Jeff Dewing
Hi and welcome to Doing the Opposite Business Disruptors, the podcast where you get to meet incredible leaders who have swung against the tide, thrown out the rulebook and changed the way their sector does business. I'm Jeff Dewing, bestselling author and Chief Exec of Cloudfm.
Today you're going to meet Garry Ridge. Garry has been Chief Exec of the famous brand - I'm sure you've all heard of - WD-40. Now for 25 years, Garry has navigated business across the world with his incredible brand WD-40. But what Garry has unbelievably achieved is a world-beating engagement from his incredible team from across the globe A whopping 93-stroke, 94% promoters. That is the envy of any brand that exists on this planet. It smashes Nike, it smashes Apple, it smashes just about any major name you can think of, and today we're going to hear the secret behind Garry's success.
So, Hi Garry, thank you so much for taking the time for joining me - this afternoon in Portugal, I think it's morning in San Diego, but thank you so much for making the time on, really looking forward to this conversation.
Garry Ridge
Gday Jeff, thanks very much, mate, it's so good to be with you.
Jeff Dewing
Garry I want to get straight down into it. First and foremost is could you just sort of spend a minute or so giving us the headline of Garry and perhaps the sort of very whistle-stop tour of your journey to find where you are today?
Garry Ridge
I was born in Sydney, Australia. I'm an Aussie, so we share the same royalty, Jeff. Although you English blokes have never forgiven the Aussies because we got sent there by the best judges in England and we got sunny beaches and good food and oh well, we won't talk about the weather in the UK, but I know you're not there right now.
When I left school I worked for a retail organisation in Australia. I was a management trainee. I finished that trainee course and then I got into wholesale selling. I did some work in marketing and through that I actually ended up meeting the people from WD-40. Back in the early 80s that I was working for the distributor of WD-40 in Australia and at that time the company was thinking about how do we take the blue and yellow can with the little red top to the world? It was an established brand in a number of developed countries but we knew there were lots of squeaks around the world that we could take care of! So in 87 they invited me to join the company.
And here's my first piece of advice always take your Dad's advice, because my Dad was an engineer. He worked for the same company for 50 years. He was born in 1907 and I said to him one day ‘Dad, I've been asked to go and join WD-40’. He said ‘you can't go wrong with that stuff, son’. So dad was right.
So in 1987 I opened the WD-40 company Australia subsidiary and I did that with a fax machine under my bed. We took it up from the bootstraps and six months later we were up and running. We had our office going, I'd employ our people and from 87 through to 94, even though based in Sydney, I did most of my work up in Asia. We were, you know, there were lots of squeaks in China and we're going to take care of those.
And then in 1994 I was having a chat with the then president of WD-40 company and I said ‘is there anything else you'd like me to do’? 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 seem to have a passion for our global business. Why don't you come over here and help me take the brand around the world’? So lesson number two always be ready to disrupt yourself.
So disruption it was. And here I did, packed up toys with the family and moved 8,000 miles across the ocean to San Diego and started working on our global business and spent a lot of time in Latin America and then in Europe through 94 to 97. And then that CEO retired and for some reason the board of a public company thought this Aussie bloke might be okay. So you know, I told them ‘be careful, unconsciously incompetent and probably wrong and roughly right at most things’. But anyhow, they took me on.
It's interesting because I was on a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney just a little while after taking the helmet and leadership at WD-40 company, and I was doing some reading and I read two things that really changed me. The first one was a statement of the Dalai Lama which was ‘our purpose in life is to make people happy. If we can't make them happy, at least don't hurt them’, and I thought that's pretty sound advice.
And the second thing I read was something of Aristotle, where Aristotle said pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. I thought okay, so as a leader, if we could create an environment where people actually enjoyed what they were doing and they were doing something meaningful and purposeful, I'm guessing they're going to enjoy it more and they're going to do better work. But I didn't know how to do that.
