Running with Purpose

How Brooks Outpaced Goliath Competitors to Lead the Pack

Jim Weber

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781400231706
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Culture sur le lieu de travail

Discover how Brooks Running Company CEO Jim Weber transformed a failing business into a billion-dollar brand in the ultracompetitive global running market.

Running with Purpose is a leadership memoir with insights, inspirational stories, and tangible takeaways for current and aspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, and the 150+ million runners worldwide and those in the broader running community who continually invest in themselves.

This leadership memoir starts with Jim Weber's seventh-grade dream to run a successful company that delivered something people passionately valued. Fast forward to 2001, Jim became the CEO of Brooks and, as the struggling brand's fourth CEO in two years, he faced strong headwinds. A lifelong competitor, Jim devised a one-page strategy that he believed would not only save the company but would also lay the foundation for Brooks to become a leading brand in the athletic, fitness, and outdoor categories. To succeed, he had to get his team to first believe it was possible and then employ the conviction, fortitude, and constancy of purpose to outperform larger brands. Brooks' success was validated when Warren Buffett made it a standalone Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary in 2012. In the pages of Running with Purpose, you will find:

• Brooks' bold strategy and unique brand positioning that fueled its move from the back of the pack to lead.
• The key to building a purpose-driven brand that is oriented around customer obsession, building trust, competing with heart, and having fun along the way.
• The six clear leadership lessons Jim has learned along his path and applies at Brooks to develop staff into authentic leaders.
• How Berkshire Hathaway's support and influence provided a tailwind for Brooks' business and brand to surge.
• An inside look at the ups and downs of Jim's personal journey, which led to his conviction that life is too short not to enjoy what you do and the people by your side.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Stumbling Out of the Blocks

It’s 1963, I am three years old, and I am running. My mom, brothers, sisters, aunts, and cousins are having a backyard picnic.

I am just running.

I was one of those kids who was always inside his own head, presenting myself as shy and introverted. I’d run around that backyard, trying to soak it all in. I was one of six kids, all born within eight years of one another, in an extended family with thirty-seven cousins, all within six miles. Age-wise, I was kind of in the middle, a tweener. The truth is I never felt that I fit in. I do not recall a happy, settled childhood. Looking back, I may have been running around in circles in that backyard, but within a few years there would be days when I would want to run away.

We lived in the working-class suburb of North St. Paul, Minnesota, twenty minutes from Minneapolis and twenty minutes from the Saint Croix River on the Wisconsin border. To many, that’s the middle of nowhere. To me, it’s home.

My dad built our small house just before I was born. What I remember most is that it had a red brick fireplace, a swing set, and a sandbox out in the backyard. I slept in a basement bedroom with my two brothers. My mom was reliably a glass-half-full person with a welcoming, empathetic presence and a ready smile for everyone in her life.

Dad was the opposite. I could sense his mood, which often seemed stressed, bitter, and unhappy. Though he was most often a glass-half-empty kind of guy, growing up I saw his glass filled with Canadian whiskey and soda. He started around 9:00 a.m., refilled it throughout the day, and always had one at dinnertime. This was his daily routine. Alcohol was always in his system. My mom and dad didn’t exactly balance each other out. I witnessed two clearly distinct approaches to engaging people and the energy you create from the attitude you carry in daily life.

The Weber home was chaotic, to say the least. Uncertainty, negativity, stress, and fear shaped my early life. I mostly kept to myself—thinking, worrying, imagining, and dreaming. It didn’t help that I was a bed-wetter. This was a painful and embarrassing issue for me as a child. I would wake up many mornings soaking wet. My mom would have to scramble to clean my sheets, dry out the bed, and somehow make me presentable for school. This was on top of caring for my two younger sisters, creating six custom lunches (each with our names lovingly written on the front), and getting us all out the door. My lunch, every day, consisted of Tastee Bakery white bread, Skippy and Welch’s PB&J, Old Dutch chips, and homemade chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies. But getting off to the right start didn’t always happen.

One morning in second grade, my teacher was in the middle of a lesson for first period when she paused, stepped back, and asked if someone in the room had wet their pants. Fear and shame ran down my spine. I knew I was the guilty one. The odor from the previous night lingered. I did not raise my hand. Frozen in place, I was terrified she was going to walk the aisles and call me out in front of the class. Maybe everyone already knew it was me. I had no idea. I never saw a doctor about it. But the Mayo Clinic, just south of our home, lists stress and anxiety as the number-one risk factor for chronic childhood bed-wetting.

During my childhood, I can’t remember seeing my dad happy (unless he had had too much to drink), but I later learned that had not always been the case. A year before he died at age eighty-four, he and my mom shared their stories over dinner with just me. This was to be our first real conversation, ever.

