Killer Thinking: Why Tim Duggan says kindness is the best way to get ahead in business

We’ve all heard the saying ‘kill them with kindness’. And one Aussie entrepreneur who believes this to his core is Tim Duggan, the co-founder of Junkee and author of bestselling book Cult Status.

Today, May 3, 2022, Duggan has released a second book — Killer Thinking — poised as the ultimate guide to “creating, developing and recognising incredible ideas that will revolutionise the way you work”.

In this exclusive extract, Duggan shares why kindness is undervalued in organisations, and how you can evaluate the kindness-ecosystem surrounding your business.

Killer Thinking by Tim Duggan. Source: supplied.

Kindness isn’t a word that’s often used in a workplace setting. Kindness can sometimes sound weak, or soft, or too touchy-feely for the thrust and pace of business, right?

I reckon that’s bullshit. We’ve been told for decades that business is a cut-throat, competitive, win-at-all-costs fight against others to claw your way to the top. There are entire TV genres dedicated to people outdoing each other in business by backstabbing in order to become number one.

Kindness is missing from traditional business, and it needs to be more than just a buzzword. The best ideas are sympathetic to the world in which they exist. They are kind to the environment, the supply chain, their customers and staff. And the best part? Kindness is contagious. Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki and his colleagues set out to test if seeing other people’s good behaviour would inspire people to act in the same positive way.

They did this in various ways. The first was to recruit participants to complete a paid study, and at the end give each recruit a one-dollar ‘bonus’. They showed them brief overviews of a hundred charities and asked if they wanted to donate any of their bonuses to each of the worthy groups. The participants saw how much other participants had donated, which was, unbeknownst to them, manipulated up and down by the researchers. The result was that people who believed we lived in a generous world where others were donating a high percentage of their bonus donated similarly high amounts. In other words, the kindness of others was contagious.

To test it even further and ensure it wasn’t just guilty imitation, they conducted a follow-up study where participants observed other people donating either generously or stingily. They were then told they were moving on to a completely unrelated task where they pretended they had a pen pal. The participants were given a note to read where the pen pal had described their life over the last month, including all of the ups and downs, and then had to write back to them.

The researchers found that the participants’ letters to their pen pals differed in tone depending on what they had observed earlier. Participants who had watched people donate generously wrote notes that were friendlier, and more empathetic and supportive, compared to the ones from those who had watched people behave greedily.

“Witnessing kindness inspires kindness, causing it to spread like a virus,” wrote Jamil Zaki in Scientific American. “We find that people imitate not only the particulars of positive actions, but also the spirit underlying them. This implies that kindness itself is contagious, and that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.”

Killer ideas begin with kindness at their core, and spread far and wide outside their original bubble. Ideas that are inherently kind travel around a community, a country and even the world.

Think about the entire ecosystem that surrounds your business, and how kind each aspect is:

1. Customers

   Do you treat them with kindness? Do you listen to them, respond in a timely manner, and take into account their needs ahead of your own?

2. Environment

   How kind is your idea, business or company on the environment? Are you leaving the world in a better state thank you found it? Or are you just taking and not replenishing anything else at the other end?

3. Staff

   Are you fair and reasonable with your colleagues? If you keep empathy at the forefront of your decisions, it’ll help you make better ones.

4. Supply chain

   How kind are you to people you purchase from? Are you reasonable in your demands from them? Do you consider the entire process?

It must be pointed out that kindness doesn’t mean bending over backwards and saying yes to anyone’s demands. Kindness can play out in unexpected ways, especially when it comes to other people. Research professor and author Brené Brown writes in Dare to Lead that “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind”, and shows that data reveals most people think they’re being kind by avoiding clarity, when the opposite is actually true. Some things might not seem kind at first glance, but you have to take into account the bigger picture and how it affects everyone.

Google has a position called a Chief Innovation Evangelist. It’s a strange title with a very worthy job description. It’s their job to encourage people, both inside and outside of Google, to pursue radically new ideas, think with an innovation mindset and figure out what needs to change in current workplaces to get there.

The current Chief Innovation Evangelist, Frederik Pferdt, says the skill that will be needed most in the future is empathy. “Practising empathy every day as a business leader, for example, helps you understand what your employees need and what your immediate team actually needs right now. So, putting yourself into their situation, to really understand how they really think and feel, helps you come up with better solutions for your employees.”

If you begin with empathy, clarity and kindness as the core motivators for an idea, you’ll be well on your way to creating a contagious idea that can build its own momentum and really catch on.

This is an edited extract from Killer Thinking by Tim Duggan (Pantera Press), on sale May 3, 2022 and available at Booktopia.