Shane Parrish

He gives Johnson the East Coast, tells him to open a store, then a factory, and he has zero manufacturing experience.

He puts Woodle in charge of operations, and he has no experience.

And then Phil gets out of the way.

He trusted them implicitly.

He later said he was adhering to the wisdom of General Patton.

Don't tell people how to do things.

Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results.

And because he trusted them with autonomy, they rewarded him with devotion.

They were a band of misfits who had walked through fire for each other and for the company, and not because he paid them well, because he didn't, at least not for years.

Instead, he saw something in each of them that the world had missed, and they spent the rest of their careers proving him right.

And while Knight was off building his team, Bowerman was doing what Bowerman always did.

He was tinkering.

And one Sunday morning in 1971, he's having breakfast with his wife and he can't stop staring at her waffle iron.

And he has an idea.

What if he poured rubber into it?

What if those little waffle squares became treads on a shoe sole?

So he grabs the waffle iron, takes it into his workshop, and starts experimenting.

And of course, he ruins the waffle iron.

While his wife is not happy, what comes out of that experiment totally changes the company.

The waffle sole grips the ground better than anything on the market.