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Shoe Dog is a first-person memoir written by Nike co-founder Phil Knight. This book primarily focuses on events that took place in Knight's life from 1962 to 1980. During this time period, Knight was traveling around the world looking for business opportunities and learning as much as he could about how to start his own business. The book discusses his struggles and trials as he tries to build his business. The book is divided into 20 chapters with each chapter covering roughly a year of his life.

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What does this have to do with management?

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What does this have to do with management?

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Phil Knight created and built one of the biggest and most successful athletic clothing brands ever. Just listening to his story of life gives the reader many incredible examples of what it takes to be successful as a manager and leader. Throughout the book Knight constantly told himself to "never stop". This attitude is one of these examples of what separates great leaders from average ones. Knight had a great education on business but taught himself about shoes and approached marketing with a much more aggressive style than his competitors. I think one of the most valuable lessons taught in this book is that if you really believe in something, or want to be successful then don't stop pursuing until you have accomplished your goal.

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1. Start before you're ready!
Knight often said throughout the book that he was faking it until he made it during his journey of starting Nike. What Knight is trying to say is that we are never going to be fully prepared to start a company or something similar to this, so just dive in and fake it until you make it.
2. Sell Enthusiasm
It is much easier to sell something that you believe in. This was the case for Knight. It was easy for him to show his passion for his products to investors or potential sponsored athletes because he wasn't lying! Knight was extremely passionate about his product and believed that it was better than his competitors.
3. Resist Conformity
When Knight first started trying to sell his shoes in the United States many people disliked his product because it was very different from the current running shoe style. So Knight signed distance runner Steve Prefontaine who also approached things differently than his competition. This is when Blue Ribbon Sports started to become successful.
4. Seek a Calling not a Career
With the education that Knight possessed it would have been very easy for him to get a well-paying job at a major business and have a very successful career. Instead Knight followed his calling and what he was interested in.

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- Steve Prefontaine: Steve was an Olympic distance runner for the United States that dominated his competition. He was a relentless runner who approached running with a different mentality than the rest of the field. This type of passion is what attracted Phil Knight to approach Pre about becoming a Nike athlete. Pre agreed and was a major piece in helping grow the company.
Bill Bowerman: Bowerman was a track and field coach at the University of Oregon and also coached for team USA. Bowerman was a co-founder of Nike after Knight approached him with his business plan. The two worked great together and built the largest athletic clothing and shoe company in the world

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- “Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ‘there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”
-“I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling.”
-“It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.”
-“But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”

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I think that throughout the story there is a common theme in the way Knight approached his business. This theme was to never stop. There were many times where most people would instantly shut down and call it quits because it looked like there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Instead, Knight refused to let even large negative events stop him from achieving his ultimate goal of building Nike.