Biography Of Phil Knight:

Phil Knight

Born February 24, 1938 (age 72)

Portland, Oregon, U.S.

Occupation Co-founder
and Chairman ofNike, Inc.

Net worth US$11.1 billion (2010)[1]

Spouse Penny Knight

Children Three

In the year 1993, ‘The Sporting News’ announced Phil Knight as the most powerful person
of the year in sports. Strangely, this man was no athlete, coach or commissioner but was the
founder and CEO of Nike, the number one athletic shoe company in the world. Over the years,
Knight has earned a reputation of being a visionary businessman and a hard-nosed CEO.

INTRODUCTION:

Phil Knight, the son of William H and Lola Knight was born on February 24, 1938 in Portland,
Oregon. His father was the publisher of ‘Oregon Journal’. William was a loving but authoritarian father,
who refused to give his son a summer job at his own newspaper as he believed that Phil should find
work on his own. Knight went to the rival ‘Oregonian’, where he worked the night shift tabulating
sports scores. Knight was a middle-distance runner for the University of Oregon track team. His
interest in sports and especially track, gave Knight the drive to study the way track shoes were being
made and marketed in the late 1950s. His coach Bill Bowerman's shared his obsession of improving
running shoes and offered assistance. They both collectively came to the conclusion that American
shoes were inferior in style and quality; and were too heavy and too easily damaged. The Japanese,
on the other hand, were experimenting with new, trimmed-down styles fashioned in lightweight, hardy
nylon.

Knight wrote his Stanford business school term paper on the same subject, when asked by
professor, Frank Shallenberger to write a paper on how they would create a new company. Owing to
his experience of Bowerman in his mind, Phil Knight's paper expressed how the import of cheap but
well-made running shoes from Japan could generate profits. A few years later, he put his theory into
practice by founding Blue Ribbon Sports.

Bowerman and Phil together, invested 500 dollars to import Tiger shoes from Japan. Knight
harnessed the ultimate aim to displace Adidas, the triple-striped German shoes worn by all serious
track and field athletes at the time. Although in the first year, they cleared only 364 dollars but by the
year 1969 sales soared to a million dollars. The success mantra was to keep the production cost low.
It was in 1972 that the company was renamed Nike.

From the very beginning, this brand sported its own look and attitude. They developed the
‘swoosh’ logo and cultivated endorsers that included Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Pete Sampras.

In November 2004, Phil Knight stepped down from the post of the chief executive of the
company and instead took on the responsibility of being the chairman of the board of director.

Early years
Phil Knight was born February 24, 1938 in Portland, Oregon, the son of a lawyer and future newspaper
publisher.[2] Knight attended Cleveland High School in Portland and then the University of Oregon
in Eugene, where he was a member of Phi Gamma Delta ("FIJI") fraternity and earned a journalism
degree in 1959.[2] He was a middle-distance runner at the school under track coach Bill Bowerman and
ran a personal best 4:10 mile,[3] winning varsity letters for track in 1957, 1958, and 1959.

PHIL KNIGHT’S ACHEIVEMENTS:

Phil Knight, the founder and head of Nike, Inc., the number one athletic shoe company in the
world. Already a legend in the retail and marketing worlds, Knight has turned into something of a
mainstream hero, the subject of admiring articles in popular magazines. It is a reputation Knight
hasearned over the years as both a visionary businessman and a hard-nosed CEO.

The man whom The Sporting News named the "most powerful" person of the year in sports for 1993 was
no athlete, coach, or commissioner. Rather, it was the man who for nearly 30 years has shod the great
sports stars as well as the Saturday-afternoon "jocks"-Nike founder and CEO Philip "Phil" Knight. The
former college track runner refers to Nike's world headquarters as a campus and runs it that way. "His
every move is now scrutinized as carefully as the glamorous superstars who wear his sneakers," reported
Frank Deford in a Vanity Fair profile.

