As CEO of WD-40 Company since 1997, Garry Ridge has helped re-ignite excitement and create cultures that foster break-through innovation in companies and workplaces in over 62 countries.
His first-hand experiences in transforming a global brand with a market cap of $2.3 billion, as well as his deep, profound commitment to creating workplace cultures that support the individual passions of all who work there, have attracted the recognition of today’s most influential thought leaders.
In 2016, he was named Igniter of the Year by Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Others to Take Action and Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t. Additionally, Inc.com placed him in the fourth position in its list of Top 10 Global CEOs in 2017. He also collaborated with Ken Blanchard (One Minute Manager series) on the landmark book, Helping People Win at Work.
Garry has also received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Freedom at Work from WorldBlu.
Most recently, he is a contributor in the Marshall Goldsmith/Frances Hesselbein book, Work is Love Made Visible: A Collection of Essays About the Power of Finding Your Purpose From the World’s Greatest Thought Leaders.
While Garry continues to develop his own book projects, other authors write about his work at WD-40 Company. The WD-40 Company is featured in the 2018 book by Whitney Johnson, Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve. Additionally, Fast Company magazine co-founder, William Taylor, also featured Garry’s work in revitalizing innovation at WD-40 Company in his newest book, Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways! Additionally, Anthony Tjan wrote about the WD-40 Company story in Good People: The Only Leadership Decision That Really Matters.
As part of his lifelong commitment to helping others learn and develop, Garry is an Adjunct Professor at The University of San Diego (Talent Management & Succession Planning).
To make contact with Guy Bloom directly: Click Here
To find out more about Guy Bloom and his award winning work in Team Coaching, Leadership Development and Executive Coaching click below.
The link to everything CLICK HERE
UK: 07827 953814
Email: guybloom@livingbrave.com
Web: www.livingbrave.com
As CEO of WD-40 Company since 1997, Garry Ridge has helped re-ignite excitement and create cultures that foster break-through innovation in companies and workplaces in over 62 countries.
His first-hand experiences in transforming a global brand with a market cap of $2.3 billion, as well as his deep, profound commitment to creating workplace cultures that support the individual passions of all who work there, have attracted the recognition of today’s most influential thought leaders.
In 2016, he was named Igniter of the Year by Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Others to Take Action and Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t. Additionally, Inc.com placed him in the fourth position in its list of Top 10 Global CEOs in 2017. He also collaborated with Ken Blanchard (One Minute Manager series) on the landmark book, Helping People Win at Work.
Garry has also received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Freedom at Work from WorldBlu.
Most recently, he is a contributor in the Marshall Goldsmith/Frances Hesselbein book, Work is Love Made Visible: A Collection of Essays About the Power of Finding Your Purpose From the World’s Greatest Thought Leaders.
While Garry continues to develop his own book projects, other authors write about his work at WD-40 Company. The WD-40 Company is featured in the 2018 book by Whitney Johnson, Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve. Additionally, Fast Company magazine co-founder, William Taylor, also featured Garry’s work in revitalizing innovation at WD-40 Company in his newest book, Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways! Additionally, Anthony Tjan wrote about the WD-40 Company story in Good People: The Only Leadership Decision That Really Matters.
As part of his lifelong commitment to helping others learn and develop, Garry is an Adjunct Professor at The University of San Diego (Talent Management & Succession Planning).
To make contact with Guy Bloom directly: Click Here
To find out more about Guy Bloom and his award winning work in Team Coaching, Leadership Development and Executive Coaching click below.
The link to everything CLICK HERE
UK: 07827 953814
Email: guybloom@livingbrave.com
Web: www.livingbrave.com
exactly but yes exactly yeah so i've pressed record so on that note gary it's an absolute genuine uh privilege and uh i'm hugely excited to have you on this episode of leadership bites welcome hey g'day guys it's really good to be here with you this morning thank you or afternoon probably where you are exactly so um you know the the sun is risen at your end and the windows are shut so for the audio podcast i've done a little introduction for for who you are but for the video version uh not so much so it'd be great just to get a sense of gary who you are what you do and then we'll we'll kind of move on from there certainly yeah i'm gary ridge i'm the consciously incompetent probably wrong and roughly right chairman and ceo of wd-40 company that little blue and yellow can with the red top that people probably have in their garage or under their kitchen sink it's the stuff that fixes everything that's what i it's my it's the magic can as i kind of reference to it thank you so much well my little boy will go is it time for the wd-40 dad and i go it may very well be son so that's my head testy so on that note gary um we're going to get in i mean i approached you and you were very gracious to come on uh the podcast which is fabulous and i do want to get into the way that you think and focus and and how you reference the world for leadership but just before that i'm this firm believer in understanding the individual to then make even more sense or value from what it is that they say so that little journey of how you got to be where you are from whatever you know that journey was it'd be great just to get a sense of that and some of the stepping stones sure so over to you sir sure so you know as some people will tell by my accent i'm an aussie i was born in sydney australia um leaving school i went to work for a retailing organization i was a management trainee there i did a a course in what was then called modern retailing which wouldn't be really that modern today and after graduating that program i i was offered a job to go work for a wholesaler that as a as a sales sales rep and so at a young age they offered me a company car and i thought this is a pretty good ride so i took that job that's my criteria yeah and uh having uh that role i got to know some the people at a company called hawker pacific in australia which was actually part of the hawker sibley group a uk-based organization and hawker pacific were the um the australian licensees for wd-40 and for another product called armor all and because of that relationship i got to know the people at wd-40 in the united states i ended up i was general manager in the end of the consumer products division at hawker pacific so i travel over to the states uh regularly and attend sales meetings and whatever so i got to know the people at wd-40 and in 1987 the licensing agreement with dub with hawker was coming to an end and that was at a time when the wd-40 people were getting really serious about growing their business outside of the united states although although the product was outside of the united states at that time 90 of the revenue was in the united states and um there was really no one in the organization that had a passion to um to really be the you know the the global globetrotter if you will anyhow i got a phone call one day from the then uh chief at wd-40 and the conversation kind of went a bit like this hi gary this is a confidential conversation as you know we're gonna we want to open a subsidiary in australia uh would you like to come and and do that for us and i said oh that sounds like a good idea my dad was an engineer and i remember calling him and saying guess what dad i've been offered a job to work for wd-40 and he gave me a great piece of advice he says you can't go wrong with that stuff son so i joined the company and i opened the australian subsidiary with a fax machine under my bed and uh six months later we had we're up and going we employed people and i i basically worked out of australia from 87 to 94 but did a lot of work up in asia and in 94 i was having a conversation with my now boss the chief at wd-40 and i said is there anything else you'd like me to do i can do a bit more work if you like i and he said well funny you should ask do you want to move to the united states and i said to do what he said well you have a passion for international business and we'd like you to come here and head up our global expansion program i said wow that sounds like a reasonable idea so we packed up our toys and we moved to san diego and then three years later he retired and for some reason the board of directors were a public company the board of directors thought it was a wise idea to give this you know one-time traveling salesman from australia this job as ceo so i got to lead the company and uh that's the experience has been wonderful one of the big big moments in my life back then as i went back to school soon after becoming the ceo i went to the university of san diego and i did a masters degree in leadership and that's where i met my dear friend and my co-author ken blanchard the one-minute manager and uh ken has been my mentor and he's uh i was subsequently on his board of his company for 10 years and he's 81 years old now i see him regularly but i there i learned the power of servant leadership and um i was fortunate enough to have a an opportunity to to practice it and so that was the start and uh since then we've grown the company to you know the market cap back then was 300 million we're now at 3.5 billion so with 10x the size of the company uh 65 percent of our business now is outside of the united states and the and we have a an amazing culture we have a 93 employee engagement which is you know at least 60 points better than most companies and probably a lot more than that so um that's why i say i'm consciously incompetent it's not about me i'm i'm not the one it's about all these wonderful people that come to