Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I think this is a David Senra saying that the CEOs and the founders of these companies that we cover, that he covers, they are the Genghis Khans of our time. Phil doesn't present as a Genghis Khan, but he still is. Deep down underneath all that introvert, he has that same drive that John Rockefeller had, that an Elon Musk has, that a Mark Zuckerberg has. This unbelievably competitive spirit is the founding element of Nike's culture that permeates to this day. At Nike, you play to win. I think everyone shows up to work, and you wear Nike stuff, and you don't ever wear any of the competitors. Not to, hey, I want to try out this stuff. It's like, hey, we don't do that here, that's playing for the other team, get off the other team, you're on our team. You wake up every day, and you show up to go to work, and kick your competitors' asses. Sometimes that takes them to questionable places that we'll talk about later in the episode. But Nike is among the most competitive cultures in the world. It's funny. You say Nike there as founding principles because Nike isn't going to come for quite a while here. While Phil is making this train trip down to Kobe, he suddenly has a realization. His plan is he's going to show up at the door. He's going to say that he's an American businessman, a distributor, and he wants to distribute their shoes in America, literally his business plan from the GSB class. He doesn't have a company though, and he doesn't have a name for the company, so he has to think fast and come up with a name. There are multiple conflicting stories about where the name comes from. The one that Phil tells is that the name Blue Ribbon Sports comes from him, thinking back to his childhood days becoming a track athlete in middle school in high school. He talks about he got cut from the baseball team, and his mom encouraged him to go out for track, and then the blue ribbons that he won at his track meets really helped define his personality.…

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