Nike's Mark Parker brings together extreme talents, whether they're basketball stars, tattooists, or designers obsessed with shoes.

"It still has moon-dust on it."
Mark Parker sounds like a happy kid as he points to an astronaut manual from the Apollo mission inside his glass-topped desk at Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters. Over his shoulder, Keith Richards, at least the version of the Rolling Stones guitarist by German artist Sebastian Krüger, feigns a boozy disinterest. "And here," says Parker, swinging around in his chair, "is Jimi Hendrix's guitar."

It is astonishing to see this shoe designer turned CEO in his natural habitat, surrounded by artwork he has commissioned or collected, mixed in with bits of Nike history, such as the boots Michael Keaton wore in the 1989 hit Batman. Next to Keith Richards is a bas-relief by Missouri sculptor Kris Kuksi. Parker owns three of his pieces, one a blank-check commission. "He just said, 'Do something huge,' " says Kuksi, who met Parker at a gallery show in Philadelphia.

"Being a designer," says Parker, "a lot of the people I hang out with are creatives. I like the eccentricity, to be surprised." Whether artists or athletes, he says he's attracted to people who are "intense, maybe even obsessed." He regularly hosts dinners for about 25 artist friends to just talk and kick around ideas. One that emerged from a get-together at his friend Lance Armstrong's house was "Stages," a recent show of more than 20 commissioned artworks that he and Armstrong cocurated in Paris to benefit the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Another friend, artist Tom Sachs, delighted the crowd with "Lance's Tequila Bike for Girls," a modified Trek bike that dispensed tequila in scatologically named shot glasses. "Irreverence inspires me," smiles Parker, sounding decidedly un -- CEO -- like. And no, he doesn't check Nike's share price daily, fret about 10-Qs, or try to game the news cycle, no matter what messes his athletes get into. Obsessed people make messes. It goes with the territory.

Obsession comes naturally to Parker. As a champion teenage marathoner, he routinely modified his own running shoes in search of better performance. Now, the designs he once called his "delicate creations" are so deeply embedded in the success of the company that he's lost track of the number of patents he holds. One is for Visible Air technology, which he created as a side project; it helped catapult Nike out of the doldrums in the mid-'80s. John McEnroe, Kobe Bryant, Olympic athletes, and your high-school's cross-country star -- he's shod them all. Bryant, fresh from the Lakers' play-off victory and his MVP award in June, describes meeting Parker, then Nike copresident, in 2003 and watching him whip out his notebook to sketch while they talked. "I knew right from that that we were on the same page," Bryant says. "He's not doing things just for innovation's sake. He truly wants to optimize my performance."

Parker isn't an attention-seeking sort of CEO, so until now it has been hard to get a sense of him. But the imprint he is making as CEO is turning out to be as meaningful as his design work. Putting his stamp on Nike as forcefully as the much splashier cofounder Phil Knight did, Parker has reorganized the company into units based on particular sports, "a conscious decision to sharpen each piece of the business so we're not some big fat dumb company," he says; reshuffled its regions to put new emphasis on China and Japan; streamlined the reporting process and removed regional middle management; handled a rare round of layoffs; and weathered yet another scandal involving a high-profile endorser. The company came out of the recent downturn with strong revenue numbers and earnings up 53% for the most recent quarter.

I met with Parker in Beaverton just a few weeks after he and his executive team impressed shareholders and analysts in their first public investor meeting in three years. Parker used some big talk -- "Nike's infinite marketplace" -- to set some big goals: increase sales by more than 40%, to $27 billion by 2015; meet a set of equally ambitious sustainability benchmarks; grow earnings 7% a year; and keep 33,000 employees thinking as nimbly as possible. "It's like a framework as opposed to a process. We need that organic-ness to be an innovative company that's continually challenging itself," he says. He characterizes his challenge as a struggle to mix his right- and left-brain strengths: "It's about balance."

But the sketchbook is never far away. "Always, always, the elite athlete" -- the Jordans, the Bryants, the Armstrongs, whose unparalleled abilities make them ideal lab rats for new products -- "still leads our design. What we learn from them is who we are," he says. Mark Parker, collector, CEO, cobbler to the gods.

