The premise of the book
If you want to find out what an entrepreneur’s life is like behind the scenes, this book is for you. It’s raw, real, and relatable for many entrepreneurs who are currently on their own journey. Phil is an excellent writer and storyteller. He’s able to make you feel the emotional rollercoaster he went through from setting up Nike (ex: Blue Ribbon) until retiring as a CEO and becoming a chairman.
Who should read this book
The book will be more enjoyable to entrepreneurs or people curious about entrepreneurship, avid runners and college students or recent graduates. But I believe anyone will enjoy it since it’s a very well-narrated story.
My rating of the book:
8/10
The format of the book:
The book is divided into two parts:
- Part one: covers the years from 1962 to 1975, where Phil details the story of him wondering the world and then starting Blue Ribon which later on will become Nike.
- Part two: covers the 1975 to 1980 where he takes us on the journey of building Nike to what it is now and all the setbacks and struggles he had to go through
The story
Phill Knight has always been passionate about running. However, he realized athleticism could not be his career so he pursued a business degree at Stanford. At the time, the running shoe market was dominated by the Germans Addidas and Puma and Phil always wondered if there was a way for Japanese sports shoes to beat the German ones the way it happened with Cameras. Since his class required writing a business plan to pass, he made it about this Japanese running shoe business.
Nobody was impressed with the paper but Phill became obsessed with what he calls “this crazy idea”. When he was touring the world after graduation, he stopped by Japan where he discovered the tiger shoe made by Onitsuka and went to visit them. When meeting the CEO, he asked for distribution rights in the western United States which he got. And from that moment his Japanese shoe business started.
He teamed up with his former track and field coach to co-create Blue Ribbon Sports. Since the business wasn’t lucrative from the beginning, Phill had to take on full-time jobs, an accountant, and professor, to finance the business. He hired his friends, former colleagues and classmates the more the business grew. To not spoil the story even further, I’ll let you discover on your own the emotional rollercoaster Phil had to go through to make Nike what it is today.
Lessons from the book
Lesson 1: Be passionate about your product and your clients:
Throughout all the struggles and moments where it felt like it was the end for Phil, what kept him going was his passion for running and the love for winning that he got from the sport.
“I’d tell men and women in their mid-twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.” Knight, pgs. 381-382
“Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. “in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.” Knight, pgs. 78-79
Lesson 2: Entrepreneurship is 99% problem-solving.
The whole book is about a person solving a problem one day and getting hit by another the next day. If you put yourself in Phil’s shoes while reading the book, you’ll feel emotionally exhausted and wonder when will this suffering ever end. This is the reality of having a business and If you cannot endure it, it may not be for you. Even if you start a business you love, same as Phill did, you’ll struggle all along the way but you’ll have to learn to love it.
“Ultimately we withdrew the offering. It was a humiliation, and in its wake I had many heated conversations with myself. I blamed the shaky economy. I blamed Vietnam. But first and foremost I blamed myself. I’d overvalued Blue Ribbon. I’d overvalued my life’s work.
More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep at night, I’d tell myself: Maybe I’m a fool? Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool’s errand?
Maybe, I thought.
Maybe.”
Page 219
“It seems wrong to call it “business.” It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business.”
Lesson 3: Start before you’re ready.
Phill was never ready to start his business. He just went for it. When he went to Oniutsuka’s offices to get the import deal he didn’t even set up Blue Ribbon yet, he made up the name on the spot when asked by the executives.
Lesson 4: Sports teach you how to overcome your own limitations::
“ The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, “Not one more step!” And when it’s not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it. I thought over all the races in which my mind wanted one thing, and my body wanted another, those laps in which I’d had to tell my body, “Yes, you raise some excellent points, but let’s keep going anyway . . .”
Despite all my negotiations with that voice, the skill had never come naturally, and now I feared that I was out of practice. As the plane swooped down toward Haneda Airport I told myself that I’d need to summon the old skill quickly, or lose.
I could not bear the thought of losing.” Page 86
Lesson 5: On hiring:
Your hires have to be passionate about the product as well. The early friends he got on board were all shoe dogs and were all working to make the product better. They ran with it, knew what was wrong with it and came up with ways to fix it.
Lesson 6: Cash flow is important in business: Cash is the oxygen of any business and it was the biggest struggle for Phil. Although the shoe sales grew from $150,000 in 1968 to $140,000,000 in 1979, that kind of growth requires a lot of cash to fund the production, logistics and all the operations. He always found himself having to borrow money from his banks, spend it all and having to ask for money again.
“Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation… I was forever pushing my conservative bankers to the brink, forcing them into a game of chicken. I’d order a number of shoes that seemed to them absurd, a number we’d need to stretch to pay for, and I’d always just barely pay for them, in the nick of time, and then just barely pay our other monthly bills, at the last minute, always doing just enough, and no more, to prevent the bankers from booting us. And then, at the end of the month, I’d empty our accounts to pay Nissho and start from zero again.” Knight, pgs. 257-258
Lesson 7: The hands-off management style:
Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and surprise you with their results.
Lesson 8: Success comes with sacrifice:
Phill was honest in the book about how he struggled with work-life balance. He draws the pattern clearly throughout of him spending all day in the business and coming home, sitting in his recliner being absent-minded still thinking about the business. Yet, he always read his sons their bedtime stories which I find very sweet. At the end of the book, Phil talks about the regret he has about not spending enough time with his son Mathew who passed away in a tragic marine accident.
Lesson 9: Winning in business
Not particularly a lesson but a beautiful passage that sums up how Phil feels about winning in his business:
“It seems wrong to call it “business.” It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher—and none of us wavered in the belief that “stakes” didn’t mean “money.” For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, “but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. 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.
Maybe it will grow on me.”
Page 475
