Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
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(as of Oct 27, 2024 07:45:35 UTC – Details)
In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.
In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime-green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. In an age of start-ups, Nike is the ne plus ultra of all start-ups, and the swoosh has become a revolutionary, globe-spanning icon, one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today.
But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, in a memoir that is candid, humble, gutsy, and wry, he tells his story, beginning with his crossroads moment. At 24, after backpacking around the world, he decided to take the unconventional path to start his own business – a business that would be dynamic, different.
Knight details the many risks and daunting setbacks that stood between him and his dream – along with his early triumphs. Above all, he recalls the formative relationships with his first partners and employees, a ragtag group of misfits and seekers who became a tight-knit band of brothers. Together, harnessing the transcendent power of a shared mission and a deep belief in the spirit of sport, they built a brand that changed everything.
Customers say
Customers find the book very readable, sensational, and well-written. They also find it inspirational, important, and relatable. Readers describe the story as engaging, interesting, and powerful. They appreciate the honesty, candidness, and sense of history. What’s more, they mention the book is funny and has countless laugh-out-loud moments.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
P.W.A. –
Great Memoir, Great Entrepreneur, and Great Company!
Wow. I loved this book. Having worked with Nike on a few jobs, I had a lot of gaps of its history. This book isn’t so much about shoes as it is about the epic journey of entrepreneurship, friendship, and self-discovery. Knight writes with such honesty and humility at times, it’s hard to believe that this is the man worth billions that created the most iconic sports apparel brand in the world.What I like most is Knight’s mindset. He had determination and fire in his belly. His belief in his brand was relentless despite some major setbacks. And in this book, he talks about a lot of them. The only part that got sluggish for me was the end with all the US government negotiations stuff. Other than that, it was a very interesting read.It’s a bonus that it was written from an Oregonian because I’m a Native Oregonian–and never have I been so proud to be one. His talk about the Men of Oregon echoes the kind of things pioneers and founding fathers sound like. You can tell that Knight wanted to leave a legacy in he could be proud. He was grateful for his roots. They way Knight talks about Steve Prefontaine is so endearing. It was interesting to hear an insider’s version of this amazing track athlete. In fact, because I knew so little about Pre, I started to feel like a bad Oregonian (in my defense, he did die before I was born). Now I know why everything that Nike stands for can be traced in the spirit of Pre. He was a charismatic rebel with a cause. (If you go to the Nike HQ museum, they still loop his Olympic run on an old television.)Through it all, you get a sense of what loyalty and friendship meant to Knight: it’s literally the glue that held his business together. Since I’m friends with many Nike directors and executives, it’s clear now why most of them have worked there for over thirty years (I think their campus badges are black). That’s practically unheard of.I’m biased because I’ve done work with Nike and grew up in Portland. But I’m unbiased in that I’m a loyal fan of Asics running shoes. Ironically, that’s how Knight built his empire so I don’t feel all that bad. Still, I do have lots of Nike gear and now I look at it a whole lot differently. The swoosh is much brighter than before.Part of my neutrality with Nike was all the talk about the sweat shops in the late 1990’s. Knight clearly gives his two cents on that towards the end of the book which still leaves room to interpret the whole issue. But now I see both sides of the coin. Since they changed their tune, put more money into philanthropies (hundreds of millions), and are the model for corporate sustainable development, ultimately I think they’re a good force in the universe.Reading this book I soon realized that no matter what Knight was talking about–Nike’s flaws or Nike’s triumphs–he was a great storyteller. Just as he mentions embedding his sons into historical events in their nightly bedtime story, Knight mindfully embeds the reader into the history of Oregon, America, and the shoe industry. Somehow he made it all sound exciting.I was worried that the book would not be complete. It doesn’t have a table of contents so until you get it, you don’t know that it’s the history of Nike from 1962-1980. Each year is a chapter, and then he sums up the last twenty years of Nike in a chapter at the end. But it all makes sense: Knight ends the book in the year he took his company public. I’m sure he had more adventures to tell, but he got out the main story of all of his hard-fought battles with competitors, athletes, governments, and ultimately himself.Since I’ve been to the HQ (which employees call the campus), I know there are dozens of more stories. They’re all bigger than life. Each building has a history of its own and every time I’m out there, they’re building another cluster of buildings. (I was told they stopped naming buildings after people who are alive because of the Lance Armstrong debacle.) Pretty soon they’ll buy the whole town of Beaverton and just call it Nike Town. There are stories like Tiger Woods breaking a glass window that houses the lap pool–an entire football field away.That’s what you get with Nike: incredible story after incredible story. Guess what the call the marketing department? Nike Story. It makes perfect sense. It’s where they articulate the soul of Nike to the world. If there ever was a company with soul, Nike is it. (No pun intended: sole/soul.) This book really captures the amazing story of a businessman and his vision. Anyone interested in entrepreneurship, teamwork, leadership, track, shoes, or Oregon should pick it up for sure. You won’t regret it!
Hots –
Just do it.
Riveting until the end. The third act felt a bit rushed, with lots of time skips and generalization, but the beginning and the middle were well-paced, well-written. I loved the humor, the wit, the unexpected analogies. (My favorites were the Fortress of Solitude and Stretch vs. the Crab!)Characters: Believable, intriguing, multi-faceted. The story intrigued me enough to look up some of them, from Jeff Johnson to Jaqua to Sarah to Strasser. Some of them really hit home as real people, struggling with loss as well as rejection. Their struggles came to life, punctuated by big moments and difficult conversations.Scenes: Again, the writer chose some impactful scenes and dramatized their events well. The meetings with the Japanese, the court cross-examinations, and the Olympic events all drew me in and provided enough conflict to drive change, story.Themes: For a non-fiction memoir, the book does a good job of delivering theme and message, which spoke to me as an entrepreneur. Buck’s Nike-is-personal motivations resonated with me, and his resiliency and strategic planning inspired me to dig deeper, ask many difficult questions. In particular, the constant desire for growth, and the lack of cash — leading to struggles with the bank and other bean counters — were a common theme that always had me asking how they’d get out of it.If I could level any criticism at the story, it’s the subtraction of in-depth problem-solving, i.e. what were the specific arguments and moments that ultimately solved or postponed their cash woes. It seems like the writer would always detail the struggles well, and put Blue Ribbon in a bind, but the solutions received less detailed treatment. How did they improve the factories, and what were their correspondences like with those factories after the Sole Jr. fiasco? How did they possibly write the ASP $9-million settlement check mere chapters after struggling to cobble together payroll in the wake of the $1-million check to Nissho? What happened to Onitsuka and Kitami, and how did their struggle continue when they became Asics? Did Buck ever engage them after their falling apart & court battle? How did Iwano, the boy that accompanied Kitami on his visit, come back to Nike, and why did Buck mention their communication in his list of regrets? The story characterized the problem and participants so well I often felt like the dénouements – the solutions – deserved better treatment.But that’s nitpicking. Overall, the book inspired me and enlightened me about how Nike grew, and more importantly, how Buck grew. These were the key moments of Blue Ribbon’s growth, and, more importantly, the key moments of a man’s life, and the fact that they were so closely interwoven made it speak all that much more powerfully to someone whose life has always been work, and vice versa, because what is life without that struggle, challenge, and the creation of something bigger than oneself? It’s a lesson so few business & life memoirs get right, in their insistence to separate the two, but Shoe Dog does it right.
Vishnu Goyal –
Just finished reading Shoe Dog. What a story, what a journey, and the way Phil has told made me feel like I am seeing the whole Nike story unfold in front of my eyes. Charged up with so much energy and positivity. Thank you Phil 🙂
Amazon Kunde –
Sehr interresante geschichte
Amanda –
Couldnât put it down. Really enjoyed reading it
Marco –
Not bad
Pablo Tejada –
Libro muy fácil de leer – 100% recomendable