Elliott Hill has a habit that shows up both at Nike and in his personal life: when something becomes too big, he tries to reduce it to a few things.
Someone once told him that four principles might be too many, because by the time you get to the fourth, you have already forgotten the first. Hill did not entirely buy the idea. If four are needed, he replied, then four it is. He does not think there is a formula for this. What is clear is that he tends to organize almost everything that way: Nike’s strategy, its sustainability agenda, the first slides he presented as CEO and even the system he created twenty years ago to organize his family life.
He joined Nike in 1988 and left in 2020, after 32 years. He thought that chapter was over. But on October 14, 2024, he returned as president and CEO of a company with around 78,000 employees in 190 countries. And when he explains what he wants to do now, he almost always ends up relying on a handful of numbers.
That 80% represents the people who, according to Hill, are unlikely to end up buying directly from Nike. They would rather go to a store, look at different options and compare brands.
That number explains much of what he is trying to fix. Even before the pandemic, Nike had been pushing direct sales in order to depend less on intermediaries, but the plan was to make the shift gradually.
The pandemic changed the timing. Production slowed, demand soared and stores closed. Hill was already out of the company, and the team shifted a large share of sales to Nike’s own channels to protect cash flow. At the time, it worked.
The problem came when stores reopened. Nike had given up space, and other brands had already taken it. It lost market share and something harder to measure as well: it was no longer as present in front of consumers.
Hill now wants to win some of that ground back and find a better balance between Nike’s own stores and wholesale partners.
The broader environment is not helping. Tariffs are expected to cost Nike around US$1.5 billion during the fiscal year. To spread the impact, the company shifted production, renegotiated with wholesalers and adjusted some prices. But it did not do so indiscriminately: during the back-to-school period, for example, it chose to keep prices unchanged.
The number 12 appears several times in his story.
In Europe, Hill once managed a team of twelve people from eight nationalities. There he had to get used to working with people who thought, made decisions and did business in very different ways. He says those were the best five years of his life and that the experience completely changed the way he viewed Nike outside the United States.
Twelve is also the number of national teams the brand sponsors at the World Cup and the number of sports around which it reorganized product development.
Nike used to divide much of that work among men, women and kids. Hill says it made sense on paper, but in practice it could leave a designer facing an enormous category without knowing where to begin.
The new model, which Nike calls sport offense, organizes the business around sports again: running, basketball, football, golf, tennis and so on, until reaching twelve. Each discipline has its own team, bringing together people from different areas and maintaining direct contact with athletes.
Running was one of the first categories to test the change. Nike has now posted three consecutive quarters of growth there.
Four are the quadrants Hill began using to organize his life long before he imagined that he would one day return as CEO.
He was under forty, his career was moving forward, he had a wife and children, and he felt there was not enough room for everything. A colleague in Human Resources recommended Halftime, a book that suggests looking at life as a game of two halves and asking how you want to play the second one.
Hill took the idea fairly seriously. He wrote something like a personal mission statement, thought about how he wanted to spend his time and divided his priorities among family, friends and personal growth.
Then he started making lists.
He says making the lists was the easy part. The hard part came afterward: drawing a line and accepting that not everything could fit. There simply was not enough time for everything.
Once that was clear, he sat down with his assistant and began putting those priorities into his calendar. A meeting at his children’s school had its place just like any work commitment. He says he still organizes himself that way.
By the time he retired in 2020, he had flown four million miles, closed 114 quarters and spent seven years with direct responsibility for financial results. He had spent decades moving from one target to the next, always with another number and another deadline ahead.
People, planet and play.
That is how Nike summarizes its impact agenda. On people, the focus is on how those who work for the company are treated, from offices to factories. On play, the goal is to get more children involved in sports: by 2030, Nike wants to reach 20 million girls and train one million coaches.
On planet, Hill goes back to something more basic: if temperatures rise and water becomes scarce, playing sports becomes harder too.
To show how that eventually turns into a product, he points to the World Cup jerseys. They use Aero-FIT, a technology that is 20% more breathable than Dri-FIT and, for the first time, made using textile-to-textile recycling.
But for Hill, the order matters. First the jersey has to look good, then it has to perform, and only then does sustainability come into the equation. If it fails at the first or second step, he says, nobody is going to buy it simply because it is sustainable.
The slides from his first day.
The first said that Nike is a sports and growth company. That was deliberate. When Hill returned, he found people talking about Nike as a technology company, which was understandable after years of investment in that area. Hill wanted to reset the order: technology can be a tool, but it is not what defines Nike.
The second slide said that Nike exists to serve athletes. And to explain what he means by athlete, Hill goes back to a line from Bill Bowerman, one of the company’s founders: if you have a body, you are an athlete.
Hill takes that definition all the way because, for him, Nike’s potential market is not limited to runners, football players or basketball players. It is eight billion people.
The one rule he repeats regardless of the question is to put the athlete at the center of every decision.
Hill makes that fairly concrete. In a meeting, he says, everyone arrives with their own targets, interests and internal battles. To get past that, he always comes back to the same questions: what problem are we trying to solve, and for whom? He wants to hear from everyone, but he also wants it to be clear who has the final say and who is there to contribute.
There is another question he uses as a measure, both for himself and for the company: what do you do when nobody is watching?
Then comes everything else: competitors that barely mattered ten years ago, Jordan generating more than US$7 billion on its own, an advisory board that meets every three months with Michael Jordan and almost weekly calls with Phil Knight. Hill compares the change ahead of him to turning an aircraft carrier. None of it moves quickly.
That is why he makes lists.
