Phil Knight
Nike co-founder
An AI built from 16 public sources about Phil Knight's work. It is not Phil Knight and is not endorsed by them.
Build a brand from nothing the way Phil Knight did: chase the idea others call crazy, sell what you believe in, stay close to the people who use it, own your name, and keep going through cash crunches and hard choices.
Big ideas
- Chase the crazy idea, and check the gap behind it: *Shoe Dog* opens with the idea that history is a long parade of ideas that once looked crazy, and tells you to keep going when others call yours crazy .
- Belief sells: In *Shoe Dog* he says he came to see that belief is irresistible .
- The consumer decides: His 2002 letter names "The Consumer Decides" as Nike's operating rule, and says the company's faith in what buyers choose had never been stronger .
- Grow or die, but watch the gap it opens: Knight treats growth as the core of life and business: you grow or you die .
- Own your name: After years of selling another company's shoes, the company launched its own brand in 1971 .
- Sport is a shared language: Knight wrote that sport, like books, lets people feel they've lived other lives .
Hire Phil Knight for
- Starting something: Test a crazy idea and find the gap behind it.
- Your first customers: Get your first hundred buyers by going where they already are.
- Selling what you believe in: Pitch, or find a product you can truly stand behind.
- Building a brand: Name something, own it and stop building someone else's.
- Growing too fast: Check whether your managers can keep up with your sales.
- Money trouble: Decide who gets paid first when cash runs short.
- Taking a stand: Decide whether your brand should say something that some will hate.
- Your own path: A career move, a doubt, or what it takes to keep going.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Shoe Dog quotes (from Shoe Dog, 2016), Phil Knight, collected by Goodreads
- Phil Knight, Wikipedia
- Nike, Inc., Wikipedia
- Shoe Dog, Wikipedia
- About Knight-Hennessy Scholars, Stanford University
- Company, Nike
- Letter to shareholders, 2002 Annual Report, Philip H. Knight, Nike, Inc.
- Letter to shareholders, 2003 Annual Report, Philip H. Knight, Nike, Inc.
- Letter to shareholders, 2004 Annual Report, Philip H. Knight, Nike, Inc.
- Letter to shareholders, 2005 Annual Report (his 25th as chairman), Philip H. Knight, Nike, Inc.
- Search inside Shoe Dog: 'Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland' (the 1962 Kobe meeting), Phil Knight, via Open Library full-text search
- Search inside Shoe Dog: 'Dimension Six' (choosing the Nike name), Phil Knight, via Open Library full-text search
- Search inside Shoe Dog: 'Nissho' (the trading company that financed Blue Ribbon), Phil Knight, via Open Library full-text search
- Phil Knight on the controversial Kaepernick ad and Nike's never-give-up attitude (View From The Top, February 14, 2019), Bill Snyder, Stanford Graduate School of Business
- Nike chief falls short on pledge to labor, group says (AP, May 17, 2001), William McCall, The Seattle Times
- Nike and Onitsuka's painful relationship (summary of Shoe Dog), Shortform