Shoe Dog

Knight tells the story of Nike from his 1962 trip to Japan, where he talked his way into a distribution agreement with Onitsuka Tiger by inventing a company called Blue Ribbon Sports, to the 1980 initial public offering. The book concentrates on the two decades of near-permanent financial distress in between and stops before the period most readers associate with the brand.

The recurring subject is cash. Knight ran the company on bank borrowing against inventory, reinvesting everything into more shoes and constantly exceeding what his lenders would tolerate. The narrative includes the loss of the Onitsuka relationship and the resulting lawsuit, the switch to Japanese trading company Nissho Iwai for financing, a federal customs claim of twenty-five million dollars under the American Selling Price rule that could have ended the company, and a bank calling the loan and reporting the account to the FBI.

The portraits of early employees give the book its second subject. Bill Bowerman, Jeff Johnson, Bob Woodell and the rest are described as misfits who took a chance on an unprofitable shoe importer. Knight writes candidly about his own remoteness as a manager, his failures as a communicator, and the personal cost including the death of his son.

The book is a memoir written decades after the events with a professional collaborator, so the dialogue is reconstructed and the shape is literary. It says little about the labour practices that dominated Nike's public reputation in the 1990s, and it ends before the brand-building era. Read it for a founder's account of financing growth without capital, not as a business history of Nike.