Another insightful exclusive excerpt from former WD-40 wunderkind CEO’s newest book.

Excerpted with permission from Garry Ridge and Martha Finney’s Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It (Matt Holt Books; March 2025).

Chapter 4: Your Purpose Is Not Your Product

Adults who grew up in the United States during the last decades of the twentieth century are likely to remember this ditty from Schoolhouse Rock!: “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?” The program writers were tasked to find an engaging way to teach a boring subject: grammar. So they came up with clever rhymes, a fun cartoon train station, and a new word for the kiddies: function. For millions of TV-watching children, it dawned on them that things were more than just things. They had purpose. What’s your function?” is just a fancy way of asking, “What are you for?” “What’s your purpose?” Which is, actually, a more complicated, multilayered question than it might appear to be on the surface.

Starting from a child’s point of view, for example, let’s consider that box on the kitchen counter with slots in it. Eventually, as the child builds vocabulary, it becomes known as the toaster. Okay, great. But what’s its function? Well, to toast bread. And then the questions begin:

“But why?”

“Because toasted bread is tasty.”

“But why?”

“Because the crusty surface creates a solid foundation for adding warmed butter and the grape jelly that you like so much. And it gives me pleasure to serve it to you that way.”

“But why?”

“Because it sends you off to school feeling loved. This is my way of telling you that you matter and you belong to our family.”

Ah. There it is. A toaster, as it turns out, is more than just an electric box with slots and wires. It’s a love experience delivery system. That’s its function. To regularly and reliably make the recipient of said toast feel loved and valued. As another American commercial from that same era would remind us, “Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven.”

And then we all grow up. The question persists, both personally and organizationally. What’s our function? What’s our purpose?

At the risk of sounding like a sap, I think that it’s safe to say that we’re all in the love experience delivery business. It’s just a question of which niche we choose to be in. And exactly what experience we choose to deliver. But first, we have to get away from attachment to the product itself. And start looking beyond that item on the shelf to the human benefit, experience, or emotional transformation it promises. That is where we will finally identify and define our purpose.

When I first landed at my role at WD-40 Company, our purpose statement was still very much focused on the product on the shelf. We were fond of saying, “WD-40 is a great problem solver.”

And that made sense, given the utilitarian nature of the Multi-Use Product. Even today, the gallon can lists all functional deliverables: “Stops squeaks; removes and protects [exactly what it removes and/or protects isn’t made clear]; loosens rusted parts; frees sticky mechanisms; drives out moisture.” Incidentally, it also makes snakes slippery, which turns out to be a handy advantage in some parts of the world, when it comes down to python versus public transit. We actually know that for a fact, from the experience of one of our customers, a bus driver in Hong Kong.

The slogans we coined during that era were more commercial taglines than they were purpose statements. And, I have to admit, we had some fun with them. We summed up our entire product line this way: “We are in the squeak, smell, and dirt business.” But we didn’t stop there with the jokes.

One of our products was 2000 Flushes. So, naturally, we said, “We’re Number One in the Number Two Business.”

That was us back then.

But soon, as I was to discover in my University of San Diego master’s class with Ken Blanchard, I learned that there was much more to a company’s purpose than simply the promise of eliminating that annoying squeak in a door hinge. Or that random smell coming from down the hall somewhere. (As I’m writing this, I’m now wondering if maybe there might be demand for a product out there somewhere that we can name Don’t Blame the Dog.)

In Ken’s classes on values and purpose, he helped me come to fully understand that a company’s purpose is about more than what the product can do for the customer. It is about more than just the brand; it needs to be emotionally linked to the people and the world we live in. For WD-40, this included our tribe members. It had to make our people feel valued in the context of the work they do. I didn’t think that being in the squeak, smell, and dirt business was something that our people would happily mention when a new acquaintance asks, “What do you do?”

I’m in the squeak, smell, and dirt business” is not a response that encourages uplifting, happy conversation.

I was learning from Ken that a company purpose is one so compelling company-wide that it’s embraced by everyone, head and heart, and acts as a unifying force. To be a great purpose, it would have people inspired to advocate for what they do, the people they do it with, and the people they do it for. It would provide a sense of stability and direction for everybody during periods of change or uncertainty. It would not budge, or waver, in other words, depending on circumstances, however extreme they might become.

So then I began to think about how we described WD-40 Company, and I knew it was time for a change. As I mulled it over for some months, I kept returning to the thought that people would say, “Oh, I remember a time when,” whenever I told them that I worked for WD-40 Company.

