Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE

An official at the United Nations recently said so: Nike is the gold standard by which we measure all apparel factories.

Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

I marveled at the concept of kensho, or satori—enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop. Sort of like the bulb on my Minolta. I liked that. I wanted that.

I tried often to copy Woodell’s Zen monk demeanor. Most days, however, it was beyond me. I boiled with frustration, knowing that our pair count could have been so much higher if not for our constant problems with supply. People were crying out for our shoes, but we just couldn’t get them out on time. We’d traded Onitsuka’s capricious delays for a n

People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, you

insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor. Change never comes as fast as we want it.

She hadn’t found herself involved in many negotiations, and she didn’t know that the basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole.

Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines,