IMAGINE THAT you grow up, literally, in the hotel industry. Your parents run an iconic pub and boutique hotel in Washington, D.C., where you spend your teenage summers cleaning rooms and working the checkout desk. After college, you intern at Hilton, go to business school, and then join the finance department of Marriott International, the largest hotel company in the world.
Over the next 25 years, you rise through the ranks to become one of Marriott’s most senior executives, and its highest-ranking woman, telling Fortune in 2015 that “anyone can make it to the top here if you work really hard.” And by 2021, when you’re named one of two executives sharing the duties of acting CEO and likely in line to become the next chief executive, it seems like your lifelong devotion to this industry is about to pay off.
And then you don’t get the job. What do you do next?
For Stephanie Linnartz—the former president of Marriott, and now the CEO of struggling sportswear company Under Armour—the answer was: Find one of the biggest turnaround jobs out there, and get back to work.
“Why things happen, we don’t ever know for sure,” she tells me during an interview at the new corner office that she’s still settling into, overlooking Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. “But life’s all about timing—and I always had this idea that the rewards of taking risks are, the great majority of the time, worth it.”
On the surface, Linnartz’s decision to jump to a bro-y sportswear retailer seems like an odd fit for an executive who’s spent her career in luxury hotels. It even required a personal-style pivot: At Marriott, “I wore dresses and high heels every day,” she reminisces, but during our interview she sports her new executive uniform of Under Armour sneakers and a