He had played football in high school, hunted, and fished with his dad. After graduation, he enrolled at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul with the idea of becoming an engineer. He loved to build things and had worked on construction crews as a kid. Building things was clearly his happy place. Ultimately, though, college was not a fit. Dad went back to construction, running crews until he was drafted to join the Army during the Korean War. Fortunately, his knowledge of drafting and engineering was just enough to keep him out of harm’s way on a bridge-building crew. After a two-year stint in the Army, he briefly returned to construction, but then his father died unexpectedly. We suspected regular consumption of alcohol was a contributing factor.

Family Business

Beginning in the 1940s, my grandfather ran Weber’s Supper Club, a twelve-lane bowling alley, bar, nightclub, and restaurant. The business was successful, and just as they took on debt to expand into a brand-new building, my grandfather died. My grandmother asked my dad to come into the business, so he left his construction business at age twenty-three. The club was a daily struggle both for my dad and my grandmother. For the next forty years, it was his entire life. Running a bar, of course, made alcohol available to him all day, every day. I remember being there one morning doing my job rolling quarters, dimes, and nickels from the vending machines to be brought to the bank, when a customer came into the bar at 9:00 a.m. and said, “Good morning all!”

My dad didn’t respond, but my grandmother looked up with a scowl and asked bitterly, “What’s good about it?” The negativity of that response shook me then, and still does. Life seemed too short to be that sad, angry, or bitter, especially at the start of the day.

My mother and her side of the family, the Schaefers, were social, happy, welcoming, and positive people. I have a lot of Weber in my persona, but I always wanted to be happy and connected to people like my grandmother on the Schaefer side. I wanted to draw people to me, not push them away. Years later, as the CEO of Brooks, we all took the Insights Discovery test: blue for precise and focused; red for decisive and assertive; green for connected and caring; yellow for outgoing and engaging. I’ve been a yellow “wannabe” my entire life.

In the Myers-Briggs world, I’m an introvert who wants to be an extrovert. A work forever in progress, I remind myself every day that attitude is a choice, and open, optimistic, positive people are magnetic to others.

By age ten, I had begun to figure out a few things about myself. I had started skating and playing hockey on our street and the nearby ponds and rinks with cousins and friends from school and the neighborhood. I’d go to their homes afterward, in part to avoid my dad’s unpredictability. That was when I began to notice a distinct difference between the relaxed, calm, happy, and engaging people at their homes, and the gray clouds and need to walk on eggshells at mine.

I ended up building my own world. Outside of sports, I spent a lot of time alone. I especially loved to take things apart and build new things in my dad’s garage workshop. I had chemistry sets, erector sets, Legos, and the like. I worked on my bike. Often I went to the library to take out books on electronics. I built my own crystal radio and experimented with light circuits. I blew up many light bulbs plugging them into 120-volt sockets. Later, my brother and I would rebuild his 1967 Chevrolet Bel Air into our version of a cool streetcar, and I would build tower speakers for my stereo from handcrafted, solid oak cabinets to wiring woofers, crossovers, and tweeters that could play Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” very loud. I loved understanding how things worked. This was a key ingredient in becoming an admirer and connoisseur of great product design.

In seventh grade I was fortunate to have a teacher who challenged me to learn from others and dream about my future. My English class was taught by Mrs. McGrath. She handed out daily assignments on the “Thought for the Day” that exposed us to great authors, philosophers, or artists and had us reviewing their genre and their greatest works. Then she challenged us with a paper that ended up giving me the focus and the nudge I needed. Mrs. McGrath asked us to write an essay on five different career scenarios for ourselves. Of course, like any self-respecting Minnesota kid, I picked “professional hockey player.” I wrote about a hockey hero, Bobby Hull, who described how he got bored between practices and games, so I wrote that I’d also need a “sideline,” perhaps a small business.

In addition to hockey player, I chose business manager, neurosurgeon, research scientist, and stockbroker. In Mr. Fulton’s seventh-grade math class, we did stock-picking exercises and tracked the stocks’ performances over time. I picked Arrow Electric and began to dream of becoming president of a company like that. My dad’s brother was the president of a major construction company. In fact, his company built the St. Paul Civic Center, a 16,000-seat arena that hosted the World Hockey Association’s Minnesota Fighting Saints and every state high school hockey tournament. Several of my friends’ parents who ran successful businesses seemed happy and certainly were not struggling. I had the inkling that I wanted to be like them.

Thanks to those middle school English and math classes, I had a clear goal to add to my hockey dreams. I would get an MBA and one day become president of a company.