So when I got back eventually, I found a program at the University of San Diego. It was a master's degree in leadership. So I'm already CEO and I'm thinking I'm going to go back to school. So I went back to school, to the University of San Diego, and I did this master's degree in leadership and in fact, that's where I met my mentor and my dear friend, Dr Ken Blanchard, the one minute manager. He was my professor. In fact, I played nine holes of golf with him yesterday. Ken doesn't live far from me he's 83 years old now and we've become very dear friends, and so the three people I owe my success to are Aristotle, the Deli Lama and Ken Blanchard.
So I did that university course a little bit about leadership and then started to apply those principles at WD-40 Company, and the rest is history. 25 years as a public company CEO. We grew the company six times in revenue. We took the market cap from about 300 million to 2.5 billion. That's all lovely, but the thing that I'm most proud of is 98% of people at WD-40 companies said they'd love to work at the company, and we had a 93% engagement, so people were enjoying their work and doing great work. So that's it!
Jeff Dewing
Thank you for that, and that's a real good overview that sets the scene for anybody that wants to understand, perhaps, what we're going to be talking about. I guess the classic example that I love, which is saying that I've lived by all my life unknowingly, and that is, as an entrepreneur or as a leader or an aspiring leader, the key to success is bite off more than you can chew and then learn very quickly how to chew it.
And if you listen to your story, in that whistle stop tour you've gone from where you were in distribution to setting up WD-40 Australia - a new journey, a new adventure, and all the trials and tribulations go with it.
You've then taken on the biggest job in the organization. At which point did you think ‘shit, have I done the right thing? Am I going to get found out? Am I really going beyond my capabilities?’
Garry Ridge
I don't know that I ever thought that because I always believed that I was not the smartest knife in the drawer. I honestly used to introduce myself as ‘G'day, I'm Garry Ridge, I'm the consciously incompetent, the probably wrong and roughly right chairman and CEO of WD-40 company’, and I think that was the key is that our job as leaders or coaches is not to run onto the field and try and kick every ball. Our job is to find the best players we can, to observe the play, spend a lot of time on the sideline, know what it takes to win, make sure that the balls got air in it and pumped up so you know in other words, the resources were there and then spend a lot of time in the locker room. And a lot of time in the locker room is where you build trust. You build that collaboration with your people, because you know a leader needs to hurt a little more, so those they lead hurt a little less. And the two things that people really, really want is to know that they matter and know that they belong. So I don't think - I never had imposter syndrome, but I was very aware of the fact that I wasn't capable of doing everything myself, and that's why I depended on others.
Jeff Dewing
Yeah! I guess when you come back to what you just said there about the leader hurts a little bit more to prevent it. It's like the captain on the on the battlefield that will make sure his men eat before he does.
It’s like us in Covid. When we were, we were a business that most struggled heavily in Covid and you know, one of the things we had to do is shave off salaries and benefits and we said we're all going to suffer a little so that no one suffers a lot.
And it's that same sort of mantra about truly looking after each other, because that's what it was only ever about, and I think Covid just shone a light on that. It shone a light on the fact that we've been getting it wrong for decades and how we manage businesses in a command and control environment and so on and so on, which is why it's the other stuff you talk about. The stuff you write about is music to my ears, because there's a lot of leaders out there - leaders, managers, owners that don't have the courage to realize that the people around them, given the opportunity and the freedom, will rarely, if ever, let you down. Everyone is chasing the ghosts. Everyone thinks that everyone's out for a buck. And give people the true freedom, given the ability to manage, influence or control their destiny. Every human being is a very, very clever individual. You just got to give them the opportunity to show you.
Garry Ridge
Yeah, and I think, Jeff, one of the things that's important of that is you have to give them a safe playing field and that's why, in an organisation, a clearly defined set of hierarchical values are there to protect people and set them free so that they don't have to quack up the hierarchy every time they want to make a decision. So, you know, I think that the fundamentals are number one as a leader, you have to be committed to the fact that it's all about the people you have the privilege to lead. Number two you have to have authentic and clearly defined purpose of why we get up every day. At WD-40, our purpose was to create positive, lasting memories, and we did it by with the products we sold, with the relationships we built, with the way we treated our, our teammates, or our tribe mates, as we call them.
