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By this point, I felt the unnerving joy of being granted incredible latitude – combined with fear of not knowing where I might find the potholes that I knew would be in the road going forward. Then Knight turned deadly serious as he leaned forward and fixed me with a disconcertingly direct gaze.
“Just don’t make the same mistake twice,” he said.
On the short dive back to my own quarters in Nimbus A- a fitting name for a building that housed design, the product lab, and advertising- I began to suspect strongly that everything that Knight did or said in the presence of key employees was carefully considered. This didn’t mean, of course, that he necessarily thought long, hard, or abstractly about his remarks. In fact, that was precisely the point: he deliberately did not think long, hard, or abstractly about them. It was simply that everything he said was judiciously weighed from an intuitive point of view. His opinions were genuine, not the sort of pronouncements that fill the air around so many CEOs who assume the position of being the ultimate authority on everything. If Knight preferred to give me general direction rather than a specific job description, I was going to have to live with it. Or find a new place of employment.
When I returned to my office I took the first step in the following the program I’d been given and began ruminating on the gamut of mistakes that I believed Nike had made in the past few years, some of them probably committed at least twice. Nike’s greatest recent error, in my humble opinion, has been to first ignore and then deny the growing strength of a new competitor: Reebok.
By the late eighties, even those in Beaverton who were inclined to stick their heads in the san and ignore the most unpleasant realities of life were finding it harder and harder to dismiss the depth and breadth of the threat posed by a soