How WD-40 Does $380 Million In Sales A Year

If you want your company to be free of squeaks, create a tribe that lives by its values, encourages learning, and sees mistakes as educational moments. 

WD-40 Company, maker of the iconic spray that stops squeaks and makes parts run smoothly, knows something about creating a tribe that is happy to come to work. WD-40 pulled in $380 million in revenue last year and boasts an employee satisfaction rate of 92 percent, compared with a widely cited 2015 Gallup poll that puts employee engagement in the U.S. at 31.5 percent. Like its iconic product, the company has figured out how to minimize friction so that its people can go about doing their work with ease. 

Garry Ridge, WD-40's CEO, recently spoke at the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coachesretreat in Phoenix. Here are his tricks for creating a company that I call his "smooth operation":

1. Be a learner and a teacher.

Ridge says that the No. 1 responsibility of a leader is being a learner and a teacher. This is a CEO who signs his emails "ancora imparo," which means "I am still learning" in Italian. "The three most powerful words I ever learned are: I don't know," Ridge says.

To commit yourself to learning, Ridge has put together a WD-40 Maniac Pledge, below, which he describes as an oath to become a "learning maniac":

I am responsible for taking action, asking questions, getting answers, and making decisions. I won't wait for someone to tell me. If I need to know, I'm responsible for asking. I have no right to be offended that I didn't "get this sooner." If I'm doing something others should know about, I'm responsible for telling them.

Ask yourself this question that Ridge asks himself: When's the last time you did something for the first time?

2. Embrace mistakes as learning moments.

Just like its name--the 40 in the name WD-40 comes from the 40 attempts it took the product's creator to get it right--this is a company that sees mistakes as educational moments.

For this to work, Ridge sets the example himself. He is humble. His humility comes from knowing that "leaders need to exercise good judgment, but that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment."

Too often, people are afraid to learn because they're afraid of making mistakes. Let the tribe know part of learning is making mistakes. Set an example as the leader that it's OK to make mistakes, and show that even you are not perfect, and can and are open to still learn. 

3. Live your values instead of visiting them.

If you go to the WD-40 website and click on any job opening, you will come across this note:

"Please, only consider employment with WD-40 Company if you feel as strongly about our values as we do:  We live, breathe, and play by our values every day." In other words, if these are not your values, don't apply.

Ridge sees values as the description of the only acceptable behavior in a tribe. And a tribe is people gathered around one purpose. 

Here are WD-40's company values:

• We value doing the right thing.
• We value creating positive, lasting memories in all our relationships.
• We value making it better than it is today.
• We value succeeding as a tribe while excelling as individuals.
• We value owning it and passionately acting on it.
• We value sustaining the WD-40 Company economy.

Ninety-eight percent of WD-40 employees feel that their opinions and values are a good fit with the company culture. Ask your tribe the same question, and you will know if you're living or just visiting your values.

This article first appeared on Inc.com on March 30, 2018

How Flying Taxis Will Change Everyday Life

Larry Page, CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet, is financing Kitty Hawk, a company that is developing and testing Cora, a new kind of electric, autonomous flying taxi. Leading the company for him is Sebastian Thrun, who was the director of Google X and helped start Google's autonomous car division. Page, Thrun, and Google are now moving from autonomous cars to autonomous flying vehicles. So, if you thought the self-driving car was a game changer, self-driving flying objects, air taxis in this case, are going to be a game changer of a different, larger scale. 

Business travel will be just-in time.

From a user perspective, this will bring an Uber-like flexibility and choice to users (Uber is also working on a version of a flying vehicle with Boeing). Instead of reserving a place on an airplane, you will reserve an air taxi to take you where you want, when you want (airplanes as we know them will literally become flying buses). Imagine what this will do to how you manage time, travel and availability when it comes to your business travel. No layovers, a lot more flexibility, for travel to locations that are nearby, and easier/immediate access. We will take an air taxi to areas that are too distant for a car, but too close or too small for commercial airlines. To give an example, I will take an Uber from my midtown office to a meeting on Wall Street, take an air taxi from Wall Street to a factory in New Jersey.

