Book Bearings
Shoe Dog
- 386 pages · about 6 hours
- First published 2016
- 28 editions
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1 About this book
Shoe Dog is the memoir of Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike. In 1962, fresh out of business school, he borrows a small sum from his father and starts a company to import running shoes from Japan, selling them at first from the trunk of his car. The book follows the business, known in its early years as Blue Ribbon Sports, through one difficulty after another on its way to becoming one of the best-known companies in the world. Knight also writes about parts of his own life and about the people who built the company with him.
- Biography
- History
- Businesspeople, biography
- Memoir
- Biography & autobiography
- Personal Memoirs
- Businesspeople
- Business
2 What to expect
The founder's memoir of Nike's early years, from importing Japanese running shoes on borrowed money to the company's first great success. It reads like an adventure story about a business always close to collapse, with cash crises, legal fights and a close group of oddball colleagues. The tone is candid and self-critical, and it deals mainly with the early decades, so the later Nike is hardly covered.
Good for readers who want: a founder's memoir, startup struggles, and business told as a story.
3 About Phil Knight
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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