Lessons from Shoe Dog

I first came across Shoe Dog, Nike founder Phil Knight’s memoir, from this post on Tren Griffin’s blog. Soon enough, I saw the book pop up multiple times on my GoodReads, and when I got the Kindle sample last week, I noticed that all my friends on GoodReads had given it a five star rating.

So while I normally don’t read autobiographies (the only other one that I remember liking is Andrea Pirlo’s), the recommendations made this one hard to resist. And it was a brilliant read. Finished the book in two days.

It’s a story very well told, written in an engaging style that makes you sometimes wonder if it is a work of fiction. Knight has eschewed the boring details and focussed on the interesting, and impactful, stuff, and the book is full of stories about the early days of the firm (it basically “ends” with Nike going public).

What struck me about Nike’s story is the number of times it nearly went under (which is what possibly makes it such a great story). In the light of those challenges (lawsuits, supply issues, constant working capital troubles, leverage), it is a wonder that the company survived long enough to thrive! In that sense, while it makes sense to draw business lessons from Nike’s story, I sometimes wonder if it’s simply a case of survivorship bias.

For starters, for nearly twenty years after founding, Nike remained a closely held private company, with little outside investment. While the company was mostly profitable (except on one occasion when it broke up with a supplier), it was forever cash poor. Well into its fifteenth year of operations, Knight talks about the company “not having money” for stuff like advertising (for example).

Instead, the company relied on heavy leverage, borrowing as much as it could from any bank that would deal with it (which was basically all banks in Oregon – in the 1960s and 70s, there was no inter-state banking in the US). Several times, the company came close to running out of money, when banks refused to extend its credit. But then it survived.

Griffin’s review of the book shows all this as “learnings” – innovative sources of financing, high growth, dealing with crises, but to me it looks like a lot of bad financial management. Too little equity for too long, an obsession for control (finally Nike went public only when Knight figured he could issue dual class stock), high leverage and all that.

The other thing that struck me about Nike is that even in the late 70s, when the company was 15 years old, it seemed like a bunch of buddies of Knight running it – there wasn’t that much of professional management around, and this could again be attributed to the business being continuously short on cash. I guess times are different now, and equity financing is more available, and firms can start hiring professional managers early, but a 15 year old company being seemingly run in a chaotic manner seemed odd.

Finally, back in business school, we were told that when applying to companies such as Nike or Adidas, we should highlight whatever sporting achievements we might have on our CVs. That struck me as odd – what impact could having played cricket for my hostel wing possibly have on how I could sell shoes?

Reading the book, though, it seems like a culture issue. In several places in the book Knight talks about the firm being driven by a “passion for sport”, with the early employees all being sportsmen. Culture permeates, and you hire more people like you. There is this vague sense of brotherhood, among people who have played competitive sport, and that’s hard to permeate for non sportspersons. And the culture goes on. Whether this lack of diversity is good for the company is another matter!

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