Parker is sitting in on a product meeting in Nike's secretive Innovation Kitchen, a think tank for designers where athletic ambition, art, and a bit of mad science are cooked into the stuff that has made Nike the dominant player in sport shoes and apparel. The Kitchen is a free-range creative playpen, with every type of tool, material, machine, toy, instrument, software, game, and inspirational image at the ready. Nike Free, the training shoe that mimics the benefits of running barefoot, was born here. So was Flywire, the ultralight thread system inspired by a suspension bridge that has changed the way shoes are constructed. The Kitchen is so secure that most employees aren't allowed in. The Kitchen and its earlier R&D iterations are also where Parker spent most of his time before he became CEO. "I think his heart is still here," says Michael Donaghu, director of footwear innovation. "He still likes to just pop in and start talking to people about stuff that's on their desks, particularly their side projects. He can't help himself."

On the table in front of Parker is an abundant display of shoes, sandals, gear, and what might be a digital Etch a Sketch that you stand on; at the head of the room, under a drape, waits a shiny prototype of a new image-transfer gizmo that will allow the swift customization of shoes at retailers and special events. Unveiled, it lurches to life after a few false starts; a mildly acrid smell fills the room as the machine's mother shyly explains the process and affixes some art to a sneaker. "It looks like the fortune-teller machine from Big," someone jokes. It does. Parker and the team applaud good-naturedly when the demo actually works. Although the alarm on his watch prompts him to leave after an hour, Parker continues to listen raptly to each presenter, asking questions and studying their wares. Afterward, as I continue the Kitchen tour, I spot him, now very late, perched on the desk of a designer, chatting happily and poking through a pile of midsoles and uppers. "I told you," says Donaghu.

Though Parker later tells us that not everything he saw at the meeting will get a green light, he's careful not to shut people down at meetings. "I prefer to let people share what they're working on. And I don't like to embarrass anyone." He repeats a mantra I hear early and often: Edit and amplify. "I'm trying to amplify the innovation agenda further, and short-list the things that will make the biggest difference. That's an art and a science."

Back in 2003, Phil Knight passed over Parker for the top spot, bringing in an outsider, William Perez, from S.C. Johnson. It was a move that was widely misread as a snub. "It didn't upset me," says Parker, who was part of the team that vetted CEO candidates. "It wouldn't be honest to say that I didn't think about it, though. I trust and respect Phil, so I decided to learn from it." Knight explains that he thought it was time for an outside look. "I'd been CEO for almost 40 years. The company worked around my idiosyncracies so much that they didn't know that they were idiosyncracies anymore." But Nike's unique culture chewed up Perez in less than 18 months. Sandy Bodecker, now VP of Nike global design, was so unhappy on Parker's behalf that he says he "made a vow never to actually meet the guy." They once presented on the same stage -- Perez exiting left as Bodecker entered right. They even stood shoulder to shoulder at the urinals in the men's room. "I chose not to introduce myself," Bodecker smirks. Ultimately, Knight says, "Yeah, it was a mistake. We're not for everyone."

Parker came by Nike honestly, the way that all the early employees got there, as a "running puke" -- "even more extreme than a running geek," he says -- lured by the siren song of an unlimited supply of revolutionary shoes. In the mid-'70s, he was a champion runner for Penn State, part of what was then one of the most scientifically managed track-and-field programs in the country. At 6-foot-4, Parker brushed the scales at 130 pounds. "I looked like a praying mantis," he says. He customized his own shoes by cutting the soles and experimenting with foam and homemade sock liners. He turned, ironically, to sheets of Nike-made waffle-sole material that he got from local shoe-supply shops. "I might run in an Asics Tiger shoe and put a waffle bottom on it," he says. "The cushioning was so much better." He sounds wistful as he recalls his first pair of Nikes. He got them by mail order. "Waffle trainers, red with the white swoosh. I put them on and ..." he trails off.