin, just raw insight, one prescription at a time. In an industry driven by data, protocols, and pressure, we rarely pause to ask the human questions. What drives us? What breaks us? And what truths live behind the titles we wear?

**Adam Walker:** Graham Allcott is an author, speaker and entrepreneur. Graham is the author of multiple books, including the global bestseller, How to Be a Productivity Ninja. His latest book, Kind: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work, winner of the 2025 Leadership Book of the Year from the Institute of Leadership and the Business Book Awards 2025, explores why organisations with kinder, more human-centered cultures are ultimately more successful.

He's the founder of Think Productive, one of the world's leading providers of training and consultancy, with offices in the: UK, USA, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. Despite an intolerance of failure elsewhere in his life, he's an Aston Villa season ticket holder and an avid Toronto Blue Jays baseball fan.

Graham, it's a pleasure to welcome you to Pharma Prescribed today. For those of our audience who are not familiar with you, what is the mission you're on?

**Graham Allcott:** So before I do the mission I'm on, I've just realised I have to change my biog because Aston Villa just won the Europa League. We're just not used to winning, right? Also, if you do follow baseball, the Blue Jays nearly won World Series last year. So I need to change my biog.

**Graham Allcott:** But yeah, the mission I'm on, I'd say that the mission I've been on for 20 years really has been about helping people in organisations to think differently about their work. For a long time, the main tenet of that work was around productivity and in particular, a way of thinking about productivity that is sustainable and doesn't focus on toxic ideas like hustle culture and getting up at 4:00 o'clock in the morning and all that stuff. As you say, like the last couple of years with this latest book, it's really about being bold and challenging with organisations around where does success come from and challenging this notion that success comes from in business being a bastard. So the book, Kind: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work, is really about saying we've got the archetype all wrong.

We think about the Mr. Burns in The Simpsons and Shark Tank and Dragon's Den and all these things as being some kind of symbol that to be evil at work is the thing that makes you succeed. Actually, scientifically the opposite is true. So there's a whole bunch of research which I talk about in the book, which is essentially saying that kindness and empathy build trust and that builds psychological safety.

And through having psychologically safe organisations, you end up with high-performing teams and high results. So yeah, that's really the mission I'm on right now is trying to spread the quiet power of kindness at work.

**Adam Walker:** Thank you for elaborating on that, Graham.

We first met a few weeks ago when we were both at the Sussex University Kindness Conference and you were on a panel there. I hadn't heard your messages before, but I was struck by exactly as you say, the power of kindness, not just in the room, but some of the things that you were talking about. It left me not just wanting more, but actually wanting to find out more about yourself. So- you talked about- And here we are.

Exactly. I'm a guy who does what he says and says what he does. Your previous book was about, productivity and how did that translate over and above and beyond into kindness? Because you can have two together, but I wonder how you get from one to the other mindset and thought process when you're writing a book.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah. A lot of people ask me what's the bridge between productivity and kindness and people quite naturally assume that they're kinda opposites. I think that's just a hunch that a lot of people have. I've never viewed them as opposites. I think kindness brings productivity. What we've had within my own business, so I have this business called Think Productive and we've got people all over the world and we have a very distinct culture in the business, which is really important because a lot of those people, dotted around the world, have never actually met up in person.

So everything's done online. So the kind of sense of who we are as a business, what the culture looks like, how we operate really important when you don't have a water cooler, when you don't have office space. We've got a very distinct culture.

**Graham Allcott:** One of the things it's built on is our corporate values and one of those values is 'trust and kindness are our rocket fuel' So we've had that as one of our values for many years- essentially what it's about is saying when you're in collaboration, when you're in negotiation, when you're building a team, your starting point is to come at those conversations in good faith. Your starting point is to assume the best in people, not assume the worst in people.

I think when you do that, you build up a level of trust which becomes two ways. So when you, as an employer, put a lot of trust in employees, what happens is they start to trust you back and you earn that loyalty. So we've got people in, the business-- We started in 2009. When we started it was just me, but very soon after that we started recruiting, paid staff and freelancers and a lot of those people are still around, right? People have hung around a long time and been part of the success for a long time. I think a big part of that is a sense of belonging and feeling like there's a culture there that they wanna be part of and they wanna be around and that, is more than just a place to show up and do some work. There's 100 places that freelancers can show up and do some work but there's only one place that feels, I think, productive. So I feel like that idea of 'trust and kindness are our rocket fuel'. When we started it, it just felt like a good slogan. But then when I started researching the book, I realised that actually there's an awful lot of research that's been done around that idea of psychological safety and trust and how those things bring about better outcomes of business. So I do think there's not just a bridge between productivity and kindness but actually there's, in a Venn diagram, they're both in the same circle for the most part. There's lots of archetypes and views of the world which suggest that, being mean is what gets you ahead. Actually, when you really look at the numbers and you really look at the research it's the trust and the collaboration and building a team of shared values is like way more important than anything one person can do as an individual.

