Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE

Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, provides a captivating and inspiring look into the journey of building one of the most iconic brands in the world. Knight's storytelling is raw and honest, capturing both the relentless struggles and the thrilling victories of his path from a small, risky startup to a global powerhouse. With insights into entrepreneurship, perseverance, and creativity, *Shoe Dog* resonates deeply with readers who crave real, behind-the-scenes stories. This memoir is not only a tale of business success but also a celebration of the power of vision, making it a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs and fans of true storytelling alike.

I was a little dubious when I saw so many 5 star reviews for this book here, but after reading this I have to say I wholeheartedly agree. This memoir by Phil Knight explores the travel adventures he went on after finishing college and the world view it gave him. It then looks at how he set up the business that eventually became Nike and how he battled adversity and his competitors to become one of the most respected global sports brands. Each chapter follows a year in the life of the founder and his business from the early 60's up until 1980. At the end it mentions briefly where the company is at at the time of writing to conclude things in a satisfying way, although I'd happily read a second part that continues on from where this book leaves off. His tenacity shines through on every page and I also developed a greater appreciation of Nike and their ethos as a business. After the Sweatshop scandal in the 90's I was a little hesitant about buying their products, but he touches upon this aspect of the business and the subsequent deeper understanding of what drives this company has made me see them in a new light. The writing is clear and engaging and he manages to tell a story in such a way that makes you want to keep turning the pages until the end and entertains whilst also imparting some business knowledge at the same time. This is invaluable for those starting a business and a damn good read for those of us who just enjoy a good memoir/autobiography. Highly recommended.

Don't have a dream, have an obsession, and don't stop until you bend the world to your will. Apart from how this man shaped how we live (and our feet) this is a cracking business book with many lessons and you really want a sequel but the epilogue does enough because it's just platitudes from the 80's onward's; no more conflict just relentless success. As Phil regularly lauds, his supporting cast are truly heroic and deserve every plaudit. As a reader you're constantly in Phil Knight's Nike's; weighing your next move, dreading the banks, but mostly grateful that YOU'RE not the one squillions in debt and ready to lose it all in an instant and render YOU'RE family destitute.... and you wonder, what and could I risk all that for? I bet it's not Japanese shoes. Aside from our Phil, my fave hero of this adventure is the Japanese banker who understood free enterprise and was a conductor of capitalism, thank you. The biggest villain? The government goblin who later was involved in Waco, shame! When do you become too old to have a Phil Knight light bulb moment?

Just finished listening to the audiobook. I also have the e-book which I red in parts. The book is very well written and read almost like a novel it's not just about business but also a fascinating story from the very beginning. This type of biography which is written by the founder himself is my favourite because you get to know the person as opposed to biographies written by somebody else who has researched the business person. As somebody who has recently started his business, finishing listening to this book left me quite inspired and there are many parts I would want to re-read to re-listen. That last final chapters I couldn't put it down. For many years I had mixed feeling about the brand itself. I always thought was too expensive and too much overhyped with advertisement until a few years ago I bought their more minimalistic Nike flex and since then it has been my favourite shoe of all time. Phil knight himself is quite fascinating character and at times feel such an ordinary shy guy! that gives me some comfort, tying to make it in business as an introvert!

Much read!!!

SHOE DOG provides an unvarnished story of how Phil Knight started Nike and turned it into a £30 billion global company. Shoe Dog is a person whose life is about shoes. Only one question bothers them all the time: How to make better shoes? After reading this book, the next day when I went to my gym, I noticed that majority were wearing a Nike. But, I didn’t just see the shoes; I could see the sweat and blood that its founders had put into making Nike a universal brand. Obstacles at every turn, but an attitude to win, combined with camaraderie of the founders kept them going. The main characters in this book (including the author) are shown not as superhuman beings with exceptional qualities who saw it all, but average people with an exceptional ability to preserver in the face of insurmountable obstacles. Therefore it’s a story you and I can identify with, and withdraw some courage from it when going gets tough. It will inspire you. Phil drew inspiration from powerful quotes, and he has included a few of them in the book such as: Consider the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin Don’t go to sleep one night, what you most want will come to you then You are remembered for the rules you break And many more gems like these. The chapters are based on every year from when the company was founded in 1962 to when it became an established company in 1980. I carried my book to bed in the night, and in train on my way to office. It’s so good; you would not want to stop before knowing how the story ends. In between you will laugh (mostly at the audacity of the team Nike) and there are places where you will be saddened. It engulfs you emotionally. It’s one of the best biographies I have read, the others being Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, and Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. And that says something.

