The iconic swoosh and the slogan ‘Just Do It’ are today imprinted in our collective consciousness as inseparably associated with the shoe-and-sports-apparel brand Nike. And yet, in his delightful, emotion-laden memoir, Nike’s founder Phil Knight confides that Nike wasn’t even his preferred choice of names: he was fixated on naming it Dimension Six, but the core team of his employees mercifully shot down that unfashionable suggestion. So, yes, whoever says “What’s in a name?” must be made to account for whether this superbrand that is today recognisable in countless countries could really have been built on so distinctly downmarket a name as Dimension Six.
But nomenclatural trivia apart, Knight’s memoirs also narrate, in fast-paced prose that would do a suspense thriller proud, the blood-sweat-toil-and-tears saga that went into the making of Nike. For a start, it’s not a business book at all: given Knight’s disdain for the “all-out pursuit of profits” that passes for business, he contests even the characterisation of him as a “businessman” — unless he can define that term himself.
In one breathless passage where he expounds his ‘business’ philosophy, Knight writes: “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… you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.”
These aren’t just platitudes ritualistically mouthed by a transnational tycoon who made it good. Knight’s own life, and the ‘Oregon’ values that he and his company (and his colleagues) abided by, in good times and in bad, bear abundant testimony to his fidelity to that philosophy. Ironically, it wasn’t enough for Knight to ever “just do it”; it was far more important to “do it right”.
Knight recounts how his ‘Crazy Idea’, formulated as part of a college thesis, to import shoes from Japan in the 1960s, a time when the post-War reindustrialisation of Japan was beginning, came to life after a round-the-world trip he undertook. Not only was that trip entrepreneurially productive for Knight, it engendered in him an acceptance of (and respect for) other civilisations and cultures, all of which would serve to fortify him on the journey of his life and his ‘business’.
Of vicissitudes on his career path, Knight encounters more than his fair share. In the era before the dawn of big-money venture capital funding, his Japanese shoe-importing business was forever on the cusp of bankruptcy or at risk of having its credit line terminated for growing too fast without adequate equity.
And at a critical stage of expansion, he experiences the nearest thing to a double-cross by his Japanese partner — confirmation of which Knight secures when he ‘steals’ documents from the attaché case of his partner-firm’s visiting representative! It is then that Nike is born: as a shield against the imminent prospect of being cut out and seeing his business fold up.
Long after Nike had established itself as an innovation-led company that has acquired a reputation for doing things right (but almost always suffered near-fatal cash-flow issues), Knight and his core team grappled with the merit of raising money through a public issue. But again and again, they held back: even though they stood to make millions of dollars, they balked at the prospect of seeing that undefinable ‘culture’ of their company diluted (as it inevitably would).
The final denouement — of them going public and getting rich beyond measure, but without trading in their souls (thanks to the newer financial engineering tools devised by Wall Street) — makes for a fairytale ending.
Knight is an unrepentant ‘shoe dog’, but he lets us in on his obsession with crafting the perfect footwear with a convivial narrative style that makes for slick reading. But above all else, Knight’s life story, as revealed in his memoirs, is comforting affirmation that nice guys, who are not driven by profit-above-all-else considerations, sometimes finish on top.
Venky Vembu is an editor with Business Line , and a whimsical writer and blogger.