**Adam Walker:** Yeah I think I'd echo that point.

Having worked in various different organisations of various sizes and now being an independent consultant myself, psychological safety as an independent is even more important because-... Often I will find myself going into organisations as the outsider, trying to gain the trust of others- Yeah embed oneself in those organisations and show value from the beginning and continuing through that. That hasn't always been the case for me. I've worked for some very large corporations in pharma, in biotech and they're not the kindest places to be.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah.

**Adam Walker:** I've had some very unpleasant experiences that haven't really helped, but perhaps they have because that's why I think I'm now an independent consultant- because the person I answer to is the guy in the mirror- Yeah... As opposed to-

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah...

**Adam Walker:** someone who I don't share those corporate values and principles with that you're describing.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah, and I think, when you find the place where it feels like you fit there's something very powerful there that I think goes beyond, what's on the paper of a contract or what the deal is. You know, I think humans are naturally, as a species, I think we're very prone to want to feel that sense of belonging. But the thing about trust that makes it really useful from a sort of performance standpoint is it basically eliminates due diligence, right?

Are you an Apple user?

**Adam Walker:** Sad to say, yes, I am. A long time Apple proponent.

**Graham Allcott:** Okay. So the question I always ask to Apple users if you're thinking about trust and due diligence is, how long did you think about your last phone purchase? Because the chances are you didn't scroll through all the Samsung Galaxies and all the cheap versions. You basically looked at it and you thought, "Apple is a thing that I trust. I trust the operating system. I trust it's gonna work," and bang, there's my money. Is it the cheapest phone? No. Quite obviously. But is it the one that you feel that you trust the most? Yes.

I think we underestimate the value of trust a lot at work and particularly when you're collaborating with people so if you're working with somebody and you know that person has your back and there's suddenly something where you need to act quickly and maybe you can't get ahold of them, if you know that, they trust you and you know that you are empowered to make those decisions, you will just act and you'll just, react that bit more quickly. I think when we lose trust at work, we then spend inordinate amounts of time on all kinds of, governance and reporting and all of these other things that basically slow us down. So when you wanna build trust and build psychological safety the quickest way to do that is through kindness and empathy.

So often when I'm working with particularly in environments that are very heavy on performance and metrics, is talk the language. If you can actually build kindness and empathy into the mix of your culture and how you work, that's what you get back. You get high levels of trust, you get higher psychological safety and through that, high levels of performance.

**Adam Walker:** That's fascinating that you highlighted that because as you were describing that, I was thinking about some of the most psychologically safe environments I've worked. The common thread for me that ran through those organisations was that they were Scandinavian.

Interesting.

Is there something in that?

Yeah.

Is there a common thread that runs through that? Because the two companies I'm thinking of specifically had that and one in particular I worked with in Copenhagen for a couple of years and they didn't have water cooler moments, but what they did was they had cake on a Friday and they had events where they encouraged 'Hygge'.

That-

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah...

**Adam Walker:** that, that-

**Graham Allcott:** yeah...

**Adam Walker:** that kind hug type thing that you get in Denmark. And being around that and being with people that, again, working from the outside in, they were just happy coming to work, but also- they respected one another. There was trust in and across those teams and there weren't those levels of governance that you're explaining and they could have been because it's an enormous corporation.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah. That's interesting. On the Scandinavia thing, so I have a friend who's just moved from London to Sweden about seven years ago and is now moving back. The reason, she said, " it was really nice having free childcare and various other lovely perks." Everybody knows by now those newspaper, surveys that they do about which countries have the highest Quality of Life and all the rest of it and it's always the Scandinavian countries, isn't it?

They always feel a little bit, of course, Sweden and Denmark. But my assistant is Swedish as well and she's " I think probably the reason your friend's moving back is that yes, there's like a certain social safety net and there are, like, policies that are really supportive and community-minded." But actually, in terms of the actual sense of community, there's a lot more people there living in kind of socially isolated places and in socially isolated housing. There isn't the same social interaction that you'd get on, certainly the streets of Brighton where I live or Sussex where you live, or dare I say even London. People do feel a bit more isolated there. So I wonder whether that also then plays into then when you go to work, having community at work becomes even more powerful than having that in a place where you feel that community with us and everyone else.

But yeah, just coming back to your question about are there some places, are there companies that feel like they get this kindness thing more?

I'd say the one big trend I started to see when I was researching the book is a lot of the organisations who were bigger on kindness and brought it more into the culture, the thing that they had in common often was that they didn't have shareholders. So they ended up being the family businesses.

Timpson is the classic example, but, you talk about organisations like Richer Sounds or Reed Recruitment and these other organisations that have been built up by a generation, passed on a generation, that kind of thing.

I think not having shareholders just gives you more of an ability to invest in the longer term. Where you can start to think about doing things for what might be good for results in a year's time or two year's time. James Timpson talked to me about this when I interviewed him for the book, and he said, "The easiest thing in the world as an executive, if you wanna make the numbers go up, is you flog everybody, right? You just work everyone harder." I could do a really good job making the numbers go up for three, maybe four, maybe five quarters. But where would I be two years down the line if I did that? I know where I'll be, is that people will leave and generally, the best people will be the ones who leave first and then you're in a mess." So his thing is "I'm gonna build a culture that's based around people where I'm gonna put, real money on the table to do kind things for employees to make stuff happen." Stuff that feels very like counterintuitive to, shareholders or board members. But actually, it's the stuff that invest now to build returns and build culture and build performance in the longer term.

So that's probably the only correlation I've seen and there are loads of exceptions to that. Companies with shareholders and big companies that are doing this stuff really well. But yeah, I think we do also need to talk within this about the kind of structural incentives for looking after your people and treating people well. It's almost antithetical to how a lot of our capitalist systems are set up as well. Yeah.

**Adam Walker:** I think that was where I was going with it, actually. The capital ideal around driving price and shareholder value is definitely against that ethos, isn't it? So what have you found in those investigations? Because you gave the example of Timpson, which I think is a wonderful one. There must be plenty of others that are outside the realms of our understanding. What are the common threads that run through these kind of organisations? You talked about Timpson and other organisations. I wonder if there are other examples out there that we may not have heard about that perhaps you've gone into detail within the book.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah, there's a good few examples in the book. What's been really interesting over the last couple of years is I've been, out in the field and doing keynotes and doing workshops around this topic, and what's lovely about that is guess who I get to work with? It's all the organisations who've got really inspiring people who are really intent on, promoting kindness. Yeah, I just find it so inspiring and it just feels like such a privilege for me those are the organisations that I get to work with. There are a few, things that bring it together.

One, I think is a sort of recognition around trying to build a culture of work that's sustainable and organisations either recognising that maybe they've worked people too hard or the culture's become a bit toxic. And often where I get brought in is off the back end of maybe the CEO's left or, there's been a turnover of certain people in the team, and then it's like, "Now we wanna fix this. Now we wanna draw a line under this. Now we wanna, put something positive back into the culture and just say, 'Here's where we stand' and put our line in the sand in that respect." So that happens quite a bit. I'd say the other thing is just really inspiring leaders.

Just if you've got a really good chief exec or chief people officer or even just the head of a division who's really focused on this stuff, it ripple effects out from there. Often that's a top-down thing. Not always but generally. I think having someone really take the lead on it and someone really with that vision for it to say, "Kindness really matters here and we wanna build empathy, and we wanna build that trust," ends up being a really inspiring thing.

Then, there's also examples of organisations who take it that step further and it's not just about how you treat your people. It's also kindness around customers as well. So I think that's the other area where it gets really interesting. So having a really good customer service experience where it genuinely feels like you've made a connection with that person, behind the till, behind the counter, over the phone, whatever it is, it's really infectious. You just tell so many more people about that than just a standard piece of good customer service. I think when you start to add that up. People often say kindness costs nothing. I would slightly revise that and say it costs a little bit. It costs a little bit of time, it costs a little bit of care, it costs a little bit of thought.

But once you do that, the benefits that you get back from that are just so far outweighing of the cost that it just becomes a no-brainer. It feels also something that we're crying out for in the world. It just feels like there's a lot of negativity online. There's a lot of parts of our cultural life and cultural discourse that feel very fractured at the moment.

I think the lovely thing about kindness is it's completely, apolitical. It's just two people connecting in a moment around a thing and I think that makes it, I think, really enticing and accessible for people.

**Adam Walker:** I couldn't agree with you more, Graham.

**Adam Walker:** while you were talking about that, I was reminded of some of the preparation I'd done for this conversation and I recalled that you came from a charitable background.

You worked in the charity sector.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah, that was my first career, yeah.

**Adam Walker:** Now, that has some kind of thought for me around being kinder environments because they're less led by shareholder value, of course. They have principles and values that are at their core that inevitably drive them. How does that translate from your experiences in that sector to now working in the more corporate sector and seeing more of that?

**Graham Allcott:** So the funny thing is I could think quite quickly of a dozen people I know in the charitable sector who would say charities are often the least kind places to work. They're often very bitchy. They're often quite toxic. Inside the charity sector, there are quite a lot of complaints around culture and how stuff works, which you wouldn't have necessarily thought of.

Then there are also charities, certainly charities I've worked with that really emanate kindness very strongly to their core. I think I led one of those, going back to the early part of my career. You'd have to ask the other people who were there to, really find out if I succeeded, but I think I did.

I worked with some that we collaborated with around that time that had very positive cultures. But I think there's kindness and unkindness everywhere, in all kinds of different organisations. So slightly just push back on the sort of characterisation of charities as always the loveliest places. Also, the thing about charities is they're often very high performance cultures because you end up having to deliver huge social value on very little resource. The thing that I learned the most about building my business from my time in charities was just the innovation, right? Just having almost no budget and yet having to deliver something of national significance is a really big challenge and you end up having to, pull in lots of favours and learn how to be really persuasive and learn how to sell a vision to people and all that stuff is why I think volunteering or working in charities in the early part of your career is such a good grounding for whatever you do after that.

Yeah, definitely something to think about. But yeah, I think there's a whole bunch of- things that I took from that world.

**Graham Allcott:** I think that probably the thing that's been like the through line through my whole career really, which I learned in those first couple of roles in the charity sector, is I just worked with a couple of leaders who were particularly good at bringing people around the table and facilitating meetings in a way that really got people to pay full attention.

I think that has been the thing actually that... I wrote this whole book with my colleague Hayley Watts called How to Fix Meetings and a lot of that really is a book about attention. Meetings are about attention. Often, these days a meeting is, on Teams, half the people are scrolling on their phones slightly off camera. You don't really pay your fullest attention and I think it's really important that you do that if you want that gathering to generate the kind of ideas or the kind of solutions that, actually move the dial. So that's probably the thing for me is think doing that is, almost automatically a kind act.

I think giving someone your fullest attention is one of the most precious resources that you have. There's very little that's kinder than listening deeply to people and I saw that in the early part of my career in the charity world. I tried to bring that into my business, Think Productive and I was very influenced by a couple of those leaders in particular who taught me those skills.

If anyone's curious about, how to develop that, obviously, you can go and find my book, How to Fix Meetings, but there's also another book which is called Time to Think, which is by Nancy Kline. That book is probably, in my top five or six as the books that have really influenced how I've built my business because it's really about recognising and valuing everybody's contributions equally paying your fullest attention, like really listening and creating in whatever meeting you're holding a very almost sacred sense of it being like a thinking space.

When you set meetings up like that, it's not the same. It's just not the same as having these kind of back-to-back boring, unproductive meetings. So I think that for me was like, it was super kind to be treated like that early in my career when I was often one of the most junior people in the room.

But it's something that's stayed with me all, through my career really.

**Adam Walker:** I think you've hit on a couple of really sweet notes there Graham, because as you say, we're living through the attention economy and having two adult kids myself and I'm aware you're a parent as well. You will know as well as I do about that distraction that is there in the palm of our kids' hands all the time and it's not just in our kids, it's in everyone and I'm as guilty of it as the next person. One of the reasons that I love doing podcasts and I know you're a podcaster yourself, is that in this moment you have nothing but undivided attention. At the point at which we hit record, I think I said, in fact I know I said, 'cause I make sure I do these things, we switch off all of our notifications and in this moment you have nothing but full attention. As the host and the interviewee, you need to listen to the questions, you need to play them back, you gotta think things through.

There's a whole series of actions that happen that when you are fully engaged, there is total connectivity, whether it be in the room or in the virtual room and I think that's something that I'm really noticing that is a differentiator for me now. When I have people's full attention, I know I have their full attention.

When I don't, absolutely crystal clear.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah.

**Adam Walker:** There is such an enormous value in that as a differentiator, because when you feel valued, you feel engaged. Everything feels better, doesn't it? Our happy hormones are rising, our cortisol goes down, everything just becomes a flow state and conversations flow.

So as I say, you hit on a really amazing point there that I just wanted to echo and play back to you. I think it's something that we often overlook and just accept around this busyness culture that we're living in now and I think that's also something that you've spoken about is busyness and kindness.

Do the two go hand in hand? How do they fit?

**Adam Walker:** Because I've spoken to another person on this podcast, a guy called Dermot Whelan, who's written a book also about busyness, and I'd love to hear your thoughts around how busyness and kindness can co-mingle together or not.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah. Okay, here's the thing. The biggest source of accidental unkindness is busyness so you can have some times in your day, your week where you're busy, where you may think in those moments about how to be kind or about what other people need. You'll probably be too busy to act on them. But what's really core to sustainable levels of kindness is slowing down. So when you slow down, when you get out of that busyness trap, just by slowing down, what happens is you start to notice more of what's around you.

You're a bit more present in the interactions that you have with people, coming back to that attention and listening thing we were just talking about. It's really when you get to that level of connection that if you do have an idea about how you could reach out and help someone, you also have just that little bit of space to make it happen, right?

**Graham Allcott:** Often the opportunities to be kind they're almost like the window appears, but as you notice it, you realize it's also closing at the same time. A really good example of that, good visual example of that is if you think about if you're on the Tube in London and you're sat down and someone gets on and they need your seat more than you.