Then you have to have a set of values, which is the playing field. You know, is this a safe playing field? Then you have to have a clear strategy, you have to be bold at execution and then you have to reduce fear in the organization, and we did that by taking the word failure out and then replacing it with ‘learning moments’. So we said that we never make mistakes. You know, and I go out speaking on the, on the speaking circuit, I get up and I say I'm going to make a comment now. That's going to blow your brains out. ‘I've never made a mistake in my life ‘and everybody kind of goes <hahaha>, I said, but I've had millions of learning moments and once you get to the point of understanding that every opportunity is a learning moment, it's actually the trigger for success, because the definition of a learning moment is a positive or negative outcome that has to be openly and freely shared with all people. So that's what we have. Take fear out and then, once you've got those things in place, our job as leaders is to help people win. Help them win their game, but unfortunately, a lot of people protect their own comfort zone at the expense of other people's development, because servant leadership is not about kumbaya, popcorn and pizza. It's a balance between being tough minded and tender-hearted and the genius is in the end in the ‘and’ in the middle.
Jeff Dewing
Yeah. What was interesting is when you, when you sort of talk about failure, which has a negative connotation to 90% of the population of the world. One of the things that I did in our business, probably six or seven years ago, which is why we're so keen to talk to you because we seem to be brothers from a different mother. One of the things we said is ‘it's impossible to fail in this organization. You only succeed or learn’. Because if you, if you don't, if you have fear of failure, you'll never be creative, you'll never try anything new and nothing will change. The world will stand still, which is, which is a pointless existence. And and then we also go on to say why do we all even exist on this planet? What is anybody's purpose? We can all say ‘oh my purpose is to know save the whale, or save the oceans, or save the Amazon forest’. How do you make it more simplistic? Our purpose on this planet is purely to look after our fellow man before we look after ourselves, and it's to share knowledge. That's the two reasons we're here, and there's no other reason for us to be here.
I loved the saying as well – ‘no soldier goes to war for God and country. They go to war for the person on their left and the person on their right’, and when we truly understand the power in that you can, you can move mountains, whether you're a community or a company or an organisation or whatever. It's about putting people at the heart of it, right?
Garry Ridge
Yeah, absolutely. You know, at WD -40 we called ourselves a tribe, not a team, because one of the biggest desires we have as human beings is to belong, and our tribal promise was a group of people that came together to protect and feed each other. That was the promise we had to each other. That's why we got up every day. And it was interesting during COVID and you know, we all went through so many different emotions and times of uncertainty. We did a check-in employee opinion survey in January of 2021. So at this time, here was still no sight of of a vaccine, we were still in this. We were really uncertain times of were we even going to exist as a human race. And I said I want to make sure that we're not draining cultural equity, we're not draining the, the engagement of our people, because we were doing things differently and we thought we were, you know, doing them reasonably well. So we didn't serve. We went out and did our survey. One of the results that came back was it had increased, and it was the answer to this question: ‘I feel excited about my place in the company's future.’
And 98% of our people globally were positive about that statement and I scratched my damn bold head and I said you know, ‘I don't get it, why did they say that there must be something wrong with the data? Go look at the data.’ The data was right and when we sort of dug into it a little bit, the people came back and said ‘I feel safe. If there's any place I want to be right now. I want to be here because we are a group of people that are coming together to protect and feed each other, we care about each other and if we're gonna be anywhere right now, I want to be here. And I thought, ‘wow’, that has really proven the power of a really strong connected culture.
