Nike’s CEO has a habit he has never lost: looking at what sneakers people are wearing. He walks into a room, looks down and starts counting. He did it while working at the company and kept doing it during the four years he was retired. It was by watching what was happening on the street rather than looking at balance sheets that he began to notice something had changed at Nike.
Elliott Hill joined Nike in 1988, when the company was still heavily focused on the United States and made most of its business from footwear. He left in 2020, after 32 years, convinced that his time there was over. Four years later he returned, this time as president and CEO.
That time away ended up changing the way he looked at the company. Hill says those four years changed how he sees Nike today and also influenced the way he decided to run it when he came back.
First half
He grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Austin, Texas, with his mother. As a child, he moved from one sport to another depending on the season, and much of his life revolved around them. Over time, he came to see sports as a second home.
He was not good enough to play Division I college sports, so he worked as an athletic trainer and paid his way through school. He knew he wanted to be part of the sports world but had no idea what that meant in practical terms. His first step was with the Dallas Cowboys. He then went to graduate school and eventually joined Nike.
The lesson he took from that period, and one he often repeats to students, is fairly simple: first decide which direction you want to go and do not expect your first job to be perfect. The Cowboys were not his final destination, but they opened the door.
At Nike, he worked across sales, retail and brand, both in the United States and Europe. Over time, he became president of Consumer and Marketplace, with much of Nike and Jordan’s commercial and marketing business under his responsibility. By then, the company was generating more than US$40 billion a year in revenue.
By the mid-1990s, he had started insisting on one thing: he wanted to work outside the United States. Beginning in 1996, he used every annual performance review to ask for an international assignment. Europe, Hong Kong or anywhere else would do. He saw more and more of Nike’s business coming from outside the United States and wanted to be part of that side of the company. He ended up spending almost five years in Europe.
There he eventually led a team of twelve people from eight different nationalities. He had to adjust to different ways of working, making decisions and doing business. He remembers those nearly five years as the best of his life and as the period when he truly understood what it meant to work for a global company.
When he retired in 2020, he had flown four million miles, closed 114 quarters and spent seven years directly responsible for business results. He had spent decades working toward goals, numbers and deadlines that always seemed to start again.
The next four years were different. He returned to his hometown after 39 years, put together a baseball team —he plays first base—, organized a music festival and created a nonprofit organization. And, for the first time in decades, he was able to look at Nike from the outside. Without access to internal data, he watched the same things any consumer would: which brands were gaining ground, which new products were appearing and which ones were starting to disappear from the streets.
According to Hill, seeing the company from the other side of the counter was one of the most useful things he brought back with him.
Another method goes back much further, to when he was under forty and felt there was not enough room for everything: work, his wife, his children and growing responsibilities. A Human Resources colleague recommended Halftime, a book built around a simple question: if life had two halves, how would you want to play the second?
Hill applied the same logic to his life that he would use with a business. He created a personal plan with priorities for family, friends and his own development. He made lists, set limits and decided what would stay out. Then he put everything on the calendar, including school meetings. He still organizes his life that way.
The diagnosis he brought back to Nike revolves around one number.
Before the pandemic, Nike had already been pushing direct-to-consumer sales to reduce its dependence on third parties. The original idea was to move gradually and see how far that shift could go without disrupting the rest of the business.
The pandemic accelerated everything. Manufacturing stopped, demand surged and physical retail closed. Hill was already gone, and the team did what it had to do to protect cash: it pushed business toward the direct channel. It worked.
The problem appeared when stores reopened. Nike had left shelf space behind and other brands had already taken it. The company lost market share and something harder to measure: its presence in consumers’ minds.
Hill now starts from a fairly concrete figure: 80% of people do not buy directly from the brand. They prefer to compare, look at different options and find several brands in the same place. That is why Nike is trying to restore the balance between its own sales channels and wholesale partners.
The second change is organizational and affects how products are designed.
The previous structure divided much of the business into men, women and children. It made sense on paper, but Hill says it left designers without a clear reference for which product to create first.
The new structure, known inside Nike as sport offense, organizes products around twelve sports. Each sport has its own team, with different profiles and direct contact with the people who practice it, from runners and basketball players to golfers and tennis players. Each also faces a different group of competitors.
Running was the first test, and the company has publicly reported three consecutive quarters of growth in the category.
His first slide as CEO, on October 14, 2024, said Nike is a sports company and a growth company. The second said it exists to serve athletes. His definition of an athlete comes from cofounder Bill Bowerman and is deliberately broad: if you have a body, you are an athlete. Eight billion people.
The broader environment is not helping either. Tariffs are expected to cost Nike around US$1.5 billion during the fiscal year and will hit results directly. The company has tried to spread the impact through price increases, agreements with wholesale partners and production changes, although Hill acknowledges that a bill of that size cannot be absorbed all at once.
Some of it eventually reached prices, but not at every moment. During the back-to-school season, for example, the company decided not to raise them.
There were also layoffs, and Hill made a personal bet: he bought more than US$1 million worth of Nike shares.
Aero-FIT
Hill organizes sustainability around three areas: people, planet and play. His point is concrete: with more heat and less water, playing sports also becomes harder. By 2030, Nike wants to bring 20 million girls into physical activity and train one million coaches.
To show how that idea reaches the product, Hill points to the World Cup jerseys. They use Aero-FIT, a technology that is 20% more breathable than Dri-FIT and was designed for playing in high temperatures. For the first time, they are also made using textile-to-textile recycled material.
Hill puts the priorities in a specific order: first, it has to be a product people want to wear; then it has to perform; only after that does sustainability come in. If it does not work in that order, he says, it will not sell.
Second half
Nike enters the World Cup sponsoring twelve national teams, with around 78,000 employees in 190 countries and its own laboratory dedicated to sports performance research. Jordan alone generates more than US$7 billion in revenue and has an advisory council that meets every three months with Michael Jordan. Hill, meanwhile, speaks almost every week with 88-year-old Phil Knight, whom he still considers his mentor.
And Nike now faces competitors that either did not exist or posed little threat ten years ago: Adidas gaining ground in fashion, and On and Hoka pushing hard in running.
When Hill returned, he shared his personal email address with every employee and answered every message. He is cautious about timing: the company itself acknowledges that it is in cleanup and reset mode, and Hill warns that the problems will not be fixed overnight. His image is that of turning an aircraft carrier.
Years ago, when his name first began to emerge as a possible successor, Coca-Cola’s CEO gave him a warning: at a global company, the work never really stops because something is always happening somewhere. Hill thought about it and withdrew from the race. This time, he accepted without asking for time to study the numbers. And he says that warning turned out to be right.
If he were given one free week with no obligations, he says he would spend it with his family in the Dolomites. It is on the list.