Knight was born in Portland, Oregon, on February 24, 1938, the son of William H. and Lola (Hatfield)
Knight. Oregon's only billionaire "forged his go-it-alone philosophy while growing up in Portland, the son
of a domineering but loving father who was publisher of the now defunct Oregon Journal," noted Susan
Hauser in People magazine. Though too small to excel in contact sports, young Knight took refuge in
track. When his father refused to give him a summer job at his newspaper, believing his son should find
work on his own, Knight went to the rival Oregonian, where he worked the night shift tabulating sports
scores and every morning ran home the full seven miles.

That interest in sports-and especially track-gave Knight the impetus to study the way track shoes were
being made and marketed in the late 1950s. For assistance he consulted his coach, the University of
Oregon's famed Bill Bowerman, who himself would become a senior member of the Nike team. Together
they determined that American shoes were inferior in style and quality, too heavy, and too easily
damaged. The Japanese, on the other hand, were experimenting with new, trimmed-down styles
fashioned in lightweight, hardy nylon. Knight wrote his Stanford business-school term paper on the
subject, then a few years later got involved personally by visiting Japan and arranging to import new-
design running shoes himself.

"Knight ran Blue Ribbon Sports [named for a beer label] out of a storefront hole-in-the-wall next to the
Pink Bucket Tavern in a working-class section of Portland," noted Sports Illustrated writer Donald Katz.
"From the beginning Knight's animating idea was to promote high-quality, low-cost Japanese shoes, at a
time when high quality was rarely associated with Japanese products, and to eventually displace [rival
brand] Adidas, the triple-striped German shoes worn by all serious track and field athletes at the time."

"In the early days, anybody with a glue pot and a pair of scissors could get into the shoe business," Knight
told Geraldine Willigan in a Harvard Business Review interview. "So the way to stay ahead was through
product innovation. We were also good at keeping our manufacturing costs down. The big, established
players like Puma and Adidas were still manufacturing in high-wage European companies. But we knew
that wages were lower in Asia." This fact has garnered criticism for Knight and Nike by those who point
out the vast difference between the wages earned by a factory worker in Indonesia compared to the salary
drawn by a Nike celebrity endorser. But Knight insisted in the Sports Illustrated article that "we're not
gouging anybody. … A country like Indonesia is converting from farm labor to semiskilled-an industrial
transition that has occurred throughout history. There's no question in my mind that we're giving these
people hope."

Knight's reputation in the track and field world also helped him gain an early edge. "We just tried to get
our shoes on the feet of runners," he said in Willigan's article. "And we were able to get a lot of great ones
under contract-people like [distance stars] Steve Prefontaine and Alberto Salazar-because we spent a lot
of time at track events and had relationships with the runners, but mostly because we were doing
interesting things with our shoes."
Unique Image and New Technology

From the start, Knight's shoes sported their own look (including the distinctive "swoosh" logo that still
appears today) and their own attitude. An early effort to promote the newly dubbed "Nike"-pronounced
NY-kee and named for the Greek goddess of victory-included a now-classic advertisement set at the 1972
Olympic track trials in Eugene, Oregon. The copy boasted that four of the top seven marathoners wore
Nikes. As a Time writer pointed out, the ads conveniently "neglected to mention that runners wearing
[Adidas] shoes placed first, second and third."

By the mid-1970s Nike was at the cutting edge of workout-shoe technology. For instance, it was
Bowerman, the former track coach, who poured some liquid latex into his wife's waffle iron, thereby
inventing the famous sole that made the earliest Nikes feel like bedroom slippers. Nike didn't exactly
burst from the gate in profit, though. Major sports stars demanded major compensation for wearing
Knight's brand. A turning point came in the 1980s, when tennis star Jimmy Connors won Wimbledon in a
pair of Nikes and John McEnroe "hurt his ankle, [and] started wearing an obscure three-quarter [Nike]
model that had sold all of 10,000 pairs that year. Because of McEnroe's strained ligaments," noted a
Vanity Fair writer, "the model sold a million two the very next year. It was about that time when Knight
woke up one morning worth $178 million."