Everyone does that thing where you look around to see, "Are you gonna stand up or is it gonna be me?" Or whatever, and there's that opportunity. It presents itself. It's there. You can stand up in that moment and just jump into that opportunity to do something kind. But if you stay seated and that person is then standing up, within about two minutes it's super awkward. So if you stand up then, there's a little conversation that might only happen in your head, but the conversation is: "why didn't you do this two minutes ago?"

So it's like the window appears that you can jump through that and create that opportunity for kindness, but as it appears, it's also closing. The same is true in meetings, right? Where, item four on the agenda, you're coming to the end of item four on the agenda and you know that item four, your colleague who you're sat next to, you could put them on a pedestal, and you could really praise the work they're doing in that particular area, and you can say that kind thing. But then the chair goes "onto item five," and as soon as you've had that idea, the opportunity might disappear. I think when we slow down, it gives us... So in that particular example, it gives us probably the 20 or 30 seconds either before you enter the Zoom room or the physical room, where you're looking at the agenda and just that little bit of space to go, "Oh yeah, item four, when that comes up, I'll talk about my colleague." If you're rushing and by item three on the agenda, your head's still in the last meeting or it's in what you had for lunch or whatever, you know and you're not actually fully present, we often miss those opportunities. So yeah, the biggest cause of accidental unkindness is busyness.

We often think of unkindness as being this kind of unhinged evil, sort of bad intentions kind of thing. Often the reality is, "Oh, I've upset that person. I didn't know. I didn't think of it. I forgot." It's those things that when you're in the middle of busyness and rushing around, you might miss, that actually causes that, accidental unkindness.

**Adam Walker:** Again, I mean, you, make such a wonderful argument to that. And busyness I find around me, people seem to wear it as a badge of honor. Like-

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah...

**Adam Walker:** they think it's a good thing.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah.

**Adam Walker:** "I'm so busy. Oh, I haven't got time to do this." Like you said, the back to back meetings. At the moment I'm recovering from back surgery ironically, so things have had to slow down for me whether I liked it or not. What I've noticed is exactly that point, which is when you slow things down and then you build them up very gradually-

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah...

**Adam Walker:** That could be physically, emotionally and professionally, you bring back the things in the order in which you want them, rather than them being put as demands upon oneself.

As we're talking about that, it reminds me of a book by Matthew McConaughey called Greenlights. I don't know whether you're familiar with this one, but this is similarly- No...

About when you slow things down and you plant seeds, you don't know-... When they're gonna come back to you.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah. Lovely.

**Adam Walker:** But effectively, by those good deeds, one day they will come back to you.

The universe- Yeah... Feeds back kindness in, reward to that example you gave on the tube. So- There is certainly this toxic culture that I experience in the busyness around me not in my little world, 'cause I have a little world at the moment and I'm rebuilding that. But I do feel it and see it when I go back into those corporate organisations and when I'm engaging with them. Certainly not when I'm recording a podcast and when I'm talking to the people I choose to talk to, as opposed to those I have to talk to. Yeah. That's the difference, isn't it? It's choosing and wanting and doing. As I say, there is that whole challenge that we have around when we slow things down how we then rebuild from that point forward.

**Graham Allcott:** I think organisations and leaders, we instinctively know this, right? It's why no one ever has a strategy day in their own offices in between other meetings. You go off site, you create space, you look at some mountains or a nice lake or whatever, next to a golf course or whatever.

Creating space allows you that sense of being able to slow down and we know that we do better thinking when we do that. It's a thing that we do know when we really start to think about how we design some of... The big moments in the year where people are asked to think and strategise and be creative how do we design those things? It's pretty obvious that we're trying to make that space and create that sense of space. So I think there's the knowing that and then there's doing it day to day and then we get busy and then- people come across either, one of my principles in the book, which is this idea of slowing down or people read my friend Carl Honoré's got this book, In Praise of Slow, which has been around for quite a long time.

He, really coined the term the slow movement and had this incredible sort of internet community, back in the kind of Web 1.0 days really, like building around this idea of: how do we cultivate slowness into our lives? The problem with slowness is it feels so unglamorous and it feels so difficult when everything's going at 100 miles an hour.

There's that thing that I know half the people listening to this podcast will have in their ears right now. That's easy for him to say. "I've got a boss who needs this, that and the other." But what Carl says In Praise of Slow is, " slowness isn't really about speed.

Slowness is about savouring". So it's am I fully present in what I'm doing? Some of those things will be I'm doing them quite fast. But actually it's the sense that I have my fullest attention on the thing that I'm doing, that I'm being really intentional about what I'm saying yes to versus what I'm saying no to, and that I'm truly savouring each moment. It's like not eating your food whilst you're scrolling your phone. Like actually sit and be present with the flavours of that food. Doesn't take you any longer, but it just means your intention and your attention are on that activity 100%. It's the same when you're, having ideas or sitting with a sketch pad or having a one-to-one conversation with people. So I think it's very easy to start to think about the idea of slowing down as being this very unglamorous, difficult thing to do. But actually, I think what makes it maybe a bit more palatable for people is to reframe it as it's just really about savouring and making sure that whatever you're doing, you're 100% in that thing.