work and have fun at wd-40 every day boom that's um that's quite a quite a lot in there actually so thank you thank you for that sure there's a couple of things that i pick up on in in there you've used that phrase for some reason and i as in for some reason they chose me um and you've spoken about servant leadership and i you know talking about servant leadership is very easy well per se the intellectualization of it's not too tricky but the uh the reality of of applying what it means and living in that way is a is a different element to me so um i don't want you you know this isn't me asking you to uh sing your own praises but i would like to dive into that reality of what or what enables you to operate at the level that you do um let me phrase it like that what is it that gives you your strength and how you stay sharp because i often say that staying still in fast moving water is quite tricky um you know so how do you tip of the spear kind of thing how do you not be doled how do you keep that edge might be the wrong word but that learning ahead of the change that's going on around you so be lovely to hear a little bit about that yeah thanks guy there's a few things around that that i'd love to share number one is um many many years ago i i've learned the three most powerful words in my life and those three most powerful words i don't know and i got really comfortable with those three words and um and the other thing that i i i really believe in and i was traveling at early in my career when i got here before i become ceo i was flying from los angeles to to sydney in fact and uh i was reading some of the work of the dalai lama and i'm not a necessarily a religious person i'm probably a little spiritual but the dalai lama said our purpose in life is to make people happy if we can't make them happy at least don't hurt them and why that stuck with me is i saw so many people being hurt by going to work because they were being led in a toxic environment where they didn't feel valued and that linked up very much later on with me when i was studying servant leadership you know i saw too many people have their empathy being eaten by their ego instead of their ego being eaten by their empathy and then i also read another book and actually ken blanchard recommended it to me and it was by robert fulgram and it's everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten and and it gives you some very simple you know things say please and thank you pick up after yourself if you go out at night go with a friend clean up your mess sort of the stuff i learned from mrs mrs bennett my kindergarten teacher and things that my mother and father always said you needed to to respect and i thought well if we treat people right if there's a clear purpose if there's a clear set of values in the organization if your balance being tough-minded and tender-hearted if you care about people if you're candid with people if you hold each other accountable and you and you take on the pledge of responsibility certain great things should happen and over the years we've proven that purpose-driven passionate people guided by values create amazing outcomes because that's what's happened at wd-40 company the other thing that i i think is really sad is is how we embed fear in organizations because of the fear of failure so i took the word failure out of the vocabulary and i said we don't make mistakes we have learning moments and what's a learning moment a learning moment is a positive or negative outcome of any situation that needs to be openly and freely shared to benefit all people and it also then creates an environment where learning is really treasured so we're a learning organization i love the way we get curious um and we do that every day so you know i often say imagine a place where you go to work every day you make a contribution to something bigger than yourself you learn something new you feel safe and are set free by a compelling set of values and you go home happy happy people create happy families happy families create happy communities happy communities create a happy world and by goodness we need a happy world so i think our role as leaders is to create people a place where people leave with a smile because a lot of them come to work with a smile but most people don't leave with a smile so our job is to help people leave with a smile i already have the sense that i could spend the next two or three days with you so i'm going to try and make my questions a little bit more pointed but one of the things i talk about is instead of corporate social responsibility could we just say social responsibility because there's a belief with me that if there's 100 people in this team and we go home and you know five people you know that's excellent and you can do the domino effect which is by us taking responsibility as you say for people going home happy then that has an impact on the community and if we all did it better world so i i really buy into that i i think that's that's incredibly powerful i think what i'm interested in hearing you talk is um i've noticed that sometimes good people end up doing things that they on reflection or in a quiet moment they know they're pushing too hard or taking people to a place maybe where it's hard work for them because they have these commercial pressures they do believe in team they do believe in the things that we've said but because they fear failure and particularly maybe when the market means it's harder for them to go and get another job somewhere else they start to become quite submissive to power because they fear falling into the bad books and maybe being let go et cetera and i just i just wonder how you manage um because i can hear the conv what you've said but how do you actually manage the managers maybe that are driving too hard and where does that where's that balance between highly motivated and completely driven and it's it's gone into the red or it's gone into the amber and i wonder how you pick up on that or know that um because it's almost good people doing good