48 pages • 1 hour read
Phil KnightShoe Dog
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Telling the Truth as a Successful Business Strategy
While many people associate success in business with ruthlessness and deceit, Knight repeatedly makes the case that honesty and truth-telling were crucial to Nike’s success. At the same time, the action of Shoe Dog demonstrates that Knight is willing to wield deception strategically to further the company’s success.
The first time Knight realizes the connection between honesty and good business is as a young man selling Dreyfus funds in Hawaii. While he has little success selling encyclopedias, he finds that simply sticking to what he knows helps him make connections with potential Dreyfus funds clients. At Nike’s first appearance at the National Sporting Goods Association Show in Chicago in 1972, Johnson speaks with other tradesmen to find out why they showed faith in Nike’s shoes that year, even though they were still clearly inferior products. The men tell Johnson that they trust Blue Ribbon because while everyone else “bullshits,” Blue Ribbon always tells the truth about its products. These episodes highlight the effectiveness of forthrightness as a marketing strategy.
Knight also tells the truth during a speech he gives to his employees at a crucial moment in Nike’s history. After Onitsuka cuts off their supply to Blue Ribbon, Knight is direct and honest with his employees, which inspires them to see this potentially risky situation as a moment of opportunity. When Johnson congratulates Knight on his leadership, Knight simply responds, “I just told the truth. As he had in Chicago. Telling the truth, I said. Who knew?” (208). In this case, Knight’s honesty improves morale within the company, ultimately contributing to the company’s success.
However, Knight’s truth-telling has limits. In Blue Ribbon’s early days, for example, Knight misleads the company’s bankers, pretending to accept their terms but then placing larger-than-agreed orders. Similarly, Knight later conceals his efforts to shore up Blue Ribbon’s position in anticipation of Onitsuka cutting ties with the company. These moments suggest a certain tension between Knight’s policy of honesty and his commitment to succeed at any cost, though they also indicate differences in Knight’s approach when dealing with different audiences—e.g., customers versus potential rivals.
Breaking Rules in Order to Succeed
Throughout Shoe Dog Knight repeats a famous line credited to one of his heroes, General Douglas Macarthur: “You are remembered for the rules you break” (261). Mentioned at different points in the narrative, the line has different meanings. While preparing for his trial against Onitsuka, for example, Knight reviews some of the questionable things he did as the head of Blue Ribbon. When he thinks of when he stole some of Kitami’s files from his briefcase, Knight remembers Macarthur’s line. Knight is not proud of this moment, and the trial forces him to realize that stealing Kitami’s files might have negative consequences. In this instance, the idea of being remembered for a rule he broke has an ironic undertone. Being remembered for stealing Kitami’s files is not the recognition that Knight seeks.
In a different context, however, Macarthur’s line has more positive connotations. In Chapter 14, when Knight does not have enough money to cover his $1 million payment to Nissho, he once more recalls the saying. This time the line inspires Knight to pay his creditors, Nissho first and foremost, before honoring his other financial obligations. Though Knight faces a chain reaction of consequences for this loyalty, he is vindicated when it is Nissho that helps Nike out of a challenging situation. In this context, breaking rules has a positive outcome: Knight breaks his agreements with smaller partners to honor his agreement with his most important partner. In the end, it was this most important partner, Nissho, whose relationship mattered most.
Knight’s habit of breaking the rules is part of a larger pattern of risk-taking that the memoir associates with success in business. From the start, Knight underscores the danger and farfetchedness of his desire to partner with a Japanese company and sell shoes by calling it his “Crazy Idea.” Many people, including Knight’s own father, express doubts about the wisdom of his plan, suggesting that it is fundamentally unserious. For Knight, however, this is part of the point: He has decided he wants his life—and work—to feel like “play.” Knight’s belief that this approach to life is compatible with business success lays the groundwork for the many unorthodox practices that follow.
The Desire for Victory as Nike’s Binding Spirit
The Nike brand takes its name from the ancient Greek goddess of victory. This idea of victory has obvious resonance for a company associated with athletics, but Knight suggests that the association goes much deeper. As a young man, Knight reflects on what he wants from his life: “I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose” (3). This hatred of defeat is a primary motivator throughout Knight’s life and an organizing principle behind his formation of the Nike brand.
Most of those Knight hires to join the Nike team share his innate hatred of defeat, contributing to the emergence of a distinct company culture. Prefontaine, for example, one of Nike’s first celebrity athlete endorsers, is so averse to losing that he often throws conventional racing strategy to the wind and runs at the front of the pack for an entire race. After Prefontaine’s death, Bill Bowerman reflects that “Pre was determined to become the best runner in the world, but he wanted to be so much more” (280), which suggests a hungry determination to succeed in all categories of life, a drive that comes to inform Nike’s corporate and cultural ethos. Bowerman himself never stops tinkering with shoe designs and track surfaces, searching for perfection even after ostensibly retiring. Likewise, Knight’s trusted inner circle of employees (Johnson, Woodell, Hayes, and Strasser) each demonstrate tenacity in their own way, even in the face of setbacks, facilitating the Nike brand’s competitive spirit.
Although Shoe Dog largely celebrates this drivenness, it does hint at some downsides. In an athletic competition, it is clear what constitutes “victory,” but the word’s meaning becomes murkier in the realm of business. By ending the memoir with Nike going public, Knight implies that this constitutes a victory, but this is not the end of the company’s story. One of Nike’s slogans, “There is no finish line” (313), nods to the idea that continuous effort and improvement can also be a kind of victory, but this too invites questions. Although Knight largely depicts his personal and professional lives as existing in harmony, his total devotion to Nike does ultimately cause friction within his family, making him less involved in his sons’ lives than he would like. These tensions remain unresolved as the memoir concludes but raise questions about when a commitment to success becomes an obsession.
