Free 52 Cups of Coffee: Inspiring and insightful stories for navigating life’s uncertainties by Megan Gebhart Page B

Trials. While there, I bought a book called Out of Nowhere: The Inside Story of How Nike Marketed the Culture of Running —a book that chronicled how the company had begun with Bill Bowerman making shoes with a waffle iron in his garage, then grew into a sportswear giant that significantly changed the world of running.
    As a runner and marketing major, I had a lot of respect for Nike, which I had mentioned to Bill Ward, Cup 9, while carpooling to a conference in Detroit. He asked me the dreaded question I’d been hearing a lot, “So, what are your plans for after college?”
    It was a well-intentioned question I fel t I should have had a good answer for, but I didn’t, so the question always created stress. I settled on telling Bill that I liked Nike, and he mentioned that his friend Stefan Olander worked on the team that developed the Nike+ running system, and he’d be happy to introduce me. I was heading to the West Coast for Thanksgiving, so the timing was perfect. After a few emails among the three of us, I had a meeting setup with Stefan at the Nike World Headquarters in Oregon.
    * * *
    The meeting was on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It was a frosty morning, and, despite the Nike campus feeling deserted due to many employees being gone for the holiday, the place was as impressive as I had expected. I met Stefan in the Jerry Rice building, and we walked across the street to the cafeteria. Bill had told me Stefan had been born in Sweden, so as we stood in line to order, I asked how long he had been in the United States. “Six years,” he said as he began to explain the series of events that had led to his current position. By the time we had our drinks and found a place to sit, I’d learned that the Nike Headquarters hadn’t even been Stefan’s anticipated destination.
    He had originally wanted to be a ski guide in the Alps; a fter earning a degree in engineering, he hit the slopes, leading tours while working at a ski store on the side. His boss at the shop had taken a job working with a then-young company called Nike and convinced Stefan to follow suit.
    After a few years working the Nordic division, and a few courses in marketing, Nike moved Stefan and his family to Holland, to work with brand management for a five-country region. This happened when the Internet was just starting to gain traction, and Nike had one website it used for all of its regions. The strategy hadn’t made any sense to Stefan. He understood how Europeans had different tastes than Americans, so he and his team had taken on the task of rolling out customized websites for each region.
    Stefan ’s success with the new technology helped him build a reputation as a leader in digital marketing and landed him his current job in Portland: Vice President of Digital Sports. That included work with Nike+, Ballers Network, and Nike’s latest installment of digital awesomeness: Nike Grid in London. It wasn’t where he had expected he’d be when he left college, but he had followed his passion and ended up with a job he loved.
    Stefan had a laid-back disposition, a healthy perspective on life, interesting background, and clearly a creative mind. I knew his rise through the ranks inevitably taught him a lot, so I asked him what advice he would give the 22-year-old version of himself.
    It took him a minute to answer the question. I got the i mpression he appreciated both the good and bad in life as necessary steps of his journey, and that he didn’t have many regrets. But he finally decided on an answer, and I will never forget what he said, “I am certain I could have achieved the same level of success without working so hard.”
    He explained he had never minded working hard—that ’s a prerequisite; he was talking about pushing himself and the people working with him too hard—like a radio dial turned a few notches past the prime spot. If he could have adjusted the dial to find the right balance of effort, he would have been more