There was one area in which Nike made a serious misstep. Knight acknowledged in a Sports Illustrated
article that his company "lost its way" when it came to aerobics shoes. The longstanding boys-club
atmosphere of the Nike boardroom saw little promise in a lightweight shoe for women to wear to their
exercise classes. In fact, the notion of aerobics was laughed away as just the conceit of "a bunch of fat
ladies dancing to music," as Hauser quoted in the People article. That lack of insight opened the door for
an upstart company called Reebok, which then virtually cornered the market in this burgeoning
subsection of the athletic shoe industry. That was the beginning of a longstanding rivalry between Nike
and Reebok for market dominance.

Though sales slipped and profits fell during the mid-1980s, Nike regained its place at the top of the
market in 1984, when Knight returned from a fact-finding trip to Asia. Knight is a firm believer in the
Japanese way of doing business and conducting life: "He often greets his secretary with a courtly bow or
'moshi, moshi,' the Japanese equivalent of hello, and pads around behind sliding screen doors in a pair of
cotton slippers," reported Hauser.
Celebrity Athlete Endorsements

Known as a taskmaster CEO, Knight is also particular when it comes to matters of promotion. "Hi, I'm
Phil Knight and I don't believe in advertising," was the way Nike's ad agency president remembered
meeting his new client. Signing up perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, the former Chicago
Bulls' superstar Michael Jordan, was only one of the breakthrough strategies that made Nike-wearers the
envy of schoolyard pickup games everywhere. Nike slogans-"Bo Knows," "It's Gotta Be the Shoes," and
especially "Just Do It"-have entered the pop-culture lexicon. The Nike image has been linked closely with
notable "bad boys"-names like McEnroe, Andre Agassi, and Charles Barkley-as well as icons like the
Beatles (through Nike's controversial use of the song "Revolution") and Bugs Bunny.

A later addition to the business was sports management. Simply put, it ensured that Nike endorsers
maintained consistency outside the company-most importantly, by not endorsing any other product that
would interfere with the Nike image. Sports management was born after Knight caught Nike endorser
Andre Agassi in a commercial for Canon cameras. While cameras themselves don't conflict with shoes, the
message in the commercial certainly did. "When Agassi looked into the camera and said, 'Image is
everything,' Knight flipped," says Katz. "It was 180 degrees from our imagery," Knight told the Sport
Illustrated writer. "We work hard to convey that performance, not image, is everything."

CONTROVERSIES AGAINST PHIL KNIGHT AND NIKE:

Nike realized that image did count for something when it released a shoe displaying a logo that resembled
the Arabic word for "Allah," or God. Many members of the Muslim faith were upset, and in June 1997
Nike recalled 38,000 pairs of the shoes and issued an apology. The company noted that the logo was an
oversight and issued a statement saying they did not mean to offend anyone with it.

The company came under increasing scrutiny for its wages and working conditions in Indonesia, China,
and Vietnam. United Nations Ambassador, Andrew Young, released a report finding no issue with Nike's
factories, noting that facilities were "clean, organized, adequately ventilated and well lit," according to a
Reuters Business Report article. However, human rights groups charged that Indonesian workers were
incessantly striking over low wages; Nike workers received $2.46 per day in a nation that counted $4 per
day as the minimum subsistence wage.
Independent filmmaker Michael Moore, whose 1989 documentary Roger and Me depicted a heartless
corporate mindset at General Motors, turned his cameras on Nike, among numerous other firms. Moore
addressed the issue of how Nike treats its workers and requested jobs for people in his depressed
hometown of Flint, Michigan. Knight countered that American workers do not want jobs in shoe factories,
but Moore was able to find a crowd of jobless workers in Flint who would be happy to make Nikes. For his
part, Knight was the only CEO to agree to appear in the Moore film.