Jeff Dewing
Yeah, yeah, but when you went on this journey and you read the quotes from the Dalai Lama and the various other learners you had in the Masters degree you went on. Did people around you and, being a public company you've obviously got shareholders right? You've got your annual general meetings. You've got the various questions and challenges you'll get from the board. Did anyone ever say to ‘Garry what an earth you doing? This is not how you run a business’.
Garry Ridge
Oh yeah, all the time. Yeah, of course, you know it's like anything in fact. You know, I, in the early stages they a few of the leadership team said I drunk too much of Ken Blanchard's Kool-Aid, I mean, you know. But I was convinced that there was nothing wrong with creating a place where people enjoy doing what they were doing. Now, you know, we still had to make hard decisions and in the early times my board really didn't understand this at all.
I take the employee opinion survey data and share it with them on - in those days, on an annual basis and their eyes would glaze over. ‘And can we get on to look at the financials?’ And you know, what they didn't understand is - It's very simple. You can have the best strategy in the world. Let's write a strategic plan. Take it to some smart professor ‘hey, what's what do you think of the strategic plan?’ ‘Beautiful - 70 out of 100’. ‘Thank you.’
Then you go back in. You can you implement the plan if only 20% of your people go to work every day, committed to and having faith in the purpose of the plan? 20 times 70 is 1400.
But if 80% of the people go to work every day and are committed to going to work at a place where they're making a contribution to something bigger than themselves, they're learning something new, they're protected and set free by a compelling set of values and they go ‘I'm happy’. 80 times 70 is 5600. So it's simple math. And as we started to implement and our performance continued to grow, it was like ‘okay, now do you get it’? Now today? I stepped down as CEO last August after 25 years. The last five or six years as culture has become a headline in what we should think about in business, everybody wants to embrace it and it's like ‘well, where have you been for the last 15 years’?
Jeff Dewing
Yeah but I guess maybe Garry could argue that you know, Covid has shone a light on it to those naysayers that have said no, no, no, you've got to have people in fear. They got to be fearful of their job, then they'll do what you want them to do. And people have just done the same thing all their lives and always expect a different result, which by default is insanity, right? So I think COVID shone a light on it for a lot of people and I think there is a lot of change going on, but people are very, very fearful of coming out of their comfort zone. Even at leadership level.
You've got to learn to come out your comfort zone. You then go into the learning zone, you then go into the growth zone. When you hit the growth zone, that's where the magic happens, right and because nothing else changes otherwise.
Garry Ridge
Yeah, you know, Covid, slapped leadership up the side of the head. That's really what it did. I wrote an article that I posted on LinkedIn called the Great Escape, because there was a lot of talk about the great resignation. This wasn't the great resignation. This was people - were they escaping to your culture or from your culture?
And in fact, I'm just in the process of my new book and it's called ‘Any Dumbass Can Do it’, and it really is, and it's going to be released probably early next year, but it really talks about - even me and the dumbass from Australia. If you really understand what the principles are to build great cultures, any dumbass can do it. So don't tell me you can't do it! You've got to be committed to doing it and it's simple, it's not easy and time is not your friend.
You know, when I was at school in Australia, in high school, at Dramoyan Boys High School, my science teacher gave me a Petri dish and he said well, what we're going to do is we're going to grow culture in this Petri dish, and the learning I got from that was number one -
What are the ingredients you need to put in to grow great culture? Well, in an organisation, we can list the ingredients. You know you've got to have a true purpose. You got to have values, you got to have empathy. You know you've got to have clarity around the counter. But put all those ingredients in. Now what do you need to do? You need to watch the Petri dish every day and you need to feed the good ingredients so they grow. And you need to treat the toxins as soon as they get in there, because the toxins will set, send the culture sour in a nanosecond. Unfortunately, a lot of leaders think that great culture is let's bring you some simple training program, we’ll sprinkle some fairy dust over the business. Everybody's been to that training program now, oh, we've changed. No, we haven't. No, this is simple, not easy, and time is not your friend.
