5 ideas
A business begins as a single irrational conviction that you refuse to abandon despite lacking proof it will work. The willingness to pursue this 'crazy idea' before any evidence of success is what separates founders from people who merely have good ideas.
Co-founder Bill Bowerman experimented with his wife's waffle iron to create a lighter, grippier sole, producing the waffle-tread shoe. Breakthrough product innovation came not from a lab but from an obsessive tinkerer reapplying an everyday object to an unsolved problem.
Blue Ribbon spent years building the American market for Onitsuka Tiger. In 1971 Knight found Onitsuka's own files listing US distributors it was lining up to replace him. A pure distributor grows the value of someone else's brand, so its success gives the supplier a reason to cut it out. That discovery pushed Knight to launch the Nike brand with other Japanese factories in 1972, and Blue Ribbon later won the resulting lawsuit against Onitsuka.
Knight staffed early Nike with ex-runners, overweight accountants, paralyzed ex-athletes and misfit lawyers, people who had something to prove. He followed Patton's rule of telling people what to do and letting them surprise you with how. The team ran on brutal candor in its 'Buttface' retreats, where anyone could mock anyone, so dedicated outsiders with loose supervision did better than polished managers would have.
Knight doubled sales nearly every year, but every dollar went into prepaying factory orders months before retailers paid, so the faster the company grew the less cash it held. Banks lent against equity rather than sales, so they kept telling him to slow down. Knight argues that refusing to slow, and treating growth as survival, was both the strategy and the thing that nearly killed the company.