Episode notes
Amanda Fornal was on a panel at SXSW when someone asked her a simple question: what gets you up in the morning? "To do good," she said, and then she said the rest of it out loud. A few days earlier she had heard a venture capitalist argue that the smart money goes to sociopathic founders, not kind ones. It did not sit right with her logically or emotionally. So on that stage she said, "I'm kind, and I'm proud of it. If you don't want to invest in kindness, that's on you."
A few days later she had a name for her next project. She built the website, started interviewing, and talked with more than 100 leaders, founders, and investors across more than 35 countries about one question: does kindness actually work in business?
Here is what I appreciated about this conversation. Amanda is not asking us to be nice. She went and checked. She read the academic research before she trusted her own instincts, and she is direct about the fact that a business has a bottom line and kindness has to hold up against it. What she found is that it does, through loyalty and innovation and the kind of psychological safety that lets a team say the half-formed idea out loud.
We also got honest about something I do not always admit on this show. I told her that kindness does not sell. Companies hire me for resilience and burnout and mindset, almost never for the word itself. Her answer to that is worth the listen on its own.
Connect with Amanda and dig into the research
- Investing in Kindness: investinginkindnessproject.com
- Be interviewed for the project. Amanda is still taking interviews and invited you directly: forms.gle/o4gMVQWdFLfmugXY8
- Take the survey: forms.gle/Tt3THNeyTUu9Qd968
- Hypatia Leadership (her executive coaching work): hypatialeadership.com
- Elephari (the story preservation platform): elephari.com
- Women in Exploration: womeninexploration.org
- Founder Buddies: founderbuddies.com
- Love Is, the documentary: loveisthedocumentary.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amandadfornal
- Instagram: @TheOrangeExplorer
- Kindness Pays: The Business Case for Prosocial Leadership: https://www.investinginkindnessproject.com/blog/kindness-pays-the-business-case-for-pro-social-leadership
- Kindness and Retention: What the Research Says About Why Employees Stay: https://www.investinginkindnessproject.com/blog/kindness-and-retention