**Adam Walker:** So I'm just thinking about drinking this water- Yeah, once you've split it, and then allowing it to go into my palate and.. Feel it all the way down, you know- Yeah... Into my stomach. It's the same sort of thing. I'm gonna do that and I'm gonna savour it and then I'm gonna ask my next question. Yeah.

**Graham Allcott:** While you're doing that, I'll just tell you a little story about that, is I interviewed a guy called Erling Kagge, who is one of the world's leading explorers.

He's done trips to the North Pole and the South Pole. I interviewed him a good few years ago for my podcast. One of the things he talks about is how doing those trips really helped him... Obviously, he was trying to get there as fast as possible, 'cause you've got your limited supplies and you've got your sled that you're pulling and all the rest of it.

But he said, " When you empty your mind to that level," because you've got no phone, you don't have 100 things to do and emails and whatever, he says, "you just become a lot more present." He remembers picking up an apple that he'd brought with him on the trip, and he's somewhere near the South Pole, and he said, "I bit into this apple and then I immediately started to feel this connection with the tree that had grown the apple and the soil beneath that tree and the water that had to be pulled up into that tree to create this apple." You just think, man that is another level of zen, isn't it? He learned that really the hard way by literally having nothing else to think about or do in that moment. But You could tell that had really stayed with him just as a way of being, yeah.

**Adam Walker:** That's a wonderful example of, yeah, the power of slowing things down.

**Adam Walker:** It would be remiss of me not to mention, while you mentioned your podcast, I happened to listen to an episode that you recorded with the wonderful Seth Godin. He of- Yes... Tribes and various others. I wonder if you could just elaborate how on earth that came about and I think-... He's also connected with the book behind you, isn't he?

With Kind.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah. I had this podcast for many years called Beyond Busy and one of the real privileges of that was, I think I started before Steven Bartlett. So I was early, early on the podcast train. Once it had built up a bit of momentum, then I would get free books.

It was amazing. The publishers would just send me all the new releases that were coming out and the implication was, "Do you want to interview any of these people?" They've got books to promote. So I ended up interviewing some really incredible people. In fact, that guy Erling Kagge that I just talked about, that was the same thing, right?

He had a book out and so we met in The Strand in London and sat down and had an amazing conversation. Then a book landed on my desk one day that was Seth Godin's latest book, and I was just like, "Oh, yes, please." I'd had a couple of emails back and forth with Seth over the years. Seth is just, he's one of my heroes. One of the things that he is... Obviously known for all his professional things, but one of the things that he's personally known for is that he's really generous when it comes to replying to emails. I actually asked him about this. I said, "How on earth do you keep up with that? I mean, You must have thousands of emails coming in from all around the world." I don't know quite what his exact accent is. I know he lives in New York State. I won't try and do the accent, but just imagine the accent. He said "Graham, the thing is, when someone has taken the time and the care to send me a very generous email and they've been really vulnerable about the thing that they're working on, it, just feels like the least I can do is just to reply." I just thought, "Wow!" You're just operating on a different-- You just have a different set of principles to most other people that I come across. He's very good at drawing very clear boundaries and sort of lines in the sand for himself.

So I interviewed him. For Beyond Busy. That was just a great experience. They say never meet your heroes, but he was, like, super generous all the way through that. Then it came to doing Kind. I'd actually picked his brains a little bit, got some advice from him about what I should call the book. Because the publishers at the time had this really awful name for the book. I thought, "Who can I ask about this? I'll ask Seth Godin," right? So at the end of my podcast with him I said, "Can I just pick your brains for a couple of minutes?" I asked him about this title and he said to me, "Graham, I've done 19 books, and I did a book called 'All Marketers Are Liars' and it was by far the cleverest title I've ever had of any book and it sold the least of any book that I've ever..."

