Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Shoe Dog is a story of how Phil Knight turned a Stanford mba class project into one of the most iconic brands in the world today, Nike. The Shoe Dog story is organized by year and mostly focuses on the first 10 years of Knight’s proto-company, Blue Ribbon Sports (a distributor for Tiger/Asics shoes in the U.S.). Interestingly, the word “Nike” is not mentioned by Knight until around 200 pages in. The Nike story begins with a young Knight travelling the globe after school trying to figure out what to do with his life. During his wandering he ended up in Japan, where he stopped in at the Onitsuka Company (now Asics). Knight convinced them to give the U.S. distribution rights to Blue Ribbon Sports, a company that he hadn’t technically started yet. Shoe Dog then takes you along on a journey of entrepreneurship, as Knight and his rag tag group of employees keep the company af loat as banks pull loans, being sued multiple times and the bad press that comes with that. And finally, after Nike began to take off, outf lanking the fierce tactics employed by their competitors. One charming and illustrative anecdote describes how Nike stumbled upon the design for their Air midsole. The standoff between Blue Ribbon Sports/Nike and an Onitsuka executive named Kitami would be worthy of its own book. Most impressively, Shoe Dog reveals the vulnerabilities of one of the biggest companies in the world, and allows the reader to understand just how close Nike came to failure, time and time again. Knight’s memoir is a great read for anyone who wants to know Nike beyond the veneer of success that the Swoosh has had. And while readers already know the outcome, the book’s strong, forward propelling plot and clear prose make Shoe Dog a gripping and at times tense read. This is because Knight’s story is driven by its characters and dramas between competitors and the relentless demand that is the bottom line. Shoe Dog reads as a fascinating autobiography, the most content rich of business text books, and a mind-blowing economics essay – but a version of each kind that you can’t bring yourself to put down.— Joel Vosburg