I have read many, if not all, autobiographies and biographies of business leaders. Out of them all, my two absolute favorites are Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson and Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch.
While Steve's biography is an outstanding anecdote of a magnificent personality, Jack penned down his corporate journey and moving up the ladder to become one of the most successful CEOs in the history of Business. No doubts, like every great leader their struggles, were huge, but for Steve, life was directly or indirectly more about his personal struggles and for Jack, it was centered around the operations of handling a giant company, General Electric.
Phil Knight's story is unlike them all. His is the story of a true entrepreneur. It's a story about the mocking, the belittling, the ordinary challenges of survival, the stress, the desperation, and yet a story of pressing on, of taking another tough decision, the story of not giving up. This is not the story of an obsessed perfectionist who fired people in an elevator or a man who had chartered planes at his disposal to travel to sign contracts; it's the ordinary story of a man who gets lured by the temptation to steal documents in the fear of losing his business.
Beautifully summed up within 370 pages is the story of an ordinary man who was overshadowed by the stature and expectations of his prestigious father. One day he decided to pick up his bag, fetched some money, and started his world tour with a friend. Memories of that tour later became his solace in every hour of desperation.
After returning to his country, he noticed that Japanese shoes were yet to enter the American markets, and with great struggle, he collected the money and started importing Japanese shoes. Years passed by, and he became the sole distributor of Japanese Tiger shoes in America. On his journey, he luckily found all the passionate misfits, and with his leadership, molded them into a team that lived for a vision, a vision to build something meaningful for the world.
New glamorous competitors, shortage of funds, banks giving up on his business - several such miseries came knocking down on his door every month of every year, struck him hard and made him feel like maybe this time he won't survive, but he pressed on, and emerged out of all the deep waters, victorious.
It was when the executives of Tiger Shoes try to cut him off and find a new distributor, that he realized it was time to be his own boss, to create something that belonged to a vision of changing the world through actions, and thus, NIKE was born. New challenges started, new tragedies occurred, new opportunities were grabbed and Nike grew past all expectations. Despite facing intense financial adversaries and the surety of a huge fortune, Phil was reluctant to go public, because money never mattered to him or his team. What mattered was the culture that they had created together and they didn't want to dilute it. But on December 2nd, 1980, when he finally did decide to go public, he was worth USD 176 million. His thoughts didn't linger there for even a second, because what mattered to him was the next product, the next factory, the next breakthrough in the history of shoes!
Below is my favorite excerpt from the book which probably sums it all up:
It seems wrong to call it “business”. It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner – business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher – and none of us wavered in the belief that “stakes” didn’t mean “money”. For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living – and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original decision of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is – you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.
Maybe it will grow on me.
(Excerpt taken from: Shoe Dog, page 352-353).
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