Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
4.8 | 62,590 ratings
Price: 19.68
Last update: 01-30-2026
Top reviews from the United States
- Alex DyerVery inspiring and motivating bookI’m a big Oregon / Nike fan. So i might be a little biased when coming to reviewing this book. I loved it mainly because it doesn’t talk about what everyone knows like how Jordan made it blow up to new heights but more of how many times the company could’ve went bankrupt and how Phil knight persevered
- Brendan ConnorsA vivid read on never saying quit and believing in your dreamsAn inspiring never say quit book about Phil Knight’s thought, creation and building of Nike into a global sporting power!
A great read for any entrepreneur/business person looking to start a business/run a business and the dedication to your dreams that is needed to succeed. - Christian herediaWhat a dealBook arrived in excellent condition and packaged securely. All pages were damage free. Excellent time to get into a new book
- Ian MannIf you are looking for ‘my 7 secrets of great success’ in this bookThis book is about an entrepreneur’s journey, how one man took on the giants and won. The Dassler brothers, founders of Puma and Adidas, began their business in 1924 and Phil Knight began his in 1963.
Over the past 18 years of writing reviews, I don’t think I have reviewed more than 3 autobiographies. My experience has been that hardly any avoid being little more than an airbrushed account of an extraordinary genius, with depth of character and business prowess, written by the paragon him or herself. My visceral response to an autobiography is – ignore.
Shoe Dog came to my attention in 2017, and I ignored it. A week ago, a client, still in her mid-30s, and half way to building her company into a billion-dollar business, raved about the book.
I share her enthusiasm for this autobiography. Let me tell you why.
If you are looking for ‘my 7 secrets of great success’ in this book, you will find only one. And for that one, this 400-page book is not worth the effort. So why would Bill Gates call this book “…an amazing tale”? Primarily because, as Gates says, “Knight opens up in a way that few CEOs are willing to do.”
There are no two businesses that could possibly follow the same paths to success. Every business is one of a kind, with a unique history, built by unique people, facing unique challenges, and responding in their uniquely flawed way.
Everything about this book links back to Phil Knight’s love for running.
His humourless, stern and brilliant college track coach, Bill Bowerman, eventually became one of his earliest business partners. This was a man who would take the athletes’ shoes from their locker, tear them apart, examine them and redo them. He understood that if you remove one ounce from a shoe, you remove over fifty pounds from the runner. It was Bowerman who used his wife’s waffle iron to develop the soles for which Nike became famous.
In one of the many beautifully written passages in a remarkably well written book, Knight describes watching a race in which the legendary middle-distance runner, Steve Prefontaine participated. The joy and agony Knight and his wife experienced is described vividly – Knight was no passive spectator: he was experiencing the tension of the athletes, their physical exertion, their ‘digging deep’ into personal reserves to push through the last moments before the finish. At the end of the meeting, Knight describes – in passing – the physical exertion he experienced as a spectator, and the beauty and the art of these athletes.
Knight, trained as an accountant, didn’t start his sports shoe business, Blue Ribbon, because he had a vision of manufacturing sports shoes, and turning them into a universal, essential clothing item across the globe. He didn’t have the strong desire to get rich as even a part of his decision-making criteria. Throughout his business career he chose not to make real money in favour of other decision criteria: not spoiling the culture of the business by listing, or selling to the wrong people.
The culture of Nike is possibly best described as wild, made up of “losers”, (a disabled athlete confined to a wheel chair; an obese accountant who would never make partner in his firm because he was so large; a needy and obsessive letter-writing lawyer.) But all were perfect in their positions and each a “Buttface” as the inner circle was called. The interactions in the company were forceful, crude and remorseless, which is why truth was heard. No, they were not polite and sensitive: in fact, the essential common denominator across the various Buttfaces was a thick-skin.
For most of the history of the company, from the early days when it was still called Blue Ribbon to its emergence as Nike, the company was cash-strapped. All but the last chapters of the book had an underlying theme of financial survival. Initially it was to pay the few thousand dollars to be able to buy the next shipment of shoes from the Japanese manufacturer, to having the bank cut off their credit line, to being sued by the Customs Department for $25m of unpaid fees for an obscure tax (finally reduced to $9m.)
And all this time, there was an escape route – go public. And each time it was rejected because of what it might do to the ethos of the company.
So, what is the only lesson you will learn from this book? It is not that Knight was the quintessential, ‘Jack Welsh’ quality manager - confident, kind, clear thinking, and a team player. As a text-book manager Knight would not make even a department head. He is shy, introspective, and does not praise, or give much feedback unless it is to solve problems.
The lesson is passion. Having real passion for what you are investing your time, effort and money in. Real passion. The stuff that makes you thrill when you see a master take the race, with the grace of an artist, drawing down on resources he never knew he had. A level of passion that leads you to doing things you may regret – like being sorry your wife will not stay an extra day in hospital after giving birth to your second son, because you wanted to attend an athletics meeting.