Still, there was my total immersion in hockey.

Hockey Dreams

Hockey is a fast and physical game, and it also requires finesse, precision, skill, power, synchronistic team play, and fluidity. I first learned to skate on a postage-stamp-sized rink in a neighbor’s yard. Eventually, I could seemingly skate forever over interlacing ponds and lakes. Minnesotans are fond of bragging that they can shoot the puck a mile. I know this from experience: The first hard freeze before snow is a slice of heaven for a skater. I’ve had to retrieve errant pucks that were driven by a slap shot to the other side of a lake.

In winter, everyone I knew skated on the ponds and local rinks. Youth Hockey was wildly popular. My goal became to go to Hill-Murray School, a local Catholic high school known for its hockey dynasty. My plan was to make the hockey team and then compete in the three-day, televised state championship at the St. Paul Civic Center. I dreamed of playing in the University of Minnesota Gopher hockey program, the Minnesota North Stars of the NHL, and, naturally, Team USA in the Olympics.

For me, hockey became an obsession. I put everything I had into it. I played on squirt, pee-wee, bantam, plus school teams, often on premier traveling teams and always in summer leagues. My mom drove me to multiple practices every week, some at 6:00 a.m. If she couldn’t, I walked nearly a mile with my gear to Polar Arena on dark winter days or hitched a ride to games with teammates. I was big for my age and started as goalie but transitioned to other positions, eventually finding my spot as left wing.

I fixated on one player in particular who came out of North St. Paul. He went on to have a great high school career and played for the Gophers. He moved effortlessly up and down the ice. With a single flick of his wrist, he could rifle the puck into the upper corner of the net. It didn’t matter whether he was off balance or moving at speed.

I spent hours in my garage trying to master that snapshot. I signed up for every summer league and continued to work on my stick handling to make sure I didn’t leave anything on the ice. I ended up with a decent shot, but despite the hours I still couldn’t deliver it at speed and off balance like he could.

All my siblings attended public school, but I was determined to talk my parents into letting me go to Hill-Murray. I knew family finances were strained, so I put in many hours at Weber’s Supper Club mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, and working the bowling counter. I also got on a commercial roofing crew in the summer to fund most of my tuition. At Hill-Murray, I signed up for football, hockey, and track. Since my dad was six feet two, I assumed I’d continue to grow. As it turned out, my mother’s genes prevailed, and by age fourteen I was fully grown at five feet eight. In team photos, I went from being the tallest kid in the back row to sitting in front. As others kept growing, I was getting comparatively slower each year. In running terms, I didn’t have a cadence issue; I had a stride-length issue.

At Hill-Murray, many of the great hockey players made varsity their freshman year and played all four years. That was my goal. And because I was so fixated on hockey, everything was on the line at that point in my life. To qualify for the later tryouts held on the ice, I first needed to run a sub-six mile on the track. Check. Then I made two of the three cuts when we got on the ice. But when the varsity list was posted, my name was not on it. My heart sank. It is hard to express how catastrophic that was at the time.

I went on to a good year on the junior varsity team and after just three games at the start of my sophomore year I was called up to varsity. My NHL dreams were intact. The school was a powerhouse in hockey. More than twelve teammates went on to Division 1 college hockey. The goalie was Steve Janaszak, who became the backup goalie to Jim Craig on the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” Olympic team. My line mate was Chris Pryor who eventually played in the NHL. I played on a regular shift, typically on third line, for the next three years at Hill-Murray. Each year our aim was to qualify for the state tournament and its enormous audience. It was the most thrilling experience of my life at that time. It seemed like everyone in the state was focused on the teams and players in this high school tournament. If I could distinguish myself as a player on one of the best teams in the state, I would have achieved something.

Each year before the state tournament, we had a team meeting in somebody’s house to prepare mentally for the tournament. Sitting there during my senior year in a large circle, we were each asked to share our thoughts on the opportunity ahead. Given that this was my third state tournament without a championship and my last shot at getting one, I made a plea to everyone to set their minds on winning the championship trophy. Hill-Murray had won plenty of section titles. In previous state tournaments, we went home with third place or the Consolation Trophy. I wanted to win state. My mindset then would prove useful later in life: Winning begins with a belief in its possibility, and if you have a ticket to the game, why not play to win?

The coach echoed my sentiment. It felt good to be out front, challenging our team to be the best. We made an impressive effort but were shut out 1–0 by a great goalie. As for my future sideline, at Hill-Murray I had become class president twice, attended Boys State, was on the student council, wrote for the student newspaper, landed a role in the musical Hello, Dolly!, and was begin...