It Was Never About the Oil
Garry Ridge spent 25 years as CEO of WD-40 Company. (Yes, that WD-40 — the blue-and-yellow can in your garage.)
When he got the job in 1997, it was an insular American company worth about $300 million, and Ridge was the long-shot pick: a bloke from Australia who'd never worked in the US market and had never been to Wall Street.
The bet paid off.
During his run as CEO, the company:
Grew revenue 7x
Expanded into 176 countries
Grew its valuation to $3.6 billion
Sustained 93% employee engagement for a decade
And went 25 years without any layoffs (including through COVID)
A pretty incredible resume, right?
How did he do it?
The easy explanation is that he had an incredible strategy. But that’s not what Garry would say…
He says his strategy was “probably wrong and roughly right.”
The real difference-maker was that they had, “an organization that had a high will-of-the-people.”
In other words, Garry put more focus on getting all of his employees to show up every day and passionately execute against an average strategic plan than he spent on developing the perfect strategic plan.
In today’s episode, Garry lays out why CEOs who don’t have their Heads of People sitting at the executive table are “losers” (in the literal sense of the word).
👀 Here's what you get in today's edition of the Culture Creators:
The math equation that turns HR leaders into the most valuable strategic advisor in the room
Why WD-40 deleted the word "failure" from its vocabulary (and what showed up in its place)
Why a public company CEO threw out annual reviews, and the 15-minute conversation that replaced them
Check out the episode wherever you get podcasts.
And don’t forget to check out Garry’s new book, “Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It: Learning Moments from an Everyday CEO of a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company”
— Nate Bagley, Producer of Culture Creators
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Most leaders invest countless hours and dollars developing their strategy.
But Garry understood something crucial…
It doesn’t matter how good your strategic plan is if only a small percentage of your workforce is showing up every day and enthusiastically executing on that plan.
CEOs pay for 100% of their headcount.
But they rarely consider how they can get every single person to show up every day and…
Make the right decisions
Work on what’s most important
Put in a genuine effort every day
Care about the success and growth of their peers
Passionately execute on the mission of the company
Garry understood that business success was an equation:
“The Will of the People x Strategy = Success.”
He realized he could get a way better multiplier to his bottom line if he spent less time, energy, and money developing the perfect strategic plan…
… and more time motivating, inspiring, and developing his employees so they showed up every day excited to do their part to help the company win.
The rest of this newsletter lays out how he did it.
1. Turn engagement into strategy yield
Garry’s math is simple. Pretend you have 2 companies:
Company A
They have a great strategy…
… but only 30% of the people show up every day and passionately execute on the strategy with energy, ownership, and urgency.
Company B
They have a mediocre strategy…
… but 80% of the people show up every day and passionately execute on the strategy with energy, ownership, and urgency.
Company B wins every time.
(By the way, 30% engagement is a real stat from Gallup research.)
So, if you’re an HR leader, stop saying, “We need to improve engagement.”
Instead, try, “We have a great strategy. But we’re only seeing a portion of its execution value because many employees are likely not giving 100% effort. I want to help close that gap.”
This positions you differently.
You’re shifting from reporting on sentiment to business performance.
It also gives the CEO a more useful way to think about people data. Engagement is not just a morale score. It is an indicator of how much discretionary energy is available to execute the business plan.
CEO translation: Culture determines how much of the strategy actually gets executed by the rest of the organization.
HR move: Bring engagement, manager effectiveness, recognition, and listening data into the same conversation as strategic priorities.
2. Treat values as decision infrastructure
Values are powerful… but only when it’s crystal clear which ones are most important, and how they look when translated into behaviors.
For example, a supplier once pitched an employee at WD-40 an ingredient that could increase profitability by an estimated $4 million.
The catch: the can would need a California cancer warning label.
The employee who heard the pitch did not escalate it.
They did not call Garry.
They just said, “No.”
That kind of decision-making does not happen because a company simply has values on a wall.
It happens because the values are ranked, defined, and operationalized.
At WD-40, “doing the right thing” ranked above “sustaining the company’s economy.” So when those values collided, the answer was already clear.
For HR leaders, this is the deeper point:
Values are not culture decoration. They are risk infrastructure.
(If you’ve been paying attention to previous episodes, you know how important values are… when they are clear and actionable. Every. Single. Guest has talked about this.)
When values are vague, every hard decision escalates.
When values are ranked and behaviorally defined, people can make faster, cleaner decisions without waiting for executive permission.
CEO translation: Clear values reduce decision drag and protect the business when leaders are not in the room.
HR move: Run a values stress test with the executive team:
If two values collide, which one wins?
Where are employees currently forced to guess?
What decisions keep escalating because the values are not specific enough?
What behaviors prove each value is being lived, not visited?
3. Make managers accountable for the culture employees actually experience
Garry hated the word “manager.”
His issue was less about the branding of the word, and more about what the word “manager” implied as a job description.
Here’s his simple analogy to describe his beef:
A manager grades your paper
A coach helps you get an A
So, Garry got rid of managers, and made them all coaches.
Coaches wake up every day with one objective: Help their team members step into a better version of their personal selves… help them win the game.
That shift matters because most employees do not experience “company culture” in the abstract. They experience it through their direct leader.
That is why HR cannot be the sole owner of culture outcomes.
HR can develop the tools, frameworks, systems, and support.
But leaders have to own the employee experience they create.
So, when engagement results came in at WD-40, leaders owned the results for their teams. HR supported the work, but accountability lived with the people who had daily influence.
