7 Leadership Lessons from Phil Knight

Phil Knight was 24 years old in 1962, the year he started Nike.  It began as a Crazy Idea.  At the time, camera companies from Japan were taking market share from traditional German manufactures by bringing high quality, low cost cameras to the U.S. market.  Phil's idea was to do the same thing with running shoes. Import athletic shoes from Japan and take on the German footwear giant, Adidas.  Why not?

In Shoe Dog, Phil's recently published memoir, he relives this improbable story; how he followed his Crazy Idea into the unknown.  Unlike most business memoirs, Phil's narrative is not just a chronicle of triumphs and deals measured in dollars. Rather, he takes the reader along an emotional journey as he describes the ups and downs of starting a footwear company.  He discusses his motivations and fears, his self-doubt and guilt, his greatest successes, his narrowest escapes and even the darkest moments of his life.  

One of the pillars of the Nike brand is authenticity, and what Phil has created is an authentic account of one man's life journey.

Here are five leadership lessons that Phil discusses in the book:

1. Follow your Crazy Ideas.  In a time when entrepreneurship was frowned upon by many, Phil listened to his Crazy Idea.  He dedicated himself to it because pursuing that idea, and making it a reality was a worthy use of his life.  

"At twenty-four I did have a Crazy idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future, and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their mid-twenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas.  The things I loved most – books, sports, democracy, free enterprise – started as crazy ideas."

Phil recognized early on that time was his most precious commodity and he was determined to spend it wisely:

"But deep down I was searching for something else, something more.  I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful.  And purposeful.  And creative. And important.  Above all...different."

2. Hire good people and give them the freedom to succeed...or fail. Phil had the insight (or luck) to hire great people at the very beginning.  Once onboard, Phil didn't micromanage his people.  He set goals, painted a vision of the future, and guided them in the general direction, but he never told his people how to do their job.  As a student of history and an avid reader of books, especially about war, he was heavily influenced by something General Patton once said and adopted it for his management style:

"Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results." - General Patton

3. Treat praise like a precious commodity.  If you want praise to be meaningful, save it for the moments that matter most, and even then, be careful not to offer too much.  Phil thinks he got this one from his father, who offered praise sparingly, and his college track coach at the University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman, who was even more reluctant than his father to lavish praise. Bowerman was a mentor and father figure to Phil, and also his business partner. Bowerman "weighed and hoarded words of praise like uncut diamonds."  After one of Bowerman's runners on the Oregon track team became one of the first American athletes to crack the sub-four minute mile, his response was "nice race. " And that was it.  Bowerman's methods may have been unorthodox, but there were also strangely effective. So Phil adopted this trait at Nike.  He became well-known for dropping by the office of some Nike employee who just knocked it out of the park, and he'd offer a short; "not bad," and then move on.  

4.  Believe in what you do.  Early in his career, before founding Nike, Phil took a job selling encyclopedias door-to-door, and another selling securities.  He wasn't successful at either.  He figured he just wasn't that good at sales.  But when he started selling running shoes, he couldn't write orders fast enough.  

"So why was selling shoes so different?  Because, I realized, it wasn't selling.  I believed in running.  I believed that if people go out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place and I believed these shoes were better to run in.  People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief I decided.  Belief is irresistible."

5. Failure is okay, just fail as fast as you can.  So what does a guy who started a tiny shoe import business and grew it into the largest athletic company in the world know about failure?  Plenty, it turns out.  There were many, many stumbles along the way.  For much of the first ten years Nike was constantly on the brink, there were times when Phil even expected it to fail.  And he was okay with that:

"But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I'd fail quickly, so I'd have enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons.  I wasn't' much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: fail fast."

6. Take time to reflect.  Nike sales were doubling every year, and so was the stress in Phil's life. Eventually he married Penny, his wife of 48 years (and counting), and soon they had two boys.  Now he had a family and a business, and both were demanding more and more of his time.  To cope with all this, Phil started running six miles every night.  It became a ritual, a sort of meditation, giving his mind the space to reflect on the day, process decisions and dream of the future.

"At the close of those difficult days, it was my nightly six-mile run that saved my life."

Later in his career, when the need for capital became more intense, the prospect of going public was raised, and Phil resisted it. He imagined thousands of investors, who could grow angry at the first sign that Nike might miss quarterly expectations.  Gradually, on his nightly six mile run, he began to view going public in a new light – a way to connect with more people:

"During my nightly run, I'd sometimes ask myself, hasn't your life been a kind of search for connection?  Running for Bowerman, backpacking around the world, starting a company, marrying Penny, assembling this band of brothers...hasn't it all been about, one way or another, going public"

7. Business isn't about money, it's about something much, much bigger. 

If your sole mission in business is to make money than you've truly lost your soul.  If you follow your passion and work with people you trust and respect, and you believe in what you do, than at some point you transcend to a higher level. You move up Maslow's hierarchy:

"For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.  Yes, the human body needs blood.  It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else.  But that day-to-day business of the human body isn't our mission as human beings.  It's a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living..."

For Phil it was about bringing athletic shoes to runners, and later the mission was broadened to bringing inspiration and innovation to athletes everywhere. We all need to figure out what it is we do that transcends business.  How do we help our fellow humans live more fully?  How do we connect with others in a meaningful way.  How do we attain Oneness?  As Phil says...

"Oneness – in some way, shape or form, it's what every person I've ever met has been seeking."

Sean P. Murray is an author, speaker and consultant in the areas of leadership development and talent management.