Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It

Garry Ridge · 2025

Thesis

Running a company well does not require genius but a culture in which people feel safe to admit what they do not know, share their mistakes openly and know which values come first, and a leader's job is to build that culture and coach people within it rather than to command them.

The main ideas

Replace the idea of failure with the learning moment: an outcome, good or bad, to be shared openly so everyone benefits.
The most useful words a leader can say are "I don't know."
Fear stops people from learning. Psychological safety is the condition for growth.
A company can be a tribe, a place people belong, rather than a team assembled for a task.
Rank the company's values in order, so people know which one wins when two conflict.
Managers should act as coaches who help people succeed, not judges who grade them.

An everyday CEO

Garry Ridge joined WD-40 Company in 1987 to run its business in Australia, moved to the American headquarters in San Diego, and became president and chief executive in 1997. He held the post for about 25 years, retiring in 2022. Under him, the company, best known for its blue-and-yellow can of lubricant, grew from annual sales under $150 million in the late 1990s to about $519 million in fiscal 2022.

Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It, written with Martha I. Finney and published in 2025 with a foreword by Ken Blanchard, presents his approach to leadership as a set of short lessons he calls learning moments. Its title makes the book's central claim: that the practices he describes are simple enough for anyone to follow, if they are willing to.

Ridge had earlier written Helping People Win at Work (2009) with Blanchard, describing WD-40's approach to performance reviews.

Implication: look for the leadership practices that depend on consistency and humility rather than brilliance, since those are the ones anyone can adopt.

Learning moments

At WD-40, Ridge changed the language the company used about mistakes. Instead of failure, people spoke of learning moments: outcomes, positive or negative, that should be shared openly so that everyone could learn from them.

The aim was to remove the fear attached to mistakes. In many companies, people hide errors because admitting them is punished. That means the organization never learns from them, and the same mistakes are repeated elsewhere.

The book connects this to psychological safety: people learn and contribute fully only when they are not afraid of being blamed or humiliated for honest errors. Ridge argues that a leader creates this safety through daily behavior, including the way they respond when someone brings bad news.

The mechanism is that information about mistakes is valuable only if it travels, and it travels only when telling it is safe.

Implication: when someone reports a mistake, respond in a way that makes the next person more willing to report one, and ask what the organization can learn.

I don't know

Ridge argues that the three most important words a leader can learn are "I don't know." The book's title points to this attitude, which he has jokingly called dumbassery: the willingness to admit ignorance and ask questions rather than pretend to have all the answers.

A leader who never admits not knowing teaches everyone else to hide their ignorance too. People then guess rather than ask, and problems go unsolved because no one will admit they do not understand them.

By admitting what they do not know, Ridge argues, chief executives give everyone in the company permission to do the same, and make learning part of the culture rather than a sign of weakness.

The mechanism is that people copy the behavior of those with power. A leader's candor about the limits of their own knowledge sets the standard for everyone else.

Implication: say "I don't know" when it is true, especially in front of the people who report to you.

The tribe

WD-40 describes its employees as a tribe rather than a team. The distinction, for Ridge, is about belonging. A team is assembled to accomplish a task and disbanded afterward; a tribe is a community that people belong to, with shared values, rituals and a sense of looking after one another.

He argues that the desire to belong is one of the strongest human motives, and that a company that meets it earns a commitment from its people that pay alone cannot buy. The company reports very high levels of employee engagement in its own surveys, in the range of 90 percent or more.

The mechanism is that people work harder and stay longer when they feel they belong to something, and they look after colleagues they see as members of the same community.

Implication: ask whether the people you lead feel they belong to the group or are merely assigned to it, and what would change if they did.

Ranked values

Most companies list their values. WD-40 ranks them. Its values are numbered in order of priority, so that when two conflict, people know which one takes precedence. The first is doing the right thing. Others include creating positive, lasting memories in all relationships, making things better than they are today, and succeeding as a tribe while excelling as individuals.

The point of the ranking is to make values useful in decisions. A list of equal values gives no guidance when, for instance, serving a customer conflicts with the company's short-term profit. A ranking lets people decide without asking permission.

Ridge treats the values as the framework within which people are free to act. Leaders who make the values clear and consistent can give their people more freedom, because the values guide the choices.

Implication: if your organization's values conflict in practice, decide which comes first and say so, so people can act on them without waiting for instructions.

Limits

Its evidence comes largely from the company itself. The engagement figures are WD-40's own survey results, and the claims about the company's growth in market value come from Ridge, so the book's case rests on numbers that have not been independently checked.
It cannot separate culture from circumstance. WD-40 is a dominant, single-brand business with strong pricing power, and the book offers no way to tell how much of its success came from culture rather than its brand and market.
Much of it is not new. Its core ideas, including learning moments, the tribe and ranked values, repeat Ridge's earlier book and many years of talks, and the reviews so far come mainly from his admirers.

Principles — another chief executive's system for learning from mistakes, built on radical transparency.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things — a chief executive's account of leadership through crises rather than culture.
How to Win Friends and Influence People — the older advice on leading through appreciation rather than criticism.