Book Reads 001— Shoe Dog
In 2017 there are many things going on. Moving from Vancouver back home to Maryland, transitioning Capture Productions, launching The 1% Engineer, starting this blog, etc. On top of everything else, I’d like to begin a book summary series of everything I read, which lately has been a lot.
The core theme of my books is business. Biographies of the greats, marketing, innovation, and start ups are some focus themes. I’m about 50% through the Steve Jobs biography, and need to return to this soon. But Shoe Dog, holy crap what a story about Phil Knight— the man behind Nike.
Nike means more to me than a shoe brand. My mother was a marathon runner, who topped her career with Boston, years before the disaster. She always wore Nikes, and even though we didn’t have a lot of money as a family, she found a way to buy the expensive shoes. After reading Phil Knight’s book, I now understand.
Knight grew up in Oregon, and like most natives, loved it there. He ran his entire life, along with running track for the University of Oregon in college. This is where he met “Bill” Bowerman, son of the governer of Oregon, and head coach of the Ducks running squad. Bowermans forfather’s paved the way for the Oregon Trail. Like the computer game I grew up with :)
After college, Knight got his MBA from Stanford, and was destined for a typical life as a typical American, working some job in a tie that he hated. Work, Mortgage, Kids, Dead…. Sounds about right. But not for Knight. He obsessed over running shoes, particularly Japanese running shoes. For his final entrepreneurship project at Stanford, the focus was a shoe import business from the land of the rising sun.
By around age 26, he worked up enough nerve to tell his father this true dream. To go to Japan, strike up business deals surrounding shoes, hike Mt Fuji, travel the world, and return to start a show business. He did just this.
It’s an insane story that got more and more crazy each year. They doubled their sales, yeah 100% increase, every year for about 15 years and were ALWAYS nearly insolvent. No money. They’d import on levered bank money, sell on margin that beat out Puma and Adidas (current German show superpowers), and barely pay bills on time. Each while, Knight would go back to the bank to ask for more money with barely any collateral, and basically just kept flipping shoes for a decade and a half. Issues all over the place. Grey hairs and insane Japanese business and stress and lawsuits and crazy issues all over, make for the most ridiculous business story I have ever read.
What Shoe Dog tells us is that entrepreneurship is hard. Damn hard. If your heart isn’t in it, if you are bleeding passion for what you are doing, you’ll quit. You’ll fail. It’s not worth all this otherwise. Knight loved running, he ran a six miler each night before heading home, just to clear his head. Before Nike, there was no such thing as running for endorphins, running for health, running for pleasure. Runners were thought to be manic crazy people with too much energy.
Knight wanted to create a storefront and brand haven for those he loves the most. He loved runners because running was his life, his passion. That is why Nike has been one of the most successful retailers in the history of American business. Nike is not a shoe company. Nike sells “Authentic Athlete Performance”- the empowerment of athletes. Everything in life starts with why. Why are you selling this stuff? Why is your organization doing this thing? Unless there is meaning behind it, unless you are standing for some cause you would die for. You will fail.
Be like Phil Knight. Stand for what you believe in, fight when absolute peril seems inevitable, and only then will you be as successful as possible. Just Do It :)
Love you Mom.
Follow me on social media @jakevoor
The 1% Engineer show https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6jLimb3eM2MVx1m4uTL8Hg