The uproar over the Asian workers dragged on for Nike, and they eventually raised wages a small amount.
Some American women's groups, protested that female employees-the bulk of Nike's Asian work force-
were still working 100 to 200 hours overtime at Nike just to pay their bills. They issued statements
accusing Nike of corporal punishment and sexual harassment in the shops as well. By mid-1998, Knight
announced in a speech to the National Press Club that Nike was "dedicated to giving American consumers
assurances that the products they buy are not manufactured under abusive circumstances," according to a
Gannett News Service article. He added that he had been branded as a "corporate crook," and defended
his business practices, citing "misinformation and misunderstanding" as reasons for the media assault on
Nike. Knight noted that a number of policies were going to be implemented in their production facilities,
including raising the working age to 16 at clothing factories and 18 at shoe factories; using safer, non-toxic
glues when possible; adopting stricter, U.S.-dictated air quality standards; instituting on-site education
programs, and more.

In addition to the Asian labor issues, many people remained outraged over Nike's escalating costs,
especially since a large market for the products are poor, inner-city youth. One shoe endorsed by
basketball player, Anfernee Hardaway, was tagged at $180, and the Air Jordans touted by superstar
Michael Jordan had always been priced at over $100. Perhaps this combination of issues served to cause a
slump. Sales and profits fell in 1998, and Nike laid off 1,900 employees. However, the company remained
the world's largest shoemaker. It won a lawsuit in early 1999 that had accused the firm of lying to
consumers about "sweatshop" conditions in Asian factories. Human rights groups remained unconvinced.

In 1998, Knight pledged to impose more stringent standards for the factories that Nike engages to
manufacture its goods, including minimum age standards, factory monitoring, and greater external access
to Nike's practices. The negative publicity did not stop the growth of the company. By the year 2004,
Nike was selling goods worth around 12bn dollars annually and employed 24,000 staff worldwide.

PHIL KNIGHT’S SPECIAL CONTROBUTION TO SPORTS:

In 2000, Knight was inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame for his Special Contribution to Sports in
Oregon.[6] Knight is believed to have contributed approximately $230 million to the University of Oregon,
the majority of which was for athletics.[7]

 On August 18, 2007, Knight announced that he and his wife, Penny, donated an additional $100 million
to the University of Oregon Athletics Legacy Fund.[8] This donation is reportedly the largest in the
University's history.

In 2006, Phil Knight donated $105 million to Stanford Graduate School of Business, at the time the largest
donation to a business school in history.[12] Knight also provided monetary support to his high school alma
mater Cleveland High School for their new track, football field, and gymnasium.

In October 2008, Phil and Penny Knight pledged $100 million to the OHSU Cancer Institute, the largest
gift in the history of Oregon Health & Science University. In recognition, the university renamed it the
OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.[13]

LATE YEARS:
In 2002, Knight purchased Will Vinton (Animation) Studios, where his son, Travis, worked as an animator,
and changed the name to LAIKA. Travis was named to the LAIKA Board of Directors later that year, and
became CEO of LAIKA in March 2009, replacing Nike alum Dale Wahl. [17] LAIKA released their first
feature film (stop motion) Coraline in February 2009.

He resigned as the company's chief executive officer in 2004, while retaining the position of chairman of
the board. As of 2010, Knight's stake in Nike gives him an estimated net worth of US$11.1 billion, making
him the 23rd richest person in the U.S.[1]

When not at the helm, Knight enjoys the fruits of his success. He and his wife Penelope "Penny" Parks
have two grown sons and one foster daughter. They live in non-ostentatious comfort in Oregon, with a
gaggle of pets and Knight's "only personal concession to flash: black Lamborghini (vanity plates: NIKE
MN) and red Ferrari," as Hauser noted in People. The workplace is also the scene of fun and comfort:
Nike World Campus features three restaurants, plus fitness center, beauty salon, laundry service, jogging
facilities, a day-care center, and other amenities.
Knight can't help but see success in Nike's future, as the company expands its product line to include a
wide range of apparel and accessories. As a Forbes writer noted, the man who built an empire on a pair of
shoes still cherishes the words of his track coach: "Play by the rules, but be ferocious."

Chronology: Philip Knight
1938: Born.

1959: Completed his BBA at the University of Oregon.

1963: Earned his MBA at Stanford University.

