Episode 03 - Think Productive | Graham Allcott: What it costs to close the gap

Graham Allcott has been testing the same idea for more than fifteen years, under two different names. In doing so, he has become a leading authority on kindness, though he would be loathe to admit that.

He founded Think Productive the consultancy in 2009. It grew out of his own obsession with productivity, a skill that never came naturally to him. He wrote How to Be a Productivity Ninja in 2012 and self-published it in 2013. A publisher called a few months later, having noticed it selling well on Amazon on its own, and relaunched it in January 2014. It has since sold over 100,000 copies in the UK alone, translated into more than half a dozen languages. Think Productive now has its own MD and its own team, and Graham had, by design, made himself less necessary to the business he built.

Several more books followed. None of them matched Productivity Ninja‘s success, until Kind: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work, his sixth book. It won the Business Book Awards 2025.

Today, Graham spends most of his working life closing the kindness gap. Most leaders he meets do care, he says. Most organisations, asked directly, do say they want to be good places to work, and mean it. The problem isn’t sincerity. It’s that kindness is easy to say and hard to build, and it doesn’t survive pressure unless someone designs it to. Then practices it, again and again.

That idea has been one of Think Productive’s stated values since the early days, long before Kind existed as a book. What’s changed is that Graham now has a name and a framework for it: eight principles of kindfulness at work, built from research, road-tested on early readers per manuscript, aimed less at the people who buy Kind than at the people they hand it to.

Graham is just as deliberate about what he’s refused to build. No logo. No plan to scale beyond his own time. No exit.

“There’s not going to be an exit. There’s not going to be a scale.” — Graham Allcott

Revenue comes from book royalties, speaking fees and a small number of workshops. None of it is optimised for growth. Graham is explicit that his working week has to stay short enough to remain, in his words, a hands-on parent to his son, and that constraint isn’t up for negotiation.

The episode goes deeper on the commercial reality behind all of this. Why Graham recoils at the idea of monetising an individual act of kindness, even while making the business case for kindness at scale. What entrepreneur James Timpson told him about paying for an employee’s dream holiday, and why he’d never trade that for a better quarter of numbers. The research on why the UK, specifically, may need this work more than many other countries. And what it’s actually like to be brought in to hold a company accountable to values it wrote on a wall and quietly stopped living by.

There’s also a moment near the end, when Jason asks what inspires him, that has nothing to do with business at all.

“He is the vessel for kindness.” — Graham Allcott, on his son

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