Phil Knight

Phil Knight is the American co-founder and former CEO of Nike whose memoir Shoe Dog tells the story of building one of the world's most recognisable brands from a car boot full of shoes.

Phil Knight is the billionaire co-founder of Nike, the sportswear company he built from a 1962 road trip to Japan and a handshake deal with Onitsuka Tiger into the largest athletic footwear company in the world. Shoe Dog (2016), written with the help of ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer, is his memoir of those early decades — the chaos, near-bankruptcies, relationships, and luck that shaped the company from Blue Ribbon Sports to Nike. It is among the most readable business memoirs ever written, combining genuinely propulsive narrative with an unusual willingness to portray the author’s own failures and anxieties.

Knight writes — or has written for him — with real literary quality: the prose has a voice, the characters are distinct, and the specific texture of the 1960s and 1970s business environment (hand-to-mouth credit, airline tickets purchased at the gate, letters to Japan taking weeks) gives the book a period specificity that more generic business memoirs lack. The emotional honesty is also notable: Knight is candid about his distance from his family, his obsessive focus on the business, and the personal costs of the company’s growth.

The honest caveat is that Shoe Dog covers only the early years, ending roughly at the point of Nike’s IPO, and therefore sidesteps many of the company’s most significant controversies — the labour practices in overseas factories that generated intense scrutiny in the 1990s receive almost no attention. Knight’s account of his own role is inevitably partial, and readers who want a complete picture of Nike’s history should supplement it with critical journalism. But as a portrait of what it actually felt like to build a company from nothing — with all the terror and exhilaration that entails — Shoe Dog is exceptional.