Shoe Dog: a wing-whoosh thingamajig turning into Nike
Title: Shoe Dog
Author: Phil Knight
Publisher: Scribner
Pages: 399
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? I love this book. I hope you love it too. Anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit will devour it (defined as you will.)
Without question, this book ranks in my top 10 best books of all time. A memoir by Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, rang so many bells for me. He runs. I run! (before my run turns into a walk, and then a crawl, all the while listening to the Nike+ run app’s audio tracks and dreaming of running with the Bowerman track team.)
I never thought of going into business, and wow is the business world based around a different moral compass, don’t think I would relish it or thrive in it. Phil Knight’s infectious passion for shoes makes up for it though.
He says, “Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”
Phil Knight travelled, starting out surfing in Hawaii and selling encyclopedias, can you imagine? Nike was a bluff — a mishmash of importing before even coming close to a self-functioning entity. Phil has swallowing ambitions, and his eyes are constantly on the prize and he corrects for faults aiming higher and higher.
What a legend.
He keeps his gears turning, churning dreams into reality, going into debt time and time again. The business world is such a different universe, and Phil did not even wrap his head around the concept of a work-life balance. When you’re starting a new venture, there are just so many loose threads and little tasks that you need to account for, so that you’re thinking about it 24/7 and thinking of new ideas to take flight. His blind confidence slapped. You can bring yourself to do that?! Betting your company on everything. Crippling debt hovering above your head for decades at a time. Literally resting your head at the centre of a guillotine, and with millions worth of lawsuits from the U.S. government and the mere threat of FBI’s hunting you down.
Phil is deadly ambitious, and he makes sacrifices to get there, crystal clear. You know the analogy of using four burners to represent your life, the first burner representing family, the second being friends, the third being health, and finally, work? So it goes, (arguably), that you can only realistically choose two, and give up the other two. For Phil, no indecision existed. He placed work above all else, sacrificing time with his little boys. His liver can attest to the binge drinking on Tuesdays to humour his boss. He put everything into his baby, Nike, by recruiting all of the people he admired. Nothing about Nike could be teased out or separated from his life.
My favourite person here? Employee Number One, Jeff Johnson. A loyal worshipper of Nike deserving everything about Nike’s success. Phil’s leadership style is clean. He knows what he wants and comes into negotiations with clear ideas of what he needs out of it. He knows what is worth his time, and what is not, gripping power and respect tight. He never feels an urge to “send words of encouragement” yet the culture at Nike was unbeatable.
Phil’s personality made his success and reading this, and is it because of my own biases or is it because of how people responded to him that I couldn’t wrap my head around him being equally successful, under similar circumstances, if he were a woman? Traditionally, leadership is measured by dominance and assertiveness, but if everyone around someone unintentionally measures and respects her by how likeable, gentle and non-opinionated she should be, how do you expect something to thrive? Indeed, leadership can be cruel and sacrificing when everything is on the line. It just shows that there are still barriers in place for female entrepreneurs and CEOs to be successful.