So his basic wisdom from it was be really obvious about what the book is and if you then need the subtitle to do the work, then the subtitle does the work underneath. So immediately off that call, I was like so it's called Kind. Then we spent quite a long time coming up with the exact wording of 'The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work' being the thing that's underneath it. But yeah, really the title I have Seth to thank for that. Then you have this sort of part of the process as an author where the publisher says: "we're gonna give you PDF copies and we'll give you a bit of admin support. But now go out and reach out to everybody that you know who might endorse the book." In the book world, they call it 'blurbing'. So I had to email Seth Godin and be like, "Hey, I would love you to 'blurb' this book and I feel slightly terrified asking you, and is it possible?" He sent me this amazing email back that had a little link to... He has this little blog post, which is like, "Here are my rules for blurbing..." the stuff on the rules was basically it's like, "I get asked loads. I can't say yes to them all. Here are some things that you need to take into account. One of them is, "if you've sent me a PDF that has a watermark through it, I ain't reading it. You're asking me to spend my time reading the book and that is getting in my way and I won't be able to focus on the words and stuff. So that's just a no and I'm really sorry if that's what..." Of course that's what I'd sent him because that's what every author says. So I had to go back to Bloomsbury and be like "No, no, no, quick, can we get a version that doesn't have a watermark on?" Which they then did, and then I read his thing, sent this new version to Seth saying, "Just read all you're saying, watermark thing. Okay, sorry about that. Here's the latest one." Then probably about two weeks later, I got an email back from him and it literally just said "Graham," I think it said either ni-nice work or I think it might have said top work, but it's like either nice work or top work. "Here's my blurb. Best wishes, Seth." It was just like this moment of, "Oh my God". In his words, because also in that blog post that he sent me, one of the things was- 'blurbs don't sell books, but what they do is they help the author to walk a little bit taller'. Getting a 'blurb' from Seth Godin made me walk taller because it made me think, "Man, like I'm onto something." If Seth is willing to spend some time with this book, if he's willing to write top work and write a 'blurb' and whatever, like I just feel more confident now in taking this book out into the world. So it was a big moment for me that. Wherever else I've interacted with him yeah, like he's just super generous with how he responds and yeah, I just I love how he thinks. His writing is head and shoulders above any other business author, to be honest. In terms of his writing, like I just rate him so highly. Yeah, that was a very proud moment. So it was lovely to have him on the podcast. That was really about promoting his book, The Practice, as it was then.

Got into loads of interesting sort of side conversations with him on the podcast. But yeah, to have him endorse my book was yeah, a real career highlight for me, for sure.

**Adam Walker:** Honestly, kudos to you, Graham. I think that speaks volumes to the content, but also the manner in which you approach the work that you're doing, not just in your authorship, but clearly in the day-to-day activities and the way in which you're interacting with people and leaving them feeling better than they were before.

As you were describing that and telling that story of Seth Godin, I had all manner of different thoughts whirling through my head. But at this point, I just wanna give you the opportunity, is there anything that we haven't spoken about today, Graham, that perhaps we should have spoken about? I've asked you a lot of questions, but I have to play it back to you because in all of these discussions that I have with so many different fascinating and interesting people like yourself, I always want to give the opportunity for you to answer that question back to me.

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah. Okay. I'll leave you with two thoughts: One is just about how to connect with me or follow me a bit more. I'll do that one at the end...

But, we talked a lot about kindness and I think often the question that people have off the back of that is, "Okay, so how do I make this practical? What can I do tomorrow if what you're saying is true? That, when you have kindness and empathy, you build trust and when you build trust, you have psychological safety and that drives a whole heap of performance, whether it's productivity or retention or better ideas and critical thinking, all this stuff. Okay, Graham, how can I do that?"

In the book, there's eight principles, but the first principle is 'kindness, starts with you'. I think this is a really important reframing around kindness. When we first think about the word kindness, generally, our next thought is: "Okay, how can I pay it forward in the shop?" Or, "How can I pay forward the parking meter?" Or "Who can I donate to?" Or we start to think about the other people that we might wanna help. We just think back to the little conversation we were having around busyness and the need to slow down, I think there's also a really important component here, which is we've gotta really start with self-kindness. This is really challenging for a lot of people. I think there's a lot of people who would identify themselves as 'people pleasers'. There's a lot of people who are very happy to let themselves down but not so happy to let other people down. I think we've gotta get really savvy around how we wire our brains around kindness.

Ultimately, that's about having a brain that's focused on abundance and not scarcity. Really any act of kindness, when you're being kind to someone else it's, in, a sense, bringing some of the abundance from your world into their world. But actually when it comes to self-kindness we're often very wired around scarcity, and it's no surprise.

If you go on your Instagram feed, every single advert is scarcity in some sense. You don't look as good as you need to look, or you need to feel jealous about this person's lifestyle or whatever the thing is. So much of what we read and hear in particularly in advertising or in the media is really setting up a scarce world. But if we start to rewire that around abundance and start to think about it in that way then we just rewire our brains so that when those opportunities and those windows appear that are closing as we see them we're in abundant mode and not scarcity mode. When we're in that scarcity mode, we start to think about the opportunity to be kind to somebody, and we say to ourselves things like, "There isn't enough time," or there isn't enough to go around." Ultimately we start to get into this idea that we are not enough. When we're in abundant mode we flip that script. So we start to say there is enough time and there is enough and I am enough." I think that's a really important practice that we need to develop as humans. We've gotta rewire our brains towards abundance away from scarcity. Very good things happen when you start to think about it in that way. But when you think about it in that way, you've also role modeled abundance so much in your own head that when you see the opportunity to be kind, you jump in much more quickly.