You will go where roads won't take you.

Now think of Africa where there are 204 km of roads compared with the world average of 944 km/1000 square km. Air taxis will also mean you can go where no roads will take you. Africa has been leapfrogging traditional infrastructures with new technology--the energy grid with solar energy; finance with banking over the phone. The next leap for the continent is going to be in autonomous flight. Drone experiments are already under way for transporting goods to remote areas--medicine and health supplies being a key one. Imagine what transporting doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers will do to remote areas in Africa will do for the economic and social development of Africa.

You will witness the design of new flying vehicle archetypes.

What should an air taxi look like? The Larry Page prototype is a cross between a drone and a plane. Is this the new archetype of what autonomous flying objects will look like or is this a fast, early prototype? First cars looked like the horse-drawn cart because that is what we knew. It took a few decades for the car to take its archetypical form. Air taxis might take decades to find their true design expression--in terms of both its form and experience.

Laurent Bouzige, designer with Toyota Europe, whose day job is to explore the future of transportation design, thinks that we will see new designs as the technology of autonomous flying is being developed and regulated. "Future air taxis might have a more integrated, less technological form that intentionally communicates an inherent feeling of trust to the users--perhaps a flying bubble where you can't see the mechanics," Bouzige says. "This new three-dimensional space offers us new poetic perspectives never explored; a new layer of mobility to think of new uses and respond to certain societal problems."

Safety still comes first.

How do you move fast, like Larry Page and his team are, in order to be the first to market, and yet still do due diligence to FAA regulations and bring a safe flying vehicle to market? How can you demonstrate that catastrophic failures will not happen in a million flights, a standard manufacturers are held to by regulations?

Norm Ovens is a senior technical leader with GE Aviation who views these vehicles as a wonderful development. They are however, just another evolution of flight, simply in a different form. As Ovens puts it, "These new vehicles introduce complex systems into areas that they haven't been before, the challenge will be to find acceptable methods to determine safe operations and acceptable development practices. Denying the hard work is not an option. The ones to ultimately succeed will meet all the requirements, not just the technological ones".

This article first appeared on Inc.com on March 16, 2018

How IKEA Made Customer Research Fun?

If you want to innovate and bring new solutions to old problems, ask yourself if your customer research is innovative. 

A recent study by IKEA into co-living spaces is a good case in point. The study asks what co-living will look like in 2030 when there will be 1.2 billion more people on the planet with 70 percent of these people living in urban areas where space and resources will be limited. IKEA's goal is to understand what is happening today, so that it can design and develop products for the future.

To do this, IKEA's future living research lab Space10 launched One Shared House 2030, a survey that was developed by interaction designer Irene Pereyra of Anton & Irene. I highly recommend you try it out, both because it's fun and because it gives you real-time data as you're doing it. An amazing 60,000+ people have already taken the survey.

Here is what makes IKEA customer research innovative:

It's an experiment.

Everything about the survey from its design to it's game-like interaction communicates, "We're experimenting here!" The IKEA team is out to explore the new--in new ways--and they're not afraid to try things. This intentional pioneering spirit is key if you want to explore new frontiers. 

Next time you're designing your research, ask yourself if you're being experimental enough. In other words, are you experimenting with your experiment?

It's empathic for its subjects.

The research and its style was inspired by a documentary Pereyra did about her own co-living experience from when she was a child, growing up in shared housing for mothers and kids called Kollontai in Amsterdam. Her story gives authenticity to the survey and creates a deep sense of empathy. It is that sense of empathy that draws us in and helps feel the complexities of co-living? Do people want to share toilets? Do they want someone else to use their bedroom if they're not there? How much sharing is too much sharing?

If you want your innovation to be empathic, start by making your research empathic. 

Even research can be beautiful.

