CEO As ‘Lead Learner’

A Profile of Garry Ridge, Chair & CEO, WD-40 Company

(Extracted from The Power Of Us: How We Connect, Act, And Innovate Together)

(Illustration by John Biggs www.johnbiggs.art)

You can learn a great deal from a leader by how they communicate with you. Garry Ridge has an email signature that immediately puts you at ease: “I may be working in a different time zone to you, and I am sending this message now because I am working. I don’t expect that you will respond to, or action it outside of your preferred working times.”

And below that comes his favourite quote, usually attributed to Michaelangelo: “Ancora Imparo” — loosely translated as: “Yet, I am learning”. Then there was the personal welcome when I arrived at the WD-40 Company global headquarters in San Diego: “G’day David. Welcome to WD-40 Company. I’ve set aside as much time as you need”

No fancy office, no personal assistant, just Garry. As you can probably tell from his greeting, Garry isn’t a native Californian. He’s Australian, and the first thing he wanted to share, as he showed me around, was the tepee and the other visible nods to indigenous cultures. WD-40 Company doesn’t have employees, it has ‘a tribe’. The tour also taught me the origin of the products we all use ‘to eliminate squeaks, smells and dirt’. The history is a perfect fit for Garry’s passion for learning.

WD-40 Company was originally called the Rocket Chemical Company (RCC). Controversy surrounds the identity of the inventor — it could even possibly be the result of mistaken identity between two Norms. One proposal is that a San Diegan chemist, Norm Lawson, created the lubricant and sold it to RCC for $500. WD-40 Company’s own website claims that it was another chemist- Norm Larsen — who invented it. Either way, Lawson, or Larsen, was trying to concoct a lubricant that would prevent water, and therefore rust, from getting into one of the early fledgling rockets. The Atlas rocket wasn’t a huge success, exploding a number of times before being retired from service. And the need for a ‘water displacement’ (WD) lubricant had a similarly unfortunate run of luck. There were 39 unsuccessful attempts to create the right formula, before success was achieved on the 40th attempt. Hence, WD-40. It was only when employees started taking the lubricant home to fix a variety of household problems that Jack Barry, the then CEO, put it in a can, and subsequently renamed the company after its sole product.

And for the first forty years of its life, that was pretty much it: one company, one (highly successful) product. And its very success, in becoming an iconic American brand, became the problem. Garry worked for the company for ten years before becoming its CEO. At that point, 90% of its sales came from the US, and 100% of its profits went in shareholder dividends — there was basically nothing else for them to spend their money on. Now, over 60% of WD-40 Company’s revenues come from countries outside the US; compounded annual growth in shareholder return over the past five years has been 23%. As for those 39 previous attempts failures, they were, as Garry loves to describe them, ‘learning moments’.

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At this juncture, I should introduce Al, not least since he’d been sitting on the sofa during our entire interview. He must have been feeling distinctly uncomfortable at this point, but since he’s a two-foot high doll, it wasn’t obvious. Al sits there to remind Garry of everything he opposes: the soul-sucking CEO that puts himself before everything, and everyone, else:

“Al knows everything. He worked so hard to get to the role of CEO — who’s going to know more than Al? So, what does that do? It shuts down all of the creative thinking, all of the innovation. People just go numb. Employee engagement goes down. Al’s number one attribute is that his ego eats his empathy, instead of his empathy eating his ego.”

I shared with Garry the Surgeon-to-Architect taxonomy of leadership from the Harvard Business Review (if you aren’t aware of the study, read my previous post) - it seemed so obvious that Al is the surgeon, while Garry is the architect.

“We had to build the trust first. Consistency of leadership is so important — tone at the top is so important. You don’t have to like this company — that’s OK. But if you’re not happy please go somewhere where you can be happy. Because our most important objective is that you’re happy.”

