The Pioneer
The frontier and an appetite for the unknown, goes first.
Phil Knight embodies The Pioneer, a leader willing to operate without a map. He turned a handshake deal importing Japanese running shoes into the world's dominant sportswear brand, in the early years quite literally selling product from the trunk of a car.
“So, two thoughts popped to mind when I read that. First one was that at least he got an A. If you remember somewhere back in the 150s, I covered the biography of Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx. His company also started as a term paper, and he got a C.”
“So he tells his dad this decision, and we're going to see difference between inner scorecard and outer scorecard. He stared. I'm sorry, this is his boss first. His boss and his dad react the same way, so he tells him I'm quitting. He stared. I'd gone off script, way off. Why the hell would you do something like that?”
“Bauman scolded the trucker, threatened to punch him in the nose, but the trucker paid no heed, so Bowerman rigged the mailbox with explosives. Next time the trucker knocked it over, boom. When the smoke cleared, the trucker found his truck in pieces, its tires reduced to ribbons.”
“Billions of dollars, and yet this book tells us the struggles that Phil had to endure to build a company and that advice that he set at the very beginning, keep going, don't stop. It might be the only advice looking back 50 years later that we should ever give. And we see that you have to have control of your mind, though.”
OTA Leadership Index: “Public record read”
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