Finally got round to reading this. It’s as good as everybody says. I didn’t end up liking Phil Knight, but I do take my hat off to him. I did not care for the tawdry bits of score settling. I did not care for the sundry snippets of Asian wisdom. I did not care for the habits of the inventor of the air soles either. I sure did not care for how he lost his virginity at 24, other than to reinforce my belief that high achievers are in the main compensating for something. And I really really really did not care for his messed-up, self-aggrandizing connections regarding destiny, what NIKE spells backwards on a phone dial or his exact position in the firmament of billionaires and philanthropists. Regardless, this was for me a thriller. I could not put it down. I had to keep discipline last week, as I was up at six fifteen every morning to teach arithmetic to my boy who’s taking the 11+. So three times I reluctantly went to bed with Shoe Dog unfinished and then spent the night worrying about the million dollar loan that came due, about the Onitsuka lawsuit, about the number of pairs sold, I basically lived this book. And I lost track of who is who, so it’s not like Phil Knight is the king of character development, but he did one better: he hired all these amazing characters and created Nike out of nothing and he remembers how he did it all in enough detail to make this the best book I’ve ever read about entrepreneurship. In short, I loved it.

I had heard of Phil Knight, but I didn’t know about Phil Knight. Anyone who knows me well will tell you I have an unexplainable attachment to the Adidas brand. In fact, I had to double check in disbelief but I truly don’t own anything from the Nike range in my wardrobe. That is why reading this book initially felt like a disloyalty in a major way. I had bought myself this copy a while back but I kept putting it further down my reading list, until I eventually succumbed to all the good reviews I read about it. Now I know a book is awesome when I feel the need to take it with me to the toilet seat. This particular one debuted as early as the first chapter. I was engrossed. Reading books by self-made milli or billionaires can sometimes be daunting. Sometimes they get so caught up in the me, me, me moments that it becomes difficult to read through the pages without rolling your eyes and silently thinking to yourself, ‘get over yourself already’. Not this one though. I could relate to this man. Right from the start, I appreciated how human Phil Knight was. A sell for me is always a book where the author allows themselves to be vulnerable. Phil Knight just laid it all out, from 1962 to 1980, he tells the story of not only the making of the brand, but the making of the man too. He tells you how he succumbed to using the Nike name (suggested by one of his eccentric employees, Jeff Johnson) because they had run out of time and a name had to go on the shoe. If it were up to him that brand would today be knows as Dimension Six. 🤦🏽‍♀️ Nike is the Greek goddess of victory so in a way the name embodied everything that Phil Knight was striving for. In 1972, he begrudgingly accepted the name and told himself it would grow on him. Until this point Phil Knight owned a company known as Blue Ribbon which acted as a distributor for Japanese based Onitsuka Tiger Company (today known as Asics). He had however had a fallout with Mr. Onitsuka and there was an urgent need to rebrand. Another thing that makes you warm up to Phil Knight in his book is how he seemed mostly in favor of the underdog. His employees were not the typical (or even athletic) type of people you would pick for the kind of dream he had, but they had one thing in common, each one of them was a Shoe Dog. Phil Knight openly admits to how in his quest to build an empire, he wasn’t the best of dads. He talks about his strained relationship with his son Matt who died while scuba diving in May 2004 and that part just moved me to tears. He talks about fall outs with close friends and partners, espionage, the backlash from competitors, near bankruptcy, he even admits to writing off Magic Johnson and calling him the player with no position that would never make it in the NBA. He talks about the kind or relationship he has with Tiger and why to this day he will hear no ill word spoken of him. He even briefly talks about what became known as the sweatshop controversy. This could easily have been a fairytale but it is an honest, entertaining memoir that every book lover must read. My only question perhaps is why he makes no mention of his daughter anywhere in his memoir and even the internet seems to have very little detail about her. At this point I figure I am a little sold to the idea of owning my first pair of Nike shoes. Cortez perhaps?🤔🤔🤔

Throughly enjoyable. As a 30yr veteran expat in Japan I could feel his pain. I found myself giving him advice. I’ve recommended the book to several.

This is by far the best book I have ever read about entrepreneurship and never giving up. I have read a lot of books about people who have created successful businesses, but this is by far the best one I have ever read. Captivating from start to finish. I can’t wait to read it again.

