You've Just Failed?–?Congratulations! You Get A Trip For Two Around the World.

Perpetually curious.

These two words define Garry Ridge, CEO, WD-40 Company, and my guest on the Disrupt Yourself Podcast. A native of Australia, Ridge recalls favorite television characters and programs from earlier years. A childhood hero was television scientist, Dr. Julius Sumner Miller, whose episodes of quirky experimentation would always end with the question, “Why is it so?” Colombo, played by Peter Falk, whose unconventional and deceptively bumbling methods of detection concealed a steely intellect and disarmed the criminals he pursued. “I love him,” says Ridge, “because he is so curious.”

Ridge rightly considers himself to be a change agent, which requires, “in a volatile, uncertain world, full of ambiguity…that leaders have to be comfortable with disruption.” They have to embrace every opportunity to improve their education, to be always and ever learning, and particularly, they have to be willing to learn from failures and mistakes and more than willing to allow their subordinates to do the same.

As the head of WD-40 for 20 years, Ridge has worked to create a corporate culture that values and utilizes the feedback that failure provides, and that handles mistakes in constructive and creative ways. WD-40 has enjoyed incredible growth, and the company’s employee engagement numbers are off-the-charts high, successes directly connected to Ridge’s dynamic, innovative leadership philosophy and style. “It was obvious to me that if you put people in an uncomfortable position where they feel like something they do is going to get them in trouble, it limits their creativity; it limits their ability….I said, ‘How do I set people free? How do I take [them] from fear to freedom?’

"If people are free, in a safe environment, amazing things happen.”

This is more than mere toleration or acceptance of failure. Ridge champions failure and those who openly discuss it. “When we first started…to embed this into our culture many years ago everybody was silent.” That’s the fear almost all of us feel at revealing failure or pointing out weaknesses in our work environment. “So I ended up putting a program in place,” Ridge says, “We’re going to give a reward, a big reward….Someone’s going to get, with their partner, a fully paid trip around the world.”

Not bad compensation for being honest about mistakes, something we all would like to feel freer to do. And seemingly, the philosophy holds even when the failure is costly to the company. And it has been a source of valuable intel that has made the company stronger moving forward. “One of the big [failures] we had was many years ago, we came out with a WD-40 pen, which was like a marking pen with a felt tip on it; it had WD-40 inside, and we put the formulation in it….What we didn’t was that this was going to evaporate fairly quickly out of this pen. We had millions of these things made; we launched it and suddenly we found it out. And we said, ‘Wow, what happened here?’ We had to bring a lot of these pens back out of the market and replace them. The good thing that came out of it was we identified a testing method that we’ve used from that day forward, on the way that WD-40 creeps through certain things.”

Ridge follows this story with an anecdote on the subject, “I think his name was Smith—the head of 3M or IBM; I’m not sure—where someone came to him and said, ‘I’ve made a mistake that cost the company a million dollars. Are you going to fire me?’ And he said, ‘I just spent a million dollars educating you; why would I fire you?’”

There’s something contagious about Ridge’s optimism. I’ve sometimes said that in the business world, and the pursuit of disruption and innovation ‘death isn’t fatal’ and it proves to be true here. Even colossally costly mistakes can be overcome. Perpetual curiosity means that when one door closes to us, we can walk through a different door, taking our valuable new learning with us. When a dream proves to be unattainable there can be a new aspiration to replace it.

And it isn’t hard to see how Ridge’s cheerful pragmatism can be advantageous is life outside of business as well. “I’ve never known a problem that got any better by time, by holding it back over time,” he says. “You know, let’s get it out on the table and let’s deal with it. And we’ll be ladies and gentlemen and we’ll get through it and we’ll be fine.”

Whitney Johnson is one of the world's leading management thinkers (Thinkers50), author of the critically acclaimed Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work and host of the Disrupt Yourself Podcast. You can sign up for her newsletter here.