Coming from other CEOs, (say, Al) this might sound like a slightly sinister exercise in faux-sincerity, but the quest for authenticity is foundational to Garry’s leadership style — alongside the primacy of building a culture of learning:

“A couple of things became clear to me. One, I was consciously incompetent, and two, I learned the three most important words I’ve ever learned: ‘I don’t know’. And I got very comfortable with those words. I looked for a way that I could confirm what I thought I knew, and learn what I didn’t know. So, I went back to school. I went to the University of San Diego, doing a Masters degree in Leadership, and that was an amazing experience — it gave me the balls to go and do what my gut told me to do.” Garry now teaches at the University and has encouraged 30 other employees to complete their Masters, fully paid for.

“Everyone has to be a teacher and a learner”

The centrality of learning — to the organisation and to Garry personally — can’t be overstated. He told me that Parnassus, one of the major shareholders in WD-40, had held a 10% investment in the company for over fifteen years, purely on the basis of the culture of learning there. It’s also a key attraction to younger employees:

“What do millenials want? They want a place where they can be better today than they were yesterday, through learning. They’re so inquisitive. A lot of people think it’s about free food, and shuffleboard in the canteen. No, they love to learn.”

The main vehicle for learning is the Learning Laboratory, in which everyone has a right to enrol. There are three distinct areas:

• The competency lab — essential skills (trust building, effective presentations, project leadership, etc);
• The leadership lab — learning by doing (talent acquisition, leadership psychology, organisational theory);
• The faculty lab — skills development for teachers (presentational skills, adult learning, facilitating learning)

Garry underlines what we all should know: you can’t make anyone learn anything. But a leader’s job is to create a culture that makes learning irresistible: “I want people to be inquisitive, I want people to ask questions and take chances. My job is to create a company of learners. I like to ask my people and myself, ‘When’s the last time you did something for the first time?’”

All good. But I was curious to know how this hotbed of learning fed into a company that, until recently, had but a single product line. Does innovation need to be a priority? Garry, very politely, corrected me:

“You might just see a blue and yellow can, but during the last five years we’ve launched a whole range of new products, we’ve innovated with our delivery systems, formula innovation. We invest $11m a year in our innovation development group. A number of years ago, when we weren’t innovative, and we only had one product, I formed a group called Team Tomorrow, who could ONLY focus on revenues in the future. And they broke our model because we hadn’t done anything new in 40 years.”

“Innovation isn’t just bringing out something new”

With a brand so ubiquitous, almost cult-like, as that blue and yellow can, it’s easy to overlook the fact that some parts of the world are so-far impervious to its two-thousand documented uses: “Innovation isn’t just bringing out something new, it’s about making what you have of better value to the end user. We’re going to add $200m of revenue to that can in the next seven years, because, today, people in China are meeting that can for the first time”.

Or the ingenious way they’ve made squirting lubricant onto a squeaky door into a cultural experience:

“People will use WD-40 for the most oblique things, because we’re an honest product and we rarely let the user down. They take chewing-gum out of the carpet; we get people telling us they use it for arthritis — don’t do that! We say we’re in the memories business. People think of WD-40 and say ‘I remember when…I remember the smell of it with my Dad under the car’….The second of our company values is to create positive lasting memories. When our innovation group is working on new delivery systems we can say “Help me understand what positive lasting memories that will create.”

And you thought it was just a can under the sink?

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As he escorted me out, I had one outstanding question: How much of WD-40 Company’s success is due to his presence?

“I hope less and less each day. I planted the seed, the tree’s grown and a lot of people are sitting under it. When I leave I’m convinced that, though that person won’t be me, the culture will be so strong, and my successor will have been here a long time, they’ll know that it’s all about the people. If the champagne truck happened to hit me tomorrow, we’ll be OK.”

Garry is a visionary example of a Lead Learner who kickstarted innovation in a 60-year old business that couldn’t help but make money, with little incentive to change. He represents the leadership needed for our time — and not just in the business world. The ego-driven dynamic leaders — embodied in his couchsurfing doll, Al — may still be with us, but their days are increasingly numbered.