It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh.

What if kindness were a scalable, collectively known asset?

James Rees says it already exists as a thing called Goodwill.

In his 2021 talk from TED at BCG, the Goodwill Strategist makes a case for kindness and its role in reshaping business.

So today, I'm going to talk about the word goodwill.

Goodwill, did you know, is a technical accounting term.

It's an asset that's literally only created

when a buyer shows up and pays a purchase price for a company that's more than the fair value

of that company's net assets. So this unexplained differential is named Goodwill. And with it, accountants actually can make balance sheets balance.

Now, of course, this isn't how most of us think of goodwill.

We experience the more human definition of goodwill.

And I remember very clearly when that definition first entered my life.

It was 1976, and I was five years old,

and I was sitting there one morning in kindergarten class when in-walk the father and older siblings are one of my friends. And they handed me a present. They gave me a little toy red helicopter.

And in the moment, I didn't really understand why they were giving it to me.

I just remember sensing that they were happy and sad at the same time.

And it wasn't only until much later that I had my aha moment,

that my friend had lost his mom recently,

and that this gift, it was a thank you because I would often share my lunch with my friend on the many days that he would come to school

without any lunch of his own. In an over time, as things happened, I lost the toy, but I never

forgot the lesson, especially how it made me feel.

My friend's father had rewarded kindness without cheapening it, and he made it tangible with an object,

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