Shoe Dog - Phil Knight
There was a time, a long long time ago, when Nike was an indie brand…
It’s really easy to think that the world has always been the way that we see it now. Why would anyone naturally think anything else? It takes effort and exposure to recognize that the world is NOT only what you see but it was very different in a thousand and one ways for a million and one years.
This memoir from Phil Knight is a beautiful little glimmer of this kind that provides a look into the athletic equipment world before it turned into the Nike-dominated world that I grew up in. Obviously Nike started somewhere - it wasn’t always the company that sponsored Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But the origin story that Knight weaves is begging to be made into a movie (and it sounds like it’s headed that way with Adam Driver as a lead). Knight started Nike, the biggest athletics company in the world, by selling imported shoes from Japan out of the back of his car. Like every origin story, he had an idea, and he went after it. It wasn’t just one bolt-of-lightening moment though. There wasn’t just one major leap that he took. He just kept moving forward one incremental step at a time. Nike started as a business school project and the idea stuck in his mind. As he finished school, that idea lingered and he faked his way forward as he needed to in order to try and make it into something real. In fact, he basically ends the book when the company went public and the “hustle” stage of the company effectively ended. It’s somewhat encouraging to read a business book from someone like Knight. He isn’t the stereotypical CEO-type. Rather, he was a dreamer and a drifter in the beginning. He made brain-fart mistakes. His super-human power seems to be that he kept moving forward. Still though, his not so secret superpower compared to many other success stories was that he put in the LONG hours for decades.*
The fact that this book was a memoir rather than a third party look at the company made the story so much better. Sure, there were plenty of funny first-hand stories that we wouldn’t get otherwise, but Knight’s background in accounting is the real voice element that shines through. I’ve never been so enthralled by assets and liabilities in my life! It seems like the founding of Nike balanced between two very different works: on one hand they were a company created by a band of obsessive-running outsiders, but on the other hand, they (maybe just Knight) were obsessed with their cash flow. Apparently, from the get go he poured every dollar that came in back into the company rather than keeping any money reserves. There are a thousand times where this has doomed a company but Knight was able to make it work. In all reality, this strategy of taking on more immediate debt after payday wouldn’t work for 99% of businesses. But, like so many realms, we heard the incredible stories of the incredible feats and Nike obviously falls into that category.
*It seems wrong to call it “business”. It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under the bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher - and none of us wavered in the believe that “stakes” don’t mean “money”...I redefined winning, expanding it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is - you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.* (352 - 353)*Knight comes off as pretty honest about the fact that he missed a lot of hours at home and it had impacts on his wife and his boys. Once again, there is no free lunch.