Nike’s Co-founder on Innovation, Culture, and Succession

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2017

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Phil Knight, former chair and CEO of Nike, tells the story of starting the sports apparel and equipment giant after taking an entrepreneurship class at Stanford and teaming up with his former track coach, Bill Bowerman. Together (and with the help of a waffle iron) they changed how running shoes are designed and made. Knight discusses the company's enduring culture of innovation, as well as the succession process that led to former runner and Nike insider Mark Parker becoming CEO.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Closer Podcast brings you the inside story of deals changing the world, told by the people who know how it all went down.
0:09.0	Understand the human motivations behind groundbreaking business decisions with host Amy Keene.
0:14.6	Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Every company has an origin story, some
0:37.2	enduring narrative that informs the company's culture. For Nike, it's the one about
0:41.8	the waffle iron.
0:43.0	One morning, co-founder Bill Bowerman had waffles for breakfast.
0:47.0	He started looking at their blocky texture
0:49.0	and realized the same shape would give a running shoe better traction. He used his own waffle
0:54.4	iron and some rubber to create a prototype. It ruined the waffle iron, but
0:58.9	everything else worked out pretty well. Today that waffle iron is at company headquarters and the sports apparel and
1:05.0	equipment maker has more than 70,000 employees and brings in tens of billions of
1:09.6	dollars in annual revenue. Given that company narrative it shouldn't surprise you to learn
1:14.8	that current CEO Mark Parker started out at Nike as a shoe designer. Nike's long
1:20.6	successful race from startup to global enterprise is chronicled in the recent book
1:24.6	Shoo Dogg.
1:26.0	The other company co-founder Phil Knight wrote it.
1:29.4	HBO Senior Editor Dan McGinn talked with Knight about partnering of Bowerman, his former track coach, to launch the company.
1:36.0	The shoe is the one piece of equipment that really matters to a runner.
1:40.0	There's no ball involved. There's no racket, there's no helmet.
1:44.0	Bowerman was obsessed with it.
1:47.0	He believed, you know, an ounce in a pair of shoes was the same as a thousand pounds in the last five yards of a 1500 meters so he was obsessed with it and
1:56.0	it got me quite interested in it. Sounds like as far back as the 50s he was sort of
	...

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