things but it's an overdone strength it's gone too far so lovely to hear your thoughts on that yeah sure um you know i think that in our organization it's really driven by our second value and our second value in the company is we value creating positive lasting memories in all of our relationships so you know if i see someone or there's someone in the organization that is acting in a way where they're not creating those positive lasting memories there's a great way to have a conversation around that now let me give you an example of how that happened in a real life example so we're in a meeting and uh there's someone in the meeting it's early in the morning and they're not creating positive lasting memories they're you know spitting out toxic if you will you know and you can see this toxic cloud kind of sucking the energy out of the room and you know people are uncomfortable and whatever well this happened one day and at the end of the meeting i went to the person i said hey guy let's go for a walk so guy and i went out to the parking lot and we're walking around and i'm looking in a trash can and looking behind a tree and guy says what are you doing gary i said guy i'm looking for you the guy i know and love was not in that room today what's on your mind what's happened to you today and we had a conversation and he'd had a bad morning you know he got up late spilled his coffee he's your toe on the table someone cut him off on the way to work and and that allowed us to have that conversation around the fact well you didn't create any positive lasting memories in that room today you actually spat out toxic you know fumes if you will the the meeting went south very quickly you know if that happens to you again don't come to work go to the beach get it out of your system because your responsibility as a leader is not to come and pollute the environment it's your responsibilities to come and enhance the environment and he said yeah you know thank you for the feedback you know we hugged that was pr before covid and um he went inside and he actually went to the people that were in the meeting and he said hey sorry you know guy wasn't guy this morning this is what happened and they said well thank you interestingly enough guy the next day what did i observe people going to that person and just checking in on him to see how they how they work so how do you know again it's it's it's showing tough love but with empathy um because you know people who push people too hard you won't get the best out of it it's a bit like what i call hull speed i know i if you're sailing a boat and you've got the the the boat trimmed as best you can and the winds in the sail and you're going at maximum speed if you put more wind in that sail the boat won't go any faster it'll just blow out the sail so you know what we want to look for is hull speed that's interesting it's almost yes in the martial arts i teach martial arts so if it takes hypothetically x pounds per pressure to break something then what does moore do so i i definitely hear that and that that resonates with me so i'm going to ask you a question that is from a place of gen i mean i buy into this i've got you know i really connect with this and i have a curiosity around the environments that i sometimes observe and i have no other word for it and you may have a more grown up word for it which is what i call the happy clappy club and the happy clappy club is when you have to show that you're on the bus and you have to show that you're fundamentally positive and everything's a challenge rather than a problem and the intellectualization of that is coming from a good place but somehow it's distorted into not being able to be anything other than genuine if that makes sense and it's now morphed into something quite negative and i i wonder it's almost like in the in the uk we sometimes say you know the queen must think the world smells of paint because somebody's three meters in front of a painting things for so is there a safeguard or how do you measure that you know the king being told what he wants to hear and you knowing if that's real and and going all the way down i mean 93 employer engagement would be a key indicator but what measures do you have and how do you keep tabs on that sure i think there's a couple of questions to unpack the the first one how do we measure this back in 1999 or 2000 we started doing employee opinion surveys and the reason i started is i i wanted to feel the pulse of the organization and back then our employee engagement number was probably in the 50s so we saw opportunity and we've done them regularly ever since and you know our last one was this march we now do it in seven languages 96 percent of our people globally participate freely yeah freely um it's all it's it's totally anonymous and the reason they participate is they know we do something with the results we actually share the results back with the people and say this is what you told us so help us fix whatever we need to fix now in that survey not only do we have 93 employee engagement let me give you two or three other numbers that are really really important 98 of our people globally say i love to tell people i work at wd-40 company and 97 of the people say i respect my coach now their coach is their boss because we don't have managers in the organization if i you have a coach so the people who report to me i am their coach and why do we call ourselves a coach because our motto is we're not here to mark your paper we're here to help you get an a so our job as a coach is to help people succeed so if the happy cappy clappy club is a false place then it's going to be false but if if being satisfied in an organization because you go to work you've got a true purpose or a just cause our just cause is to make life better at work and at home that's our just cause and if you achieving something that you're proud of and you're being treated with respect and dignity you'll be happy most of the time you won't be happy all the time you know we we have times when things are not