Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight. This book is about Phil’s view of building Blue Ribbon into Nike. Knight ran track at Oregon and finished an MBA at Stanford in 1962. His goal was to start an athletic shoe store.
Shoe Dog feels like a PR firm wrote large sections including the events which reveal Knight’s shallow views of his early employees, testifying in court for hiring a spy working within a Japanese shoe factory, and his ‘buttface’ offsite meetings.
Knight reveals himself in these chapters, and is certainly not a leader. Many will be surprised, because this is set against the hero-worship of sports in America.
Certainly the early 1960s were a different time in Japan. Lingering colonial (post World War II) attitudes of business found Knight confused about commitments from Tiger. So roughly two-thirds of Shoe Dog is interesting.
Knight grew a company after struggling for years. Phil began by bringing Tiger shoes from Japan to Oregon and then down the West Coast. This is the essence of his story.
There are many insights to Phil’s travels across the world as a gift to begin his life’s work understanding the Japanese advantage of shoe manufacturing. The stories and struggling business practices in which Knight learned the ropes launching his shoe own shoe company Blue Ribbon.