Jeff Dewing
Yeah! It’s like when we have a finance challenge and at the team of finance people say you know, Jeff, we've got a problem we need to solve, so we're going to go into a brainstorming session. ‘So whose are going to go into that session then?’. ‘I'm going to bring all my top finance people in’. I’d say ‘no, you're not, you're going to send in all the people and nothing about finance, because then you're going to get a broader perspective’, right? And the outcomes just blew their mind. Yet, they thought I had to two heads when I made that suggestion.
Every single human being you can learn from, whether you like it or not. You can learn from every single conversation you have with somebody. And when you've learned that incredible trait, when you go through your leadership, of the ability to truly listen and if you can truly listen, you learn every day, just by default. Anyway, without reading books and watching programs and going to university. You're going to learn stuff every single day.
And the bit I loved as well and I've stolen it, Garry is sending. Your ultimate aim to send everybody home happy and safe every day, and if you can achieve that you've got a great business.
So tell me during the journey the bit I'm interested in so you've had this great journey, you've come with these incredible results. It's world beating by any stretch of the imagination. We've got a great culture that we will never accept is as good as it can be. So we work on it every day. Give me some examples, if you have any, where you felt, ‘oh, this is this is really really tough’. Yeah, is there any particular examples where you think, ‘Jesus, I never expected those barriers’. Where there are any points when you wobbled and you thought, ‘wow, am I really getting this right’?
Garry Ridge
Oh, there were many times when, you know, I went into my office, shut the door, put my head in my hands and said, ‘holy hell, what are we going to do here’? But that's when I went and sought out those that were around me. Of course, if you lead a company for 25 years, you know we went through in a number of economic cycles. We went through the Asian crisis. You know wars here, this, that there you know.
And uncertainty is a series of future events that may or may not occur. I think what we need to do is ensure that uncertainty doesn't paralyze us. So, yeah, there were times, but you know, I'll give you an example of how values in an organization can be very powerful. You know, our second value was ‘we value creating positive, lasting memories in all of our relationships’, and I went into a meeting one morning and there was someone in that meeting, a senior member of my team, who was not creating positive, lasting memories. They had a really bad morning. It was one of those meetings I'm sure you and our people that are with us today have been in a meeting where someone starts just sucking the oxygen out of the room because of the way they behave.
So, what do you do as a leader? Well, you know you've got a couple of options, Jeff. Option one is you kind of pause the meeting and say, ‘Jeff, that behavior is unacceptable. You know you need to pull your head in and you know, stop disrupting the meeting’. Don't do that because everyone else in the room says when am I going to get publicly assassinated by the boss? And the person in the room doesn't gain any benefit of it.
Second thing is you can do nothing. And now that's a toxin just got into the culture dish. What we're saying is that behaviour is acceptable.
So at the end of the meeting, I said - I'll call him Jeff - I said, ‘Jeff, let's go for a walk’. So we walked out of our building and I started to look under a car and in a trash can and behind a tree. And Jeff says ‘what the hell are you doing?’ I said, ‘Jeff, I'm looking for you the year I know and love was not in that room today. What's on your mind? What's getting in your way’? And that opened our conversation. And I said, ‘Jeff, you know what our value is of creating positive, lasting memories. And I'm going to tell you, you didn't create too many in there this morning, so let's talk’.
So I think, to answer your question about when it was tough, the toughest times were when you had to deal with people, but you did it with love and care. And that's why I said most people protect their own comfort zone at the expense of someone else's development. I could have walked out of there and done nothing. That would have just put some toxin in that Petri dish. So I think the toughest times were making those tough calls on people but being brave enough to be able to say ‘I truly care about you. That's why I need to have this conversation with you, because I want you to win. I want you to get an A’.