So abundance versus scarcity I think is a big thing and it starts with you. So anyone listening to this, don't think about how you can pay forward the parking meter, which no one has done for 20 years. Even though that's like the thing that gets represented when you see kindness on social media. Just think about how you can be kinder to yourself today, this evening, tomorrow. How can you rewire your brain through that towards abundance and away from scarcity? So I think that's the thing just to leave people with because it's the thing that's most important and it's the thing that's most challenging, but it's the thing that sets the table for everything else.

Then just a really quick one. So if you are interested in finding out more about my work and what I do and if you would like me to come in and talk to your organisation about some of this stuff and how kindness can drive performance my website is just grahamallcott.com. On a Sunday evening I send out an email once a week. It's called 'Rev Up for the Week' and the idea is it's one positive or productive idea for the week ahead. It goes out every Sunday evening at 4:05. Just picked a random time several years ago. So if you wanna sign up for that there's a little form on grahamallcott.com. Put your email in there and then you'll have me in your inbox every Sunday somewhere around 4:05!

**Adam Walker:** That's a wonderful place at which I think we should probably move on to the quick-fire round.

**Adam Walker:** So at this point in the conversation, I always like to ask a number of quick-fire round questions, Graham. I wonder, what is the one piece of advice that you would give to your younger self?

**Graham Allcott:** When I was in my second year of uni, my friend told me that... We were both broke and we both came from very similar skint backgrounds and he told me he was putting an all around the world ticket on his credit card and it was gonna cost two and a half grand.

I thought, "That's so much money, I could never afford to do that." So I worked all Summer. I would tell my younger self to book that ticket.

**Adam Walker:** What are the top three qualities you value most when building your team?

**Graham Allcott:** Curiosity, commitment and kindness.

**Adam Walker:** Had to be in there. Of course it did. What is your favorite thing outside of work?

**Graham Allcott:** DJing. Yeah, so I'm big into music, love my music. I used to be very shy about talking about this on a work podcast, and now I'm starting to let the wall down a little bit. So I run a thing called 'Brighton Sundae', which happens once a month in Brighton. It's a Sunday afternoon clubbing session based around: jazz, funk, and soul. It's at brightonsundae.com or brightonsundae on Instagram. But yeah, I'm one of the resident DJs at that.

**Adam Walker:** Wow.

**Graham Allcott:** I'm looking at your face. You're like, "Wow, did not expect that."

**Adam Walker:** Oh my God. It happens that I love jazz and Russ Dewberry is one of my favourites.

**Graham Allcott:** I know Russ. He was our guest actually two months ago.

Yeah, so that's the wheelhouse, absolutely middle of the wheelhouse right there.

If you're from Brighton, you know who Russ Dewberry is 'cause he's a bit of a- you know who he is, and if you're not-...

Brighton export legend. Yeah...

**Adam Walker:** you wish you did.

Finally, Graham, your number one golden rule in life and in business?

**Graham Allcott:** I think my number one rule is 'stay curious'. For me, I think curiosity is, it's such an underrated trait, I think particularly in a world of increasing AI and slop. Being curious and I think critical thinking for me goes really hand in hand with curiosity. I think that is gonna increase as an important skill.

**Adam Walker:** Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more on that point, Graham. We have touched on so many fascinating areas of your backstory, how you came to be an author, and you've been so generous with your time. I keep coming back to the message that you said at the very earliest point, which was your principles around trust and kindness being your rocket fuel for that organisation.

Slowing things down, kindness versus busyness, and all of the principles that we've talked about in the course of this recording have just resonated in my ears and I think will resonate with me for a long time going forward I'm glad you've shared how people can get in contact with you because I then don't need to ask them how they can get in contact with you. But I was fortunate enough to see you present in a forum at the Sussex Kindness Conference and I'm delighted that I was there and took the time out of a busy week-

**Graham Allcott:** Yeah.

**Adam Walker:** Some creative space... Or maybe when I slow things down. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You make space for these things because it was a joy then and it's been a joy today to get- Thank you to know you even more, Graham and just wanted to thank you so much for coming on Pharma Prescribed today.

**Graham Allcott:** It's been my pleasure. Of course if anyone listens to this, if you've got those ideas in your head do go and get a copy of Kind because at the end of each chapter there's exercises and reflections and ways that you can make it practical.

I kinda think, kindness is really a practice, right? In just in the same way that yoga is a practice or writing is a practice. So the more we do it, the more we learn and the more comfortable we get with it and all of that. So I wrote the book really to have that practical element so that people can dig into it and figure out how to personalise that practice for them.

If any of that was at all interesting, then yeah, go and grab the book and dig in.

Yeah.

Thank you.

**Adam Walker:** Thank you once again, Graham. It's been a delight.

**Graham Allcott:** Pleasure