Katherine Rosman's Experience of Chip Wilson

Punctuality is a strong indicator of personal integrity.
[...]

He turned to one of the women and asked, “If you woke up with amnesia and couldn’t remember your name, what would you call yourself?”

“Stephanie,” the woman answered, before mentioning that it was a name her parents had considered giving her.

Mr. Wilson rejected her response. If she had amnesia, he reasoned, she wouldn’t know that she even had parents, much less that they had almost named her Stephanie. “With amnesia,” he said, “you have no past. Your name could be Refrigerator. This is about ultimate possibility.”
[...]
They sat down at a square table. Mr. Wilson mentioned that he likes square tables. “I have been studying communication for a very long time,” he said, by way of explanation.
[...]
“A new business is like a baby,” Mr. Wilson said. “It cries, it’s puking, it’s 24 hours a day and sometimes you don’t know why you did it. But then you give it a bath and put some powder on it and you can’t believe how beautiful it is.”
[...]
On the sidewalk, Mr. Wilson broached again the subject of time. “I was a competitive swimmer from the ages of 8 to 25,” he said. “You have to be right on time. You are so scheduled.”

When he stopped swimming, he let go of the schedule. “Then I showed up nowhere on time,” he said. “And then I realized I had no friends left because no one could rely on me. Then I went to Landmark. It took me three years to bring my integrity back into play.”

We sat down in a dark nook of Mercer Kitchen. Mr. Wilson ordered sparkling water. I ordered still water. “The trend is moving back to still, isn’t it,” he said. “I love trends.”

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