Jeff Dewing
That's the thing that frightens most people, even managers, when you're trying to bring managers through the process. It's that fear of conflict and conflict in a positive way rather than a negative way. Conflict is not about reprimanding somebody. Conflict is about having a difficult conversation, which is less difficult when it's delivered with care and empathy. Because you show vulnerability and the vulnerability gives you a super power, which means the person that you're talking to suddenly says ‘well, I now want to look after you’, and you create this safe environment to have that conversation, Don't you? And it is that empathy and vulnerability.
Garry Ridge
Have you ever met this person? This is Al, or Alice, the soul-sucking CEO of Fear Inc. So I invented this little. There's big AL over on my shoulder.
So I invented this, this person as the person I talk about, who as a leader, has toxic behaviors. So you know, Al is corporate royalty. I've spent my life climbing up the corporate ladder. You know I'm going to have that big office and you're going to bring me tea in the morning. Al's a micro manager, wants to be in everything. Al's always right, whether they're right or wrong. Al always has the answer and Al's ego eats his empathy instead of his empathy eating his ego. And Al hates feedback. So Al, or Alice, the soul-sucking CEO, or the sole sucking leader, is the person that really creates this environment. So when I go out speaking, I take Al with me and give him away or give her away to the people in the audience. And as I'm talking people nod. They know Al or Alice.
Jeff Dewing
It's a great I guess a great way of articulating the story right, because that's one of the biggest things that leads up a problem with this. They know how they feel, they know what they want to do, but they don't know how to articulate it, which then becomes transmissible, which then helps to grow the environment in which you're, in which you're operating. But it's a fascinating subject and I think there's more and more people now considering, perhaps behaving differently, realizing that it isn't about knowing it all or realizing that it isn't about command and control, and but I think there needs to be more people like you and I and people like us that need to help businesses move a faster pace.
Because when you call it ‘The Great Escape’, I refer to it as a ‘great resignation’ only because that was a recognized term. And I say in my keynotes ‘what caused the great resignation’?
What COVID done is it gave the entire population something they'd never had before - time to think. They gave them time to reflect on their lives, what they thought was important, what should be important. And when you then look at a Gallup survey that says 80% of people across the globe do not want to be in their job, that means we've got a big problem.
We as leaders, we as business. I've got a big problem Right and we've got to start looking in the mirror.
Garry Ridge
Well, I think a couple of things, too, I mentioned. I was with Ken Blanchard yesterday and we were in the golf cart and we were talking about the books that he and I wrote together in 2009, which is a book called ‘Helping People Win at Work’, and the highlight is ‘Don't Mark my Paper, help me get an A’, and we were talking about how, today, it is even more relevant than ever because it's really around - we are there to help people get A's, not mark their papers.
The problem is with the leaders where there's conflict, it's because there's not clarity around what we expect from each other. So we're going to always let people down if we don't have clarity around what we expect from each other, and I think that's what makes those conversations that you referenced, Jeff, really difficult, because the other person ‘well, no, no, no, I didn't understand it to be like that’. So leaders, people who lead people need to be very sure that they've really defined what an A looks like. Then your job as a leader is to help the person you're leading get that A, not to mark their paper.
Jeff Dewing
Yeah, yeah, and there's little tips and tricks, isn't there? There's some stuff that we've done in our business for years, where you have a meeting and you're having to agree and how to solve a problem, and we all agree a plan or whatever, and then what you do is you say to the people in the room ‘right, just play back to me what you heard’, because that the amount of times people hear something different to what was said is amazing. Right, so it helps you create that clarity again, because clarity is the number one driver, absolutely Freedom. Freedom without clarity is anarchy. So you just get chaos, right, so it is just about we're back to your petri dish.
It's about those right ingredients and the tools to create, you know, the clarity, the safety, no fear of failure and also this element of empathy and vulnerability. If you get those ingredients right, you get a powerhouse. And that's the bit I love, because we're executing it now. You've already executed it. It's a great case study. I use all the time, I take a lot of fun in doing it and thank you for giving me the material to use.
Garry Ridge
Not at all.
Yeah, you know. What you were saying also reminded me of a great quote of Renate Brown's, which is ‘in the absence of facts and data, we make up stories and those stories become our truth’. So, again, as leaders, how do we ensure that we're sharing, you know, the actual transparency with people, so that they're not making up their own truth which is actually false?
This is simple stuff. And the other reason that I love the piece about sending people home happy is this happy people create happy families. Happy families create happy communities. Happy communities create happy countries. Happy countries create a happy world. And by golly, we need a happy world. We do Business leaders have the biggest opportunity, and I would even say responsibility, to help us turn this world around, because it's not real happy right now.
Jeff Dewing
No, and of course, you're absolutely bang on, and I think we just need to realize that we actually do have the power to solve those problems. We've got to stop thinking about the elephant and realize it's one by that time, because we will get it.
And then the other one I love as well is the Henry Ford thing, because I'm a very, very passionate about thinking time for people in my organization. And, and Henry Ford said, ‘thinking is very difficult, which is why so few choose to do it’, because when you get the time to think and reflect, wonderful things happen, and its fantastic.
Anyway, Garry, we're going to move into the last section now. Well, I'd love to ask you a couple of quick questions, if I may.
If there was one thing you're going to answer me with now, what are you most grateful for?
Garry Ridge
People. Relationships. Connection.
Jeff Dewing
Fantastic, okay. And then the final question. If there was only one message, what one message would you send out to the world?
Garry Ridge
It's not about you!
Jeff Dewing
Haha, Bingo! Boom. Love it, love it, love it, love it, love it. It's not about you. Yeah, fantastic, I love that.
Right, Garry - Listen, it's been an incredible, incredible conversation. I knew it would be. I'm so pleased that I managed to get you on and I'm hoping at some point our past will cross, because I'd love to. I'd love a game of golf with you and I'd love to chew the fat over a beer and hopefully one day that will come true.
Garry Ridge
Yeah, well, I know where you live now and in fact I will be in Europe in a couple of weeks, but I'm not going to Portugal. I'll be in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, but I do love Portugal. So next time I'm in that area, the beers on you and we'll play the game of golf.
Jeff Dewing
Fantastic, fantastic.
Well, Garry didn't disappoint, did he? I've been really looking forward to this conversation since we booked him in a few weeks ago and after reading his book and listening to some of his keynotes that he delivers and what a lovely guy, especially from humble beginnings as well. Garry is one of those people that really is a trailblazer. A trailblazer in doing the opposite, a trailblazer in operating out of his comfort zone. A trailblazer in helping other people see the power of working outside your comfort zone and to create a world beating culture, a culture that is the envy of any organization in the world and the fact that that culture translates into sustainable profit and achieving the goals and the purpose and the strategies that those companies set out. It's one of the things where, if there's one message that I've learned from all of this whether it be with Garry or other people like Garry - is that it all starts with the people. It all starts with the culture. If you don't get that right and I'm talking world beating right then all you're doing is twiddling the knobs for the rest of your lives and going around your circles.
If you're going to truly break down barriers, if you're truly going to take on that mountain. You have to start with people and you have to truly believe that and, as he says, with these petri dish and ingredients, it is about a team of people that are prepared to go to work, protect and feed each other. It's about empathy, it's about humility, it's about the ability to be truly vulnerable and be honest and to care more about your fellow colleagues than you do yourself, because by doing that, you automatically create an environment where they want to look after you. It's the way the human spirit works.
I'm Jeff Dewing, author of bestselling book Doing the Opposite and CEO of Cloudfm. If you'd like to know more about my podcast or my incredible guests, please visit my website at jeffdewing.co.uk. You can also find out more about Cloudfm at cloudfmgroup.com or simply follow us on LinkedIn.
Finally, I'd like to offer a big thanks to my incredible team, Nichola Crawshaw at Cloudfm, Thinking Hat PR and, of course, my fantastic production team, What Goes On Media.
Thanks for listening and hope to see you soon.