Book Notes - Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
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Book in One Sentence
Founder of Nike, Phil Knight, tells the story of the mistakes (many) and lessons he learned whilst creating one of the world’s greatest brands.
The Five Big Ideas / What Stood Out
1 - Organisational Culture
“I went for long runs, musing on every detail while racing the wild geese as they flew overhead. Their tight V formations - I’d read somewhere that the geese in the rear of the formation, cruising in the backdraft, only have to work 80 percent as hard as the leaders.
Every runner understands this. Front runners always work the hardest, and risk the most.”
“On my way out the door I stopped. I asked them: “Why are you doing this?” “Because,” Woodell’s mother said, “if you can’t trust the company your son is working for, then who can you trust?””
“It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.”
“Such loyalty, such unreasonable and unwarranted fealty—that might have been the moment I fell in love with Hayes. I looked up to the man when he saw something deeper in numbers, but I loved him when he saw something special in me.”
2 - Relationships/Parenting
“I was close to tears. But I held it together, channeled all my emotion into my run, and posted one of my best times of the year. As I walked off the track I glowered at Bowerman. Happy now, you son of a—?
He looked at me, checked his stopwatch, looked at me again. Nodded. He’d tested me. He’d broken me down and remade me, just like a pair of shoes. And I’d held up. Thereafter, I was truly one of his Men of Oregon.”
"When their diametrically opposed personalities caused problems, my parents would fall back on the thing they had most deeply in common, their belief that family comes first.”
“He said it so very softly. The thought crossed my mind that some of the hardest things ever said in our lifetimes are said softly.”
“Bump later bought a pickup, and he loved putting us grandkids in the back of it, driving us into town on errands. Along the way he’d always stop by Sutherlin Bakery and buy us a dozen glazed donuts—each. I need only look up at the blue sky or the white ceiling (any blank screen will do) and I see myself, dangling my bare feet over his truck bed, feeling the fresh green wind on my face, licking glaze off a warm donut.
Could I have risked as much, dared as much, walked the razor’s edge of entrepreneurship between safety and catastrophe, without the early foundation of that feeling, that bliss of safety and contentment? I don’t think so.”
3 - Risk Taking
“As ever, the accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility. So I split the difference and kept moving forward.”
“I felt drained, but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after a day’s work. I felt like an artist, a creator. I looked back over my shoulder, took one last look at Nissho’s offices. Under my breath I said, “We made this.””
4 - Entrepreneurship
“We had retail stores in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Portland, New England, each with its own bank account. We’d have to empty them all... and still we might not be able to cover that massive check to Nissho.”
“He called in Giampietro, who drove up the road to see an old friend, a man who owned a local box company. Giampietro asked the man for a loan of five thousand dollars, cash. An outrageous request.
But the man’s box company depended on Blue Ribbon for its survival. If we went out of business the box company might, too. So the box man became our bag man, forking over fifty crisp hundred-dollar bills.”
“We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud.
When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver 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.”
5 - Creativity
“The cowards never started and the weak died along the way.
That leaves us, ladies and gentleman.
Us.”
Key takeaway for me and my life
It’s made me think a lot about building something, being an owner instead of an employee.
At this point in my life, I’ve been an employee for close to twenty years. I’ve just started doing some of my own consulting on the side and I’ve got to say, it feels good. I know that entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone but it feels nice to make more decisions on my own.
I think one of the problems with a lot of organisational cultures today is that decision making is too centralised. Or made by committee.
Whilst owning your own business wouldn't necessarily mean that you never have to work with others on decisions, from what I've seen you have a lot more decision making opportunities.