I thoroughly enjoyed this candid and inspirational personal view into the life of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. The story is told in a very approachable and compelling manner. Perhaps because I lean more toward biographies, I found it highly entertaining and hard to put down, but I believe it also has to do with the fact that book is very well written; simple and easy to follow.

Ich wusste schon als ich die Gratis-Probe anfing, dass ich dieses Buch lesen MUSS. Einfach Weltklasse. Als anfänglicher Entrepreneur hat mich dieses Buch Demut, Hoffnung und einen langen Atem gelehrt. Qualitäten die man kultivieren sollte, wenn man erfolgreich werden möchte. Eine wirklich einmalige Geschichte und darüber hinaus sehr gut geschrieben. Ich war überrascht! Also, wenn du noch haderst: Kauf es einfach. Es wird dich inspirieren! Dimitri Kanth

Wow. I loved this book. Having worked with Nike on a few jobs, I had a lot of gaps of its history. This book isn't so much about shoes as it is about the epic journey of entrepreneurship, friendship, and self-discovery. Knight writes with such honesty and humility at times, it's hard to believe that this is the man worth billions that created the most iconic sports apparel brand in the world. What I like most is Knight's mindset. He had determination and fire in his belly. His belief in his brand was relentless despite some major setbacks. And in this book, he talks about a lot of them. The only part that got sluggish for me was the end with all the US government negotiations stuff. Other than that, it was a very interesting read. It's a bonus that it was written from an Oregonian because I'm a Native Oregonian--and never have I been so proud to be one. His talk about the Men of Oregon echoes the kind of things pioneers and founding fathers sound like. You can tell that Knight wanted to leave a legacy in he could be proud. He was grateful for his roots. They way Knight talks about Steve Prefontaine is so endearing. It was interesting to hear an insider's version of this amazing track athlete. In fact, because I knew so little about Pre, I started to feel like a bad Oregonian (in my defense, he did die before I was born). Now I know why everything that Nike stands for can be traced in the spirit of Pre. He was a charismatic rebel with a cause. (If you go to the Nike HQ museum, they still loop his Olympic run on an old television.) Through it all, you get a sense of what loyalty and friendship meant to Knight: it's literally the glue that held his business together. Since I'm friends with many Nike directors and executives, it's clear now why most of them have worked there for over thirty years (I think their campus badges are black). That's practically unheard of. I'm biased because I've done work with Nike and grew up in Portland. But I'm unbiased in that I'm a loyal fan of Asics running shoes. Ironically, that's how Knight built his empire so I don't feel all that bad. Still, I do have lots of Nike gear and now I look at it a whole lot differently. The swoosh is much brighter than before. Part of my neutrality with Nike was all the talk about the sweat shops in the late 1990's. Knight clearly gives his two cents on that towards the end of the book which still leaves room to interpret the whole issue. But now I see both sides of the coin. Since they changed their tune, put more money into philanthropies (hundreds of millions), and are the model for corporate sustainable development, ultimately I think they're a good force in the universe. Reading this book I soon realized that no matter what Knight was talking about--Nike's flaws or Nike's triumphs--he was a great storyteller. Just as he mentions embedding his sons into historical events in their nightly bedtime story, Knight mindfully embeds the reader into the history of Oregon, America, and the shoe industry. Somehow he made it all sound exciting. I was worried that the book would not be complete. It doesn't have a table of contents so until you get it, you don't know that it's the history of Nike from 1962-1980. Each year is a chapter, and then he sums up the last twenty years of Nike in a chapter at the end. But it all makes sense: Knight ends the book in the year he took his company public. I'm sure he had more adventures to tell, but he got out the main story of all of his hard-fought battles with competitors, athletes, governments, and ultimately himself. Since I've been to the HQ (which employees call the campus), I know there are dozens of more stories. They're all bigger than life. Each building has a history of its own and every time I'm out there, they're building another cluster of buildings. (I was told they stopped naming buildings after people who are alive because of the Lance Armstrong debacle.) Pretty soon they'll buy the whole town of Beaverton and just call it Nike Town. There are stories like Tiger Woods breaking a glass window that houses the lap pool--an entire football field away. That's what you get with Nike: incredible story after incredible story. Guess what the call the marketing department? Nike Story. It makes perfect sense. It's where they articulate the soul of Nike to the world. If there ever was a company with soul, Nike is it. (No pun intended: sole/soul.) This book really captures the amazing story of a businessman and his vision. Anyone interested in entrepreneurship, teamwork, leadership, track, shoes, or Oregon should pick it up for sure. You won't regret it!