Most companies miss this. They just route culture data to HR, then wonder why managers do not change.
CEO translation: Culture accountability has to live where employee experience is created: with leaders.
HR move: Propose a new operating rhythm:
Engagement results go to leaders, not just HR.
Managers review their own team-level insights.
HR provides coaching, tools, and recognition systems.
Executives hold leaders accountable for movement.
This is how HR becomes more strategic: not by owning every culture problem, but by designing the system that makes the right people accountable.
4. Replace annual reviews with quarterly clarity
Garry threw out the annual review.
It’s impossible to remember how someone showed up, and the work they did a few weeks ago… let alone a year ago.
It simply wasn’t a good measure of someone’s contribution.
They replaced it with Conversational Reviews every 90 days where employees and their coach talked about two things:
Are you making progress toward the “A” we agreed on?
Are you living the values?
That model works because the standard is set before the evaluation.
People are not waiting all year to find out whether they met expectations. They are having regular check-ins about performance and behavior while there is still time to adjust.
For CEOs, this matters because annual reviews are usually lagging indicators. They reveal problems after the business has already absorbed the cost.
Quarterly conversations create a faster feedback loop.
CEO translation: Performance systems should run on the same clock as the business.
HR move: Frame performance management as operating discipline:
Define what “A performance” looks like by role.
Connect performance expectations to values-based behavior.
Replace surprise evaluation with regular coaching.
Measure whether managers are actually having the conversations.
This turns performance management from an HR process into an execution system.
5. Build trust before the crisis spends it
One of Garry’s most impressive claims is not just that WD-40 avoided layoffs during crises.
It is that the company had built enough trust for employees to believe leadership when pressure hit.
During the financial crisis of 2008-09, employees were nervous about layoffs. Garry announced, “It’s better that all of us suffer a little than a few of us suffer a lot.” He presented a plan that required some sacrifice, but ensured nobody got let go.
During COVID, a pulse survey showed 97% of employees were excited about the company’s future. Garry did not believe the number at first. But when the team asked why, employees said they felt safe.
That kind of trust does not appear during a crisis.
It is the collection of a thousand small deposits before the crisis ever occurs.
And Garry’s version was not built on vague goodwill. It was built through discipline: careful hiring, not getting “out over the top of your skis,” and refusing to create a headcount problem the company would be forced to solve with layoffs later.
That is a powerful message for HR and finance to share.
CEO translation: Trust is a form of crisis capital. You can only draw on it if you built it in advance.
HR move: Partner with finance on a more disciplined workforce planning conversation:
What would it cost us to overhire now and cut later?
What trust would we lose in a layoff cycle?
Where do we need clearer hiring guardrails?
What promises are we implicitly making every time we add headcount?
This is where HR expands its value to the CEO: by connecting people decisions to long-term resilience.
The bigger lesson for HR leaders
Garry Ridge gives HR leaders a better way to talk about culture.
HR isn’t perks, vibes, or programs you have to beg the rest of the executive team to care about.
Culture is the system that determines:
How much strategy gets executed
How decisions get made when leaders are absent
How managers create or destroy energy
How quickly performance issues surface
How much trust the company can draw on under pressure
That is CEO language.
And it gives HR a more powerful role.
You’re not “owning culture.”
You’re building the system that helps leaders and employees passionately execute on the strategic plan that ultimately determines business success.
Use this in your next CEO conversation
If you want to bring Garry’s thinking into your own company, start with five questions:
Strategy yield: What percentage of our people are truly engaged in executing our strategic plan?
Decision clarity: Where are employees still escalating decisions because our values are too vague?
Leader accountability: Do managers own their culture data, or does HR absorb it for them?
Performance rhythm: Are we coaching performance in real time, or judging it after the fact?
Trust reserves: Are our hiring and workforce decisions building trust we can draw on later?
That is the conversation Garry Ridge makes possible.
And it is exactly the conversation strategic HR leaders should be leading.
SHRM is a member-driven catalyst for creating better workplaces where people and businesses thrive together. As the trusted authority on all things work, SHRM is the foremost expert, researcher, advocate, and thought leader on issues and innovations impacting today's evolving workplaces. With nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries, SHRM touches the lives of more than 362 million workers and their families globally. Discover more at SHRM.org.
We turned Garry's operating system into a Toolkit for YOU! SHRM members can access the toolkit here:
Companies do not build the type of culture Garry built at WD-40 through slogans and posters.
They build it through repeated signals:
→ What gets recognized
→ What gets reinforced
→ What gets measured
→ What gets discussed
→ What leaders consistently model.
Nectar helps leaders like you turn those signals into systems, so values become visible, managers become more accountable, and leaders can see what is actually happening across the employee experience.
Check out AANA’s story to see how we can help a company like yours:
See Nectar in action:
The will of the people times strategy equals success.
Most companies obsess over the strategy side of that equation.
Garry Ridge built a company around the other half.
And that is the opportunity for HR leaders: help the CEO see that culture is not competing with the business plan.
It’s what determines how much of the business plan actually gets realized.
Garry credits influences like Ken Blanchard, Simon Sinek, Marshall Goldsmith, the Dalai Lama, and Aristotle.
But the real “Culture Crush” in this episode might be the operating principle underneath all of them:
A leader’s job is not to extract performance from people. It is to create the conditions where people can do the best work of their lives.
That is the through-line behind the ranked values, the 90-day conversations, the morning presence, the no-layoff discipline, and the way Garry talks about responsibility.
The tools matter.
But the perspective comes first.