going the way we want to do but that doesn't stop us from treating people with respect and dignity now if someone's not happy at wd-40 company they should go somewhere else and get happy because in life you need to be happy and you know we're a great place but we're not for everybody so i've had i've had conversations with people around the fact look i can see that you're not getting what you want out of this you're not happy please be happy go somewhere else and be happy how can we help you be happy somewhere else so again you know but culture equals values plus behavior times consistency so in an organization to build a great culture you've got to have a clear set of values behavior means you as a leader have to love your people enough and care about them enough to not only praise them and recognize when they're doing good but to redirect behavior that isn't good and you have to do it consistently day after day after day after day and that's the formula we've used to create this wonderful culture that we have that's really really powerful um for you gary how do you how do you stay sharp how do you stay alert because often when i work with senior teams i'll often say what's your relationship with learning oh yeah we love learning i'll go great what have you done that's not you've not been told to do by your company for your own development and normally there's a lot of quietness at that point where somebody might possibly listen to a podcast well as long as it's mine that's fantastic but well my most the most learning i get is out of teaching and i'm a professor at the university of san diego i teach a class there on putting culture into practice i teach at university of pennsylvania in their leadership doctoral program um i teach at this san diego state university or i'm a guest lecturer there so i've been teaching at usd for 10 years and then i'm involved with some really really um creative and and very smart people uh marshall goldsmith is a dear friend of mine and he has a group called the marshall goldsmith 100. you know there i get to mix with people like chester elton who wrote the the leading with gratitude whitney johnson you know the list goes on ala mulally who was the ceo of ford and we you know we have up we have opportunities together there simon sinek's a friend of mine uh who he wrote the infinite game in fact he was i just taught my class this last weekend uh virtually uh and i had uh uh simon sinek come in on friday i had marshall goldsmith come in on saturday and chestnut hilton come come in on sunday as guest speakers so they were great so um and then just being curious you know i when i was growing up at home in australia there was a guy that was on the tv um he i remember coming home from school and watching him his name was professor julia sundermiller and um he used to do this these scientific experiments on tv a learning show and you do you do crazy things like sucking a hard-boiled egg into a milk bottle or something like that but he always he always finished everything with this i'll never forget it and why is it so and i've never forgotten that statement of always saying why is it so or i ask myself a lot why do i believe this rule you know there's a great book written by spencer johnson called who moved my cheese you might remember that there was a follow-on that was written by his kids just after he passed away called out of the maze and it was talking about how him and eventually found their way out of this maze and the last piece of the books about why do we believe what we believe and i think that curiosity is really important so um you know i'm always asking myself why do i believe that not that i'm you know doubting thomas but it's well why is that like that and i'm just curious is it still true is um is another nice one that i quite like which is always thought it to be true but is it still true um yeah that fixed mind he's quite he's quite you're careful with that i guess and renee brown who um has written a number of great books she she has a thing where she talks about in the absence of facts and knowledge we make up stories and you know often you know we ask ourselves what story are we telling ourselves right now and and that's that's really a pretty dangerous thing because we'll make up a story because we don't have all the information and then that story becomes our truth and it's far from the truth yeah i've very often talked to leaders about the idea of you know you are it's not so much that you're fireside storytellers but you are if there are things in the business that we would agree that culture is very often what people are talking about then that role is to offer new truths as long as they're genuine and they exist and if they're not around then we have to make them so if we can't put something in that space um then we need to go and create it so we can and and that so in that you know i like that in the absence of facts and knowledge and the if we haven't got anything to offer then we need to go and create something that will fulfill that right right yeah you know it's sad and again i i think so many leaders you know i i for those who are watching here's someone i'll introduce you to this is al al is the sole sucking ceo was a sorry held up a um i don't know i'd say a six inch um mannequin with a with a uh a type a written on his chest and i think he is he is he sucking the is that is that the heart oh that's just his mouth open i see right now because he never knows when to shut up yeah i get it yeah what is that how's the sir what does that represent yeah well al's the soul sucking ceo and or the soul sucking leader and he has some attributes that are that are really not that really don't build leadership he always must be right he's corporate royalty he never listens to anybody else he never he doesn't keep his word you know he he hates feedback all of the things that you know that he's he's fought his way to the top of this organization he probably has the biggest office in the building he has his own personal car space maybe even a toilet in his office uh you know and and people are expected to bow down to al well al is not there to to be served he is there to serve so the servant leader is there to serve the people how may we serve you to help you get an a because our job as a leader is to help people get a's that's why we call ourselves coaches and what what you know what where is a great coach you know you've never seen the the coach of the of the all blacks or the the wallabies or whoever uh on the football field where are they they're on the sideline and in the locker room they're watching the game and you're critiquing the play through the players and never ever do you see them on the great coaches on the podium picking up the cup you see the team there yeah picking up the cup but that's not how he you know when things go wrong it's someone else's fault when things go right al takes all the the glory so he's the sole sucking leader um and there's plenty of owls out there i like this um it makes me think of this phrase which is not to be in service which some people when they hear servant leadership they go like a servant but to be of service yeah and that's the phrase that works for when i say it's not about being in service it's not about submission it's not about being beneath it's about being equal to and allowing people to be equal to you and being right let's do yeah so gary in your journey to in this organization are there any key moments that you look back on and go look i'm sure i'd have got here one way or the other but those are some of those moments when i spoke to that person or i read that particular book or whatever it was that you go i can really attribute some of my aha moments to maybe some conversation or a moment in time and i wonder if you could share one or two of those that would add value to that that journey yeah i mean there's many people i'm you know i i have a i'm so grateful to to those that have given their time to help me understand how i could be a better me you know am i being the me i want to be right now is a great question to ask ourselves but you know i've had ken blanchard who's been my mentor um you know one moment that i really loved um when i first got to the united states i was sitting in a meeting and there was someone from outside the company presenting something to us and and and i'm sitting there and i have no idea what this person's talking about they're camouflaging this issue with confusion to make out how smart they are and you know this person was really on the podium wanting to show how clever they were by by really showing how stupid we probably were so about 15 minutes into the this thing i i put up my hand and i say excuse me not long in this country i'm an aussie i have no clue what you're talking about and guess what happened everyone in the room went because none of us knew what he was talking about and it was really you know a moment about you know be brave enough to be able to admit that you don't know um and that was a great example that's where those three words came i don't know or my saying as i often say i'm consciously incompetent and probably wrong and roughly right in most circumstances so perfection perfection is not it's not you know it's not my game i also noticed there's something about being willing to put yourself in harm's way for the want of a better phrase which is if it's about popularity um when you're of a rank or a level you might say well i don't need to care about that anymore which would be wrong but somebody might take that position but on the way up for a lot of people there's it's what i almost i call it this just to strike a point which is the cocker spaniel years which is you know your boss throws the stick you go and get it return it as quickly as you can and wait for the next stick to be thrown and to to not be like that and to put your hand up and go that doesn't sound right or i'm sorry i don't understand i'm interested in where that part of you comes from because a lot of people might be sitting there going i don't know what this person is talking about but they're willing to put yourself in harm's way and maybe reap repercussions for why did you interrupt or you know whatever um what where does that come from inside of you do you know um you know my mom always said that you know it's it's okay to ask um you know she she even said gary even the even the queen goes to the bathroom so it's okay to ask um but you know i i think it's just i i had nothing to lose i mean i i i'm i'm not much of a kiss up um you know i i am what i am what you see is what you get and uh um you know i i try to to live to my my meaning and my meaning in life is results of what i am doing matters to me and helps others you know why am i on your show today in your podcast because i believe it matters to get the message out about leadership and maybe someone listening to this will pick up a couple of pointers from all of my scar tissue and learning that i've had over time and you know touch someone's life in a positive way you know i got it's really cool when you get little notes and letters but uh about a month or two ago i i got a letter and it started off with you won't remember me however which is which is a great letter and it was a guy that had heard me speak at a conference uh well over a year ago because we flew there and i was talking about you know happiness at work and if you're not at a place where you go home happy you should be brave enough to do something about that and he listened and he wrote me the letter he said i heard what you said i couldn't get it out of my mind i actually left my job i found a new place and i'm so happy it probably saved my life and my marriage thank you for sharing that and to me it was like wow does life get any better than that where you could and he said funnily enough he was driving home from the hardware store the other day he'd been and picked up a can of wd-40 to to um work on his cycle that bicycle because now with covert he was going to ride again right and he was repairing he said to his daughter