Shoe Dog

Phil Knight

Phil Knight was the founder and long-time president and CEO of Nike.  This is his account of creating Nike in 1962, until it went public in 1980, making him, and a lot of others, quite wealthy.

Actually, Knight did not create Nike in 1962.  He created Blue Ribbon Sports and began importing Tiger shoes from Japan.  Tiger later became Asics.  In the early 1970s, he began making his own shoes and they called them Nikes.

He’s a good writer.  He has a sense of humor.  He is fairly honest about his own weaknesses and challenges.  It is certainly a fascinating tale, as Nike became one of the most famous brands on the planet.  It is an incredible success story.

The first 10 years they were barely surviving and always in debt.  But even after they had grown larger, there was one challenge after another.  There was never smooth and easy sailing until after they went public.

What did Knight do so well?  Why did his company succeed?  Well, he’s smart.  He’s a Stanford MBA.  But more importantly, he had endurance.  He ran the mile at the University of Oregon.  He was willing to do what it took to make the company a success.  Also, he hired good people – key early men like Bob Woodell, who had been an athlete on the University of Oregon track team and was later paralyzed from the waist down from an accident.  Men like Jeff Johnson, a Stanford graduate and ex-runner who was eccentric but quite bright.  Men like Rob Strasser, an overweight insurance attorney who was very bright and became a key figure in the company.  There were many others.  Knight also includes luck as a key factor in making Nike go.  I would say it was God’s common grace and goodness.

Nike began as a running company.  Knight was a runner at the University of Oregon, and Eugene, Oregon is “running central” for the United States.  The central figures in Eugene included Bill Bowerman, the legendary track coach, and Steve Prefontaine, the legendary runner (almost mythic figure in Oregon even today) who became America’s greatest distance runner and died in a car accident in his twenties.  Both Bowerman and Prefontaine were vitally involved with Nike’s founding.  Bowerman had been Knight’s coach and became an early co-owner.  Prefontaine ran in Nike shoes and helped give the brand visibility.  And he inspired everyone at Nike with his tough charisma and confidence.

Because I ran for Nike beginning in 1977, continuing through 1984, I had met a number of these principal figures and of course that made the book a lot more interesting.  Also, since I knew Eugene so well, and the atmosphere of running in Oregon, the book was that much more fascinating. 

I especially appreciated his remarks on Geoff Hollister, who was one of the first Nike employees, an ex-runner at the University of Oregon, who first brought me into the company and who was a delightful human being.

However, for anyone interested in American business, and especially a company as unusual as Nike, this is a good read.

Draw the Circle

Mark Batterson

This book in some ways is a sequel to Mark Batterson’s superb book The Circle Maker.  The book is divided into 40 days of prayer challenge.  It includes tons of good stories, solid biblical foundation and incisive, interesting thoughts from Batterson, who is a pastor of National Community Church in Washington D.C.

Batterson’s books on prayer are filled with passion and wisdom, and they challenge the believer to go deeper with God in prayer.  Highly recommended.

The Great Game

Peter Hopkirk

The Great Game is an epic work on Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk.  In this book Hopkirk talks about the struggle for Empire in Central Asia between Russia coming from the north and Britain coming from the south, and India.  The book is filled with all sorts of adventure and intrigue.  It reads like a spy novel except it is true.

There are so many riveting stories filling these pages as the adventure ranges all over Persia (modern day Iran), the Caucasus, Afghanistan, the mountains of western China, and the region of what is now called Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

You would have to have some interest in Central Asia to enjoy the book, but if you are interested, this may be the definitive work.  This is my second reading.

Here is one blurb from the book to give you an idea:

“At first this big book looks like a fairly standard military/diplomatic history:  an account of the nineteenth-century struggle between England and Russia for dominance in Central Asia … But the author, a former London Times reporter with extensive experience in the Mideast and Asia, has not just written an updated glorification of the British Empire.  He has looked into the Russian historical record extensively, and he tells his story with a chivalrous respect for the Russian point of view.  We learn how the great push southward was the Russian version of Manifest Destiny, and we can sense that Leonid Brezhnev’s arrogant and criminal invasion of an unstable Afghanistan in 1979 was nothing new … Hopkirk has a gift for vivid writing that is exciting without being overblown.  His account of the Afghan uprising in 1841 is especially gripping and horrifying … As Hopkirk points out, after the breakup of the Soviet Union the Central Asian peoples are once again independent.  Today’s Great Powers have a second chance to behave in a civilized way – there and elsewhere.”

