Kevin Plank Is Betting Almost $1 Billion That Under Armour Can Beat Nike

Kevin Plank built Under Armour into a $4 billion behemoth. He's just spent almost $1 billion to get into an entirely new business. Can this decade's most unlikely tech startup beat Nike?

- Tom Foster

“Have you seen Kevin’s whiteboards?”

If you spend any time at Under Armour head quarters, you’ll hear that question again and again. Founder and CEO Kevin Plank really likes whiteboards,and his favorite use for them is to write out leadership maxims for his team. Inside and outside his office, whole walls of floor-to-ceiling whiteboards contain dozens of curt principles he’s scrawled over the years: Expedite the inevitable. Perfection is the enemy of innovation. Respect everyone fear no one.

These commandments are meant not as simple inspiration or hard rules, he says, but together make up a system of “guardrails” that allow everyone under him to operate as entrepreneurs by channeling his thinking. The Plank principles are drilled into new employees during a weeklong orientation, and they’re painted all over the hallways at company headquarters, a former Procter & Gamble factory on the Baltimore waterfront. Think like an entrepreneur. Create  like an innovator. Perform like a teammate.

Plank has the affect and intensity of a head coach—direct eye contact, military analogies, the air of someone you do not want to disappoint. “Winning is a part of our culture—it’s who we are,” he says in his lofty office overlooking the harbor. (The only artwork behind his desk: a giant UA logo, its letters stacked to evoke arms raised in victory.) “And culture is formed on habits. Perhaps the most important guardrail, and the company’s official mission, is seeking to “make all athletes better.” It has long equaled thinking about clothes as high-performance gear, but recently it’s taken on a big new meaning.