1964: Began importing athletic shoes; cofounded Blue Ribbon Sports.

1978: Changed the company name Blue Ribbon Sports to Nike.

1983: Became chairman and CEO, Nike

Right after graduating from Oregon, Knight enlisted in the Army and served one year on active duty and
seven years in the Army Reserve.[2] After the year of active duty, he enrolled at Stanford Graduate School
of Business.[2] In Frank Shallenberger's Small Business class, Knight developed a love affair with
something besides sports — he discovered he was an entrepreneur. Knight recalls in a Stanford
Magazine article[2] "That class was an 'aha!' moment" ... "Shallenberger defined the type of person who
was an entrepreneur--and I realized he was talking to me. I remember after saying to myself: 'This is
really what I would like to do.' " In this class Knight needed to create a business plan. His paper, "Can
Japanese Sports Shoes Do to German Sports Shoes What Japanese Cameras Did to German
Cameras?", essentially was the premise to his foray into selling running shoes. He graduated with
a Masters of Business Administration from the school in 1962.[2]

Knight set out on a trip around the world after graduation, during which he made a stop in Kobe, Japan in
November 1962. It was there he discovered Tiger brand running shoes, manufactured in Kobe by the
Onitsuka Co. So impressed with the quality and low cost, Knight made a cold call on Mr. Onitsuka, who
agreed to meet with him. By the end of the meeting, Knight had secured distribution rights for the western
United States for Tiger running shoes.[citation needed]

The first Tiger samples would take more than a year to be shipped to Knight, during which time he found
a job as an accountant in Portland, Oregon. When Knight finally received the shoe samples, he mailed
two pairs to Bill Bowerman in Eugene in the hope of gaining a sale and an influential endorsement. To
Knight's surprise, Bowerman not only ordered the Tiger shoes, he offered to become a partner with
Knight and would provide some design ideas for better running shoes. The two men shook hands on a
partnership on January 25, 1964, the birthdate of Blue Ribbon Sports, forerunner to Nike. [4]

[edit]Nike's origin
Knight's first sales were made out of a now legendary green Plymouth Valiant at track meets across
the Pacific Northwest. By 1969, these early sales allowed Knight to leave his accountant job and work full
time for Blue Ribbon Sports.

It was Jeff Johnson, a friend of Knight's, who suggested the name Nike. Nike is named after the
Greek winged goddess of victory. Nike's logo, now considered one of the most powerful logos in the
world, was commissioned for a mere $35 from Carolyn Davidson.[5] According to Nike's website, Knight
stated "I don't love it, but it will grow on me." However, in 1983 (Nike went public in 1980), Davidson was
given an undisclosed amount of Nike stock for her contribution to the company's brand.

Knight underwent his share of controversies. The company came under increasing scrutiny for
its wages and working conditions in Indonesia, China and Vietnam. Even though Andrew Young, the
United Nations Ambassador endorsed that the factories of Nike were clean, organized, adequately
ventilated and well lit, the human rights group did not let them go scot-free. They charged that
Indonesian workers were incessantly striking over low wages. Nike workers received 2.46 dollars per
day in a nation that counted 4 dollars per day as the minimum survival wage. The uproar over the
Asian workers finally forced the company to raise the wages to a small amount. Various other issues
related to women laborers also cropped up such as overtime, corporal punishment and sexual
harassment. Their use of child labor in the Far East was also scrutinized.
Knight was named a "Corporate Crook" in Michael Moore's 1996 book Downsize This!. The book cited
the harsh conditions in Indonesian sweatshops, where pregnant women and girls as young as fourteen
years old sewed shoes for factories that the company contracted to make its products. Moore went to
Knight in the hopes of convincing him to fix this problem. The interview can be seen in Moore's film The
Big One – of the nearly 20 CEOs that Moore wished to interview for his movie, only Knight agreed to
speak with Moore.

Knight informed Moore that Nike does not own any of the factories that make its products. Knight told
Moore if he was willing to invest in and build a factory in the U.S. that could match the price of footwear
made overseas, Nike would consider buying shoes from him.