Good design is pervasive, and here even the research is visually beautiful. The survey is striking with bold geometric shapes and intense colors ranging from pink, green, orange, and purple assigned to its different categories: demographics, pets, tolerance, personality, and privacy are just some of the headings. It's inviting and makes you want to participate. 

Design your research tool to be beautiful--it, too, is a design after all.

It's playful.

From the start of the survey, you're told that One Shared House 2030 is a playful research project. It's designed more like an app than a survey with music and pop-up windows.

It sets the stage as if in the future. You want to do it, and it captures your imagination.

This reminds me of something Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of IDEO.org, advocates: "When stakes are high, levity and playfulness are critical to the process."

If you want lots of people to participate, make your research playful and game-ify it.

It is not about the future, it's in the future.

The survey doesn't ask you to imagine the future--it sets the whole survey in the future. From the first interaction, it tells you that it's 2030. The world is more crowded, 70 percent of us are living in cities, we're all a little closer, there's self-driving cars and smart technology. In this new world we're sharing services, spaces, and goods so much more. Simple as it sounds, it is effective as setting the scene in a science fiction film. It is 2030, so what will you do?

You want people to imagine the future? Take them there.

At the end of the IKEA survey, take a look at the results. One take away is that, on the average, "people think being neat and tidy, honesty and being considerate are the most important qualities in a house-member". I agree.

This article first appeared on Inc.com on March 8, 2018

How Can Your Team Warm Up Their Right Brain

When you exercise your body, you start by warming up your muscles. When it comes to exercising your creativity, you also need to start by warming up your creative muscles. Whether you are brainstorming, ideating, or co-creating, preparing your brain for creative thinking is the first step. It is a signal to yourself that you're entering a different mental space--different from emailing, writing, or talking on the phone.

My favorite creative warmup takes a mere three minutes. It is the first thing we do with any creative session. It helps break the ice, gets people to laugh, and, most importantly, puts the team in a playful mindset.

Just like you wouldn't dream of running or swimming or playing tennis without warming up your body, don't dream of doing anything creative without warming up your right brain.

Here is warmup exercise:

All you need is a stack of copy paper and pens. Let people know you're going to start the session by warming up their creative brains. Then simply ask them to turn to the person next to them, to their left or to their right, and draw each other. Instructions for the warm up:

• You only have three minutes, so no masterpieces!
• Your face is like a rectangle, and the eyes go in the middle of it. Everything else can go wherever you like. 
• Have fun and remember to sign and gift your portrait to your neighbor once you're done.

Here is why doing the warm-up is important:

Break the ice.

People often feel awkward in the first minutes of an ideation session. Will they be creative? Will they rise to the occasion? When they start by drawing each other they engage with their neighbor, they start laughing at how they butcher each other's portraits, and the energy in the room rises. Before they know it, the awkwardness is gone and they're in this experience together.

Be playful.

Cardinal rule of creativity and design is to be playful. When we play, we're like kids--we're not afraid of making mistakes. We try things, experiment with ideas, and learn by doing. There's nothing like getting people to draw each other to signal we're in a playful state.

Transition into the creative space.

A creative meeting is different from other meetings. It is about generating ideas, breaking your preconceptions, and stretching your mind to imagine new possibilities. This warmup, or others you might try, disrupt people's daily work routine and help them enter a new, creative thinking space. 

Make something difficult, easy.

For so many of us, drawing someone else is tough. By doing a difficult thing together, from the get-go, and doing it in a state of collaboration and fun, you're actually priming people for the whole session. The underlying message is--you got this, you can be creative, and have fun.

Socialize.

Collaboration is social. It is about working with other people. This warmup is also about looking each other in the eye and starting a dialogue. That dialogue will continue for the rest of the session, and potentially, longer.

We all have favorite warm up routines when we exercise. This is mine. Give it a try and be ready for its effectiveness.

This article first appeared on Inc.com on March 1, 2018