Hire a CEO intern. Seriously – just do it.

But when he walked into the company’s Midwest regional sales office on his first day on the job, there was only one problem. Hill’s new boss told him it wasn’t exactly a job. It was actually supposed to be a six-month internship.

“Internship?” – he thought.

It was an inauspicious start, but Hill lasted over six months at Nike. In fact, he spent his entire professional career in the same company. He started in 1988 and was promoted every few years for the next few decades. Until his retirement in 2020, he was president of Nike’s consumer division.

But he was recently lured back to his last job – and this time it wasn’t an internship.

He has just been hired as the next CEO.

When John Donahoe abruptly stepped down as Nike’s CEO last week, his ouster marked the end of a difficult period in which the company lost its edge – and billions of dollars in market value. Before becoming CEO, he had never worked at Nike. He is replaced by someone who is his complete opposite.

Hill, a 60-year-old company lifer who calls Nike “a core part of me,” is the latest example of an interesting business archetype: the intern CEO.

Doug McMillon started at Walmart as an hourly associate unloading trailers. Mary Barra worked at General Motors as a student and then took a full-time job on the assembly line, inspecting fenders and hood panels. Christian Klein moved the monitors from the basement of the SAP headquarters to the engineers and programmers upstairs. “And not flat screens,” he told me. “The heavy ones.”

Since then, all three have been associated with their companies. All three currently head these companies.

When Ursula Burns was a summer intern at Xerox in 1980, she had no idea she would one day become CEO.

“I didn’t know we had a CEO,” she told me.

But after earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, Burns began climbing the Xerox corporate ladder. She has worked in research lab, business planning, management, global manufacturing and internal operations. Then she managed the entire company from 2009 to 2016.

Starting at the bottom of a company and working your way to the top has always been an incredible career path. However, it seems almost impossible these days.

The average tenure of U.S. workers has dropped below four years, the lowest in decades, as job changes become more common among talented young workers, according to newly released federal data. Mobility is hot. Loyalty no. Which means trainee directors may be a dying breed.

They may not have first-hand knowledge of how other companies operate, but they do have their own institutional knowledge. They remember which ideas worked and why. They also remember every stupid strategy suggested by people who knew nothing about the company but pretended to know everything. What they lack in perspective, they make up for in experience. Where outsiders see problems, interns see promise. They also have the credibility to sell their vision for change when necessary.

“If you’re going through a change at your company,” Burns said, “having someone who understands the heart and soul of the place is valuable.”

Nike is currently undergoing one such transformation.

As my colleague Inti Pacheco explained, the company has made a number of costly strategic mistakes in recent years, such as moving away from retail stores and toward e-commerce. Meanwhile, increased competition and stifled innovation resulted in meager sales, declining morale and something of an identity crisis for the sneaker giant.

This company founded by runners even missed out on America’s latest running boom. The only thing more blasphemous for Nike would be losing Michael Jordan to Hoka.

Nike lagged under Donahoe, whose experience with the company before the takeover was limited to serving on the board. He spent a formative part of his career at Bain, where he started as a low-profile consultant and later became CEO. He left for top positions at eBay and ServiceNow. Almost five years ago, he traded software for shoes and started running Nike.

In other words, he was the epitome of a consulting CEO. He is replaced by a typical intern CEO.

Hill’s first job out of college was as an entry-level position on the coaching staff of the Dallas Cowboys, where he worked for a year before earning a master’s degree in sports administration. While a graduate student at Ohio University, he took a sports marketing class and wrote an article about one of his favorite brands: Nike.

So when Nike executive Tim Joyce visited campus, Hill made an appointment, put on his best suit and begged for a job. He then tormented Joyce for months. As graduation approached, Hill promised he would never call him again if there was no chance of employment. Otherwise he will keep calling until Joyce says no. He finally said yes on Friday. Hill started on Monday.

“I never told my mom it was an internship,” he said on the Fortitude FW podcast last year. “I told her I was hired.”

Once he got his foot in the door, he never let them lock him in his Nikes. As an intern, he packed boxes in the warehouse and answered phones when the office needed help with customer service. “I did almost everything they asked me to do and then some,” he says.

During this time, he was still paying off his student loans. But thanks to this approach, he turned his internship into a real job as a clothing sales representative. Over the next two years, he put 200,000 miles on his Chrysler minivan.

There was nothing remotely glamorous about the job: the man went to mom-and-pop stores in Texas and Oklahoma selling Lycra.

Hill was so far down the organizational structure and so far from corporate headquarters that it took Nike co-founder Phil Knight a decade to figure out who he was.

Even today, when the topic involves the company’s retired CEO and largest individual shareholder, Hill sounds like an intern ready to fetch the coffee. In a respectful tone, he calls Knight the most inspiring person he has ever met and “someone I have tried my hardest to make proud.” And indeed it happened: Knight himself led the effort to reinstate Hill.

Now the company is in the hands of someone who cares so much about Nike and its culture that he cries when he talks about how much the brand means to him – someone who is willing to do anything asked of him and more.

It worked for Hill as an intern. Perhaps it will work for him as a CEO trainee.

Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected]