Shoedog

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike.  By Phil Knight.  "Knight’s unvarnished memoir about the company he birthed—Nike. Bill Gates puts it best, “Shoe Dog is a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. It’s a messy, perilous, and chaotic journey riddled with mistakes, endless struggles, and sacrifice. In fact, the only thing that seems inevitable in page after page of Knight’s story is that his company will end in failure.” So many books written by entrepreneurs make their path to success seem like a pre-ordained endeavor that the entrepreneur somehow willed to success and fortune with careful planning and a well thought out business plan. Not Phil Knight’s journey. He shows the real path warts and all.  This is not a 'how to' book with another contrived formula for success. This amazing tale is real. A young man with no money assembled an unlikely band of misfits, lives precariously for a decade at the mercy of unmerciful bankers until an unlikely potential nemesis becomes a benefactor, he pays an art student $35 to design the swoosh logo because he needed one by the next day, he doesn’t like the name “Nike” but goes along with his staff’s suggestion and say’s what the hell,”maybe it will grow on us”.  Reading this book is as close as most of us will get to having a beer with Phil and letting him regale us with this extraordinary story, you will want him to relay one more experience, one more stroke of luck, one more personal tragedy. And then you will understand in the final pages why, despite all of the hardships he experienced along the way, Knight says, 'God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing.'"