Passion is why you teach accountancy to support your micro-business of selling superb running shoes. Passion is running almost every day of your life, knowing how important shoes are. Passion is when you enthusiastically encourage and support others who are masters of your passion – the athletes. And passion is the drive to see your heroes in your Nikes, not Adidas.
Passion is what makes an accounting graduate into a “shoe dog”, strong enough to take the whipping that life and business deals you. Passion is the only thing that will keep you going, and digging deep into mental and physical reserves you never knew you had.
If you are an aspiring entrepreneur you will grow in important ways from reading this book. If you are asked what you learned, you may not be able to articulate a single lesson beyond ‘passion.’ But this is all about you, the entrepreneur, and reading the frank account of the journey of a founder-CEO now worth $10b, will be a meaningful experience.
Readability Light -+--- Serious
Insights High +---- Low
Practical High ----+ Low
*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy, and is the author of the recently released ‘Executive Update.’ - Amazon Customer LHA must read!What a phenomenal book. I could not put it down. His writing is so easy to follow and his storytelling is gripping.
- Avid ReaderIf your a founder trying to build a great company, read it.I have to say I only picked up Shoe Dog, Nike's Phil Knight's autobiography (or *memoir*? What's the difference?), because of it's mention on Gates Notes, Bill Gates' blog, where the Microsoft founder publishes an yearly holiday book list based on what were his top reads of the year (in this case, 2016).
Here's what Gates had to say about the book:
>[the] memoir, by the co-founder of Nike, is a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like: messy, precarious, and riddled with mistakes. I’ve met Knight a few times over the years. He’s super nice, but he’s also quiet and difficult to get to know. Here Knight opens up in a way few CEOs are willing to do. I don’t think Knight sets out to teach the reader anything. Instead, he accomplishes something better. He tells his story as honestly as he can. It’s an amazing tale.
I tend to trust book suggestions by people whose reading habits I admire. It's the case of Bill Gates. My trusting bias is leveraged by the facts that he's a very successful entrepreneur (maybe the most) and a very avid reader. These two traits lead me to believe that his suggestions will most likely be useful for other entrepreneurs and aspiring CEOs like me (since he's damn good at it) and well written (since he's very well read).
Shoe Dog proved my assumptions right.
The book has earned its place among a handful of other reads I consider powerful aides on my journey to build a long-lasting successful company. Made in America (by Sam Walton), The Hard Thing about Hard Things (by Ben Horowitz), Gringing it Out (Ray Kroc), Pour Your Heart Into It (by Howard Schultz) and now Shoe Dog, all have something in common: they discuss the hardships, sacrifices and joys involved in building such a legacy in a way that feels like these guys are your mentors meeting you for weekly 1-on-1s over coffee.
Knight's book teaches us a lot about resilience ("don't ever stop"). Nike's cofounder fought a number of life-threatening fires during his journey, and maybe that's really a big part of building such a successful company: remaining in the game. He lost credit lines when his business depended on them; he repeatedly almost lost his partnership with Onitsuka (I didn't know Nike had started selling Jap shoes) when distributing them in the U.S. was the only business he had; he was fined for more than a year's revenue by the Government. But he lived to fight another day, meditating, counting backwards, running, doing "whatever it took to hold it together". I can relate to that.
Another recurring theme in the book is Knight's reluctance in going public. Founding a company that's built to last is a commitment that's best measured in decades, and so an IPO was very far from his goal, a vision unlike Silicon Valley's.
We all see many startups going public with founders holding less than 10% of the equity, and quickly stepping down to start other companies and do it all over again. Building a huge company takes a very long time, and the really great founders behind the really great companies do everything in their power to remain in control (see Google, Facebook and Amazon).
So knowing he'd be around for decades running Nike was a huge factor in Knight's holding up an IPO as far as he could, so that he wouldn't abide too much equity, and I think he was right. I, too, want to build Qulture.Rocks for the long long run. He says "the cowards never started, and the weak died along the way." He might as well have said "the cowards never started, and the weak died - or sold out - along the way".
Of course, that really stems from the fact that he wasn't really chasing money, but the amazing road that's building a company for the long-term. Reflecting on his 30-plus years with Nike, he looks back and reflects on the journey being the end goal, "because, honestly, I wished I could do it all over again". That helps a lot to put my path in perspective... Remembering all the sacrifices and hardships I've been going through are actually the thing I'll miss when all is conquered and set. Not that everybody thinks, or even should think, this way: that's the privilege of a small part of entrepreneurs, who do it for the love for their products and the excitement of building something bigger than themselves.
Another thing I could relate was Knight's view of the importance of money in building Nike, not as the endgame, but as a means to build greater things: "For us, business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood". I can also relate to that. I'd love to be selling ten times what I'm selling right now so I could hire more talent, build a great office and pay top dollar to our amazing team. And that's what money's for.
That's enough. If your a founder trying to build a great company, read it.