in the car do you know what we've just bought and and she said oh some sort of oil stuff i guess dad anyhow later on he was um fixing the bike and his daughter was there helping him and he sprayed the wd-40 he said can you smell that and she said yeah she said he said you'll remember this moment for for life because we're doing something together and that also touched me too because our why statement for our company is we exist to create positive lasting memories solving problems in factories homes and workshops around the world and i can remember when i was a young boy or a young man i had a mini 850 with an east-west motor the the um the distributor was in the front so every time you went through water the car would break down and i can still remember my dad telling me to use wd-40 i can remember the moment so we create these memories with people um because of of our of what we do so we're if someone asks us what business we're in we're in the memories business that's the business we're in so it really plays into who we are as a culture of we create positive lasting memories i love that and that's i think that's something which the product may be relatively benign in the sense of what it is but actually if you attach the memory or the story that goes around the product then it becomes something quite powerful as long as that's genuine and not just a machiavellian approach to uh marketing well and at the end of the day we sell oil in the can right yeah no we don't we sell memories yeah we we create positive moments of memories we help people at work we help them at home and that goes back to our our just cause to make life better at work and at home so i'm just alert to time and as i said i could keep you for a considerable length of it so the one question i probably want to make my last one is um when i started these podcasts and covid was coming in i thought i won't talk about kobe very much because it won't be here for very long you know we're here and then bob's your uncle uh here we are so i just wondered if uh i can understand that the inherent truths of everything you've spoken about still still exists because it's inherently true um but i just wonder about managing people um who maybe are at home and their personal stresses i just wonder if it's has anything changed has it has it meant you've had to calibrate any of that thinking or is it just become extra important or i just wonder what this has done for your lens well firstly i am so grateful for the culture we have at the company because we've been drawing down on what i call cultural equity right through the last nearly year right you know we've been we've all been virtual since march uh we're all working from our homes wherever we are in you know 17 or 18 countries around the world the sun never sets on wd-40 someone's awake somewhere with it in around the world but you know what's become clear to us is even we will never be a virtual company but we will be a better company because now we're better at being virtual and what it's meant for us is we've had to turn up the volume on communication i send out an inspirational message to every tribe member we call ourselves a tribe not a team every tribe member every morning um at around 4 30 in the morning san diego time we're consistently having you know virtual events to stay connected i wonderful story from our french team you know we have i know 30 or 40 people in france and you know the french love their food they haven't been together so they're they had their end of year meeting just last week we sent out ingredients to make a dish to every french tri member they all got on virtual in their kitchens and started cooking their dishes together and then at the end of it they judged who had the best presentation of that so you know there's a wonderful way of of doing that you know we we had a a um our company's 67th birthday which was in september we got a comedian uh from he was actually from the uk and he was no he was a magician from the uk and he did a virtual magic show for us from around the world so here we all were at our homes it was breakfast time in sydney it was uh earlier morning in china it was sort of lunchtime in san diego it was afternoon in new york and it was into the evening in the uk and and france and spain and germany and italy and and you know they were drinking wine over there and having breakfast in in the southern hemisphere and here we all are together and we had you know the the brady bunch screen was full of all of our people talking to each other across being virtual so it's we we've it's taught us a lot and but it's really it's really been something that's that's made it so special that we we want to be together again so yeah and i said that also video messages i recorded two this morning one for our office in kuala lumpur and one for our office in uh in italy so we're always trying to stay in touch wow well listen gary i'm gonna bring us to a close uh not because i i want to but because i think i'm just i run the risk of just going on and on and on but just on a personal note um i've been uh in this space for you know i'm 50 so a good 20 odd years learning my craft and trade and you know just hearing i hear people talk sometimes and i know it's the right thing to say and i know it's an intellectualization for them etc but i also sometimes know their business and no it's not like that so to um what you've said first of all makes sense but i think one of the genuine impacts that i'm experiencing is the fact that um you believe it and you have the proof in the pudding which i think also makes it much more uh powerful in in what you say so just from me and i'm sure from the other listeners and observers of the video thank you so much for giving me this time it's been hugely appreciated you're very welcome guy and you're not 50 you're celebrating the 29th anniversary of your 21st birthday boom i see what you did there[Laughter] so i'm going to press stop and it's and then we'll talk for a few seconds afterwards but thank you so much gary you're welcome