Hire the intern as CEO. Seriously—Just Do It.

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. After the call that would transform his life, Elliott Hill hung up the pay phone, stuffed everything he owned in his car and drove from Ohio to Tennessee so he could start his dream job at Nike. But when he walked into the company’s Midwest regional sales office for his first day of work, there was just one problem.

Hill’s new boss told him that it wasn’t exactly a job. It was actually going to be a six-month internship. “An internship?" he thought.

It was an inauspicious start, but Hill lasted longer than six months at Nike. In fact, he would spend his entire career at the same company. He started in 1988 and got promoted every few years for the next few decades.

By the time he retired in 2020, he was president of Nike’s consumer division. But he was recently lured back for one last job—and this time, it wasn’t an internship. He was just hired as the next CEO.

When John Donahoe abruptly stepped down as Nike’s chief executive last week, his ouster marked the end of a rough stretch in which the company lost its edge—and billions of dollars in market value. Before he was named CEO, he’d never worked at Nike. He’s being replaced by someone who’s basically his exact opposite.

Hill, a 60-year-old company lifer who calls Nike “a core part of who I am," is the latest example of a curious business archetype: the Intern CEO. Doug McMillon started at Walmart as an hourly associate unloading trailers. Mary Barra worked for General Motors as a student before she took a full-time job on the assembly line inspecting fenders and hood panels.

Christian Klein hauled monitors from the basement of SAP’s headquarters to the engineers and developers upstairs. “And not flat screens," he told me. “The heavy