When's the Last Time You Did Something for the First Time?

One of the sobering lessons of the transformations in business, leadership, and society in the last few decades is that the people and organizations with the most experience, knowledge, and resources in a particular field are often the last ones to see and seize opportunities for something dramatically new. It’s whatinnovation strategist Cynthia Barton Rabe has called the “paradox of expertise”—the more closely you’ve looked at a field, the more successful you’ve been in a company or a profession, the harder it can be to see new patterns, prospects, and possibilities.

In other words, all too often, without ever intending it, companies let what they know limit what they can imagine. Which is why the most effective leaders understand that one of their main responsibilities is to keep learning as fast as the world is changing. As interesting as they may be, the best leaders are determined to stay interested—in big ideas, in little surprises, in the enduring mission of the enterprise and all the new ways to bring that mission to life.

In the research for my book, Simply Brilliant, I spent time with lots of leaders with big ideas about the future. But none of them was as determined as Garry Ridge, CEO of the WD-40 Company, to keep learning as fast as the world is changing. Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve met a CEO who has made learning more central to the corporate culture than Ridge has, or has found more ways to develop a thirst for learning among his colleagues.

WD-40 is hardly a glamorous brand, but it is iconic in its own way. Almost anybody who works on cars, or does home repairs, or just wants to get rid of a squeak or some rust, has one of those bright blue-and-yellow cans in their garage or under their sink. In fact, when Gary Ridge took over, WD-40’s flagship offering was used in four of five American households and in virtually every mine, factory, and construction site in the country.

The new CEO quickly realized the product’s ubiquity was both a blessing and a curse. It was truly part of the fabric of American life, almost a cult brand. Yet the company was also a one-trick pony. It basically had the single product, which it sold mainly in its home country. As a publicly traded stock, it paid out almost 100 percent of its profits as dividends—because it didn’t know what else to do with the money. “WD-40 is a cult product,” an article in Barron’s proclaimed, but “it is hardly a cult stock.” The “very nature of WD-40’s past success doomed it to ultimate failure.”

Fast forward to today: WD-40 now sells its products in 176 countries, sales in Europe alone are bigger than the company’s total sales when Ridge took over, and it has launched a collection of new brands and products. The share price has nearly tripled since 2009, and it has become, for the first time ever, a billion-dollar enterprise in terms of market value. (Recently, WD-40 shares were approaching $120 apiece and its market value was nearing $1.7 billion, unheard-of territory for the company.)

There’s no question that Garry Ridge has made WD-40 Company more interesting than when he took over. But he did it by demanding that he and his colleagues became more interested in what was possible for the organization, its products, and the brand. Ridge overhauled the culture, redefined the work of its leaders, even embraced a whole new language, to put a premium on learning, experimenting, improvising—transforming a stale, insular business into something agile and open-minded.

“We had such huge growth opportunities,” he told me, “but people were afraid to step out of their roles. The fear of failure is the biggest fear in the world. We had to go from failure to freedom.”

That’s why the central ritual of life at the company is what Ridge calls the “learning moment”—a period of frustration, a burst of inspiration, a breakthrough of collaboration in which people stumble upon a problem, unearth an opportunity, or fail miserably at an initiative, and then communicate what they’ve learned without fear of reprisal. “Learning moments can be positive or negative, but they are never bad, so long as they are shared for the benefit of all,” he says. “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?”

Ridge is so serious about this commitment to learning that he insists everyone at the company takes the WD-40 Maniac Pledge, a solemn vow to become, in his words, a “learning maniac.” The pledge is a formal statement of the mindset that transforms leaders into learners—and that Ridge believes will allow him to keep transforming WD-40. To underscore his personal commitment to the Pledge, any time he replies to an email, he affixes an electronic signature with the message “Ancora Imparo,” Italian for “I am still learning.” The phrase was a favorite of Michelangelo, according to the CEO, and the artist signed it into many of his works.

“One of my huge learning moments in life,” Ridge says, “was getting comfortable with those three magic words, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s great to hear people across the company, anywhere in the world, say, ‘I just had a learning moment’ and share it with other people. Or to hear one of our people say ‘Maniac Pledge’—knowing they have permission to ask about something they need to know or learn. My dream is for this organization to be viewed as a leadership-and-learning laboratory for business.”

In the spirit of learning, I’ll ask you to consider what Garry Ridge asks his colleagues: When’s the last time you did something for the first time?