                                                                        --James North, New York Newsday

Between Two Worlds

By John Stott

John Stott was a master preacher and a master writer.  This is his major book on preaching and it is superb.  He does an incredible job by giving a historical sketch of preaching.  Then he follows it with some of the objections to preaching in the modern world. 

(The publishing date is 1982, so it is not current, but it is relevant.)

He then has a superb section on the theological foundations for preaching, followed by a long chapter on preaching in the modern world.

The next chapter has a ringing call to the preacher to be a student, followed by an excellent and yet practical chapter on preparing a sermon.

The last two chapters might be the best of all.  One is on sincerity and earnestness or passion. The second one is on courage and on humility.  He is superb on these topics.

I highly recommend this book.

The Ideal Team Player

By Patrick Lencioni

It is always a significant occasion when Patrick Lencioni writes a new book.  Lencioni, along with Jim Collins, is perhaps one of the two most insightful writers today on leadership and organizational health.  A former Bain consultant who now has his own organization called The Table Group, he has impacted millions through his writings.  This book is about how you find and develop team players.

Lancioni writes that the most valuable quality a person needs to develop in the world of work is how to be a team player.  He then argues that the three essential traits for team players are humble, hungry and smart.  The key issue is how he defines these three terms.  He writes this book in the form of a fable, a true-life story that is quite interesting.  His fables are always good reading.  And then he follows with a final 50 pages explaining the fable in more detail.

He argues that humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.  Here are the questions to determine if someone is humble.

Does he genuinely compliment or praise teammates without hesitation?

Does she easily admit when she makes a mistake?

Is he willing to take on lower-level work for the good of the team?

Does she gladly share credit for team accomplishments?

Does he readily acknowledge his weaknesses?

Does she offer and receive apologies graciously?

The second key trait is hungry.  He says that hungry people almost never have to be pushed by a manager to work harder, because they are self-motivated and diligent.  Here are the questions to determine if someone is hungry.

Does he do more than what is required in his own job?

Does she have passion for the “mission” of the team?

Does he feel a sense of personal responsibility for the success of the team?

Is she willing to contribute to and think about work outside of office hours?

Is he willing and eager to take on tedious and challenging tasks whenever necessary?

Does she look for opportunities to contribute outside her area of responsibility?

The word smart can be confusing.  He is not talking about IQ here, but more about emotional intelligence, or people intelligence.  He’s talking about being smart in how you deal with people.  It basically refers to a person’s common sense about people.  Here are the questions to determine if someone is smart about people.

Does he seem to know what teammates are feeling during meetings and interactions?

Does she show empathy to others on the team?

Does he demonstrate an interest in the lives of teammates?

Is she an attentive listener?

Is he aware of how his words and actions impact others on the team?

Is she good at adjusting her behavior and style to fit the nature of a conversation or relationship?

He then describes why you need all three traits, and how problems will arise if you only have two of the three traits.  And how disaster might arise if you only have one or none of the traits.  He talks about how these three traits affect hiring, how you develop these three traits more in your current employees, and how you embed these three values in your organizational culture.

Finally, he connects The Ideal Team Player with his well-known book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  They go hand in glove.  The Five Dysfunctions focuses on how a group must interact to become a cohesive team, centering in on the essential nature of trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results.

By contrast, this book focuses more on the individual team member and the traits that make him or her more likely to overcome the dysfunctions that derail teams.

The book is superb.  It is exceedingly practical and relevant.  It is a fascinating read.  However, here is a warning:  Patrick Lencioni is a Christian and I imagine a devout Christian, but he does use earthy language at times in the fable, perhaps to reflect the workplace today.