As I reviewed those instances in my mind, I realized they weren’t telling me about how well the product worked for them. They were telling me about the memory they cherished around the experience when the product was working for them. The squeak would be long forgotten. The circumstance around the removal of that squeak was the thing remembered lovingly. The time spent with a parent. Or a child. Or the time when a door hinge threatened to blow the whistle on a date that lasted later into the night than it should. And how the handy blue and yellow can with the little red top would play a role in rebuilding grandpa’s tractor on the family farm that decades before you had had your first driver’s lesson on. Or the time it saved the day on a long bicycle trip. Or a day out on the water, sailing. Or how it revived a critical piece of machinery that gummed up an entire assembly line, ultimately allowing the factory to make quota that day.

As it turns out, WD-40 Company figures into thousands of positive, lasting memories throughout the world. That’s its true purpose.

We are in the memories business. We’re here to create positive, lasting memories with the customers we serve, the people in our tribe, the community that we’re given permission to operate in. We would ultimately capture this vision in our formal purpose statement:

We exist to create positive, lasting memories in everything we do. We solve problems. We make things work smoothly. We create opportunities.

During this time, we were also working on creating our values. And we said, “If we could align one of our values to what our purpose is, that would really embed it.” Our first value became, “We value doing the right thing.” And our second value became, “We value creating positive, lasting memories in all of our relationships.”

Was this idea universally embraced right off the bat? Absolutely not. It was derided as being too, let’s see if I remember the expression correctly, foo-foo. Just another softheaded notion from that crazy young Aussie who still had so much to learn about how things are done in American business.

I remember once when an advertising agency was pitching different brand positioning strategies. And I happened to be in that meeting. I said, “No, no, no, no. We’re in the memories business.”

And they laughed at me.

So I said, “I want you to think about it. What does a memory do? Firstly, it’s created from an event. Secondly, it puts a stake in the ground of something that you can cherish or sometimes memories you don’t cherish, right? The bad memories, we don’t want those. But they are also something that we can talk about.”

There was the predictable eye rolling, of course. But my voice was loud and emphatic enough that the agency team had no choice but to consider my point of view. So they packed up their laptops and presentation materials and marched off to consult the Oracle of Madison Avenue, or their Magic 8 Ball, or whatever it is that they do to confirm or concede their creativity.

In due time they came back to solemnly pronounce, “We’re quite intrigued.”

The result was the following wording: “We exist to create positive, lasting memories by solving problems in factories, workshops, and homes around the world. We solve problems, and we create opportunities.” Yes, we kept the language around solving problems. A problem solved is also a positive, lasting memory, right?

“Creating positive, lasting memories” became the true north that governed every decision we made from that point forward. Including a critical decision to step up to the opportunity to create a product to go head-to-head with one of our most compelling competitors. Our challenge was to develop a penetrant that worked better than the competitor’s did. The added challenge was that it would have no cancer-causing ingredients in it, as the competitor’s did.

Recall that our number one value is to do the right thing. So bringing a known cancer-causing ingredient to the marketplace was out of the question. Cancer had touched many of us at WD-40 Company. My own brother had died of cancer. We were prepared to cancel the entire endeavor if that was to be our only option. Cancer did not bring lasting, positive memories to humanity.

Happily, our R&D team took on the challenge. The result was a product that actually worked better than the competitor’s. The development process took longer, to be sure. We were slower to market than our competitor was. But the memory of how we all pulled together, stood by our values and our purpose, and made the necessary sacrifices to create the product we would be proud of was the memory that would outlast the short-term frustration of the earliest days of development.

Years after we had collected many experiences and products that confirmed and solidified our purpose, tragedy struck the Blanchard family. Their house burned to the ground, taking with the flames every material possession of both value and sentiment.

Ken’s wife, Margie, would say to me, “The only things that you ever get to keep are the memories that you have. We lost everything in that house, but we still have our memories.”

BEST: When developing your company’s purpose statement, look beyond the promise as it’s described on the product labeling and consider how the successful use of the product makes people feel.

WORST: Settle for the first purpose statement that comes to mind. If the successful outcome can be described in a quantifiable way, you haven’t yet touched the heart of your company’s mission.

FIRST: Invite your customers and tribe members alike to tell you what the company and its products mean to them personally. Collect stories and insights. Your purpose will be found there.

Excerpted with permission from Garry Ridge and Martha Finney’s Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It (Matt Holt Books; March 2025). Click here to buy the book.

Garry Ridge is the former CEO of WD-40 Company and founder of The Learning Moment.

Martha Finney is the author and co-author of 30 books on world-class business leadership culture.