The Thimbles Summary
Shoe Dog
The book in one sentence
Nike’s founder tells the messy, near-bankrupt story of how a young man selling imported Japanese running shoes from his car built one of the world’s great brands.
Who it's for
Founders who want an honest picture of the early years, anyone interested in brands and sport, and readers who prefer a gripping story to a list of business rules.
The big idea
Knight ran middle distance at the University of Oregon under coach Bill Bowerman. At Stanford business school he wrote a paper arguing that Japanese running shoes could do to the German brands what Japanese cameras had done to German cameras. In 1962, aged 24, he travelled to Japan, talked his way into a meeting with the Onitsuka company in Kobe, and won the right to sell its Tiger shoes in the United States. The memoir follows the company year by year from that trip to its stock market listing in 1980. The overwhelming theme is that success looked anything but certain at almost every step.
The full summary continues with the five ideas worth keeping, three things to try this week, the 5-minute deep dive and our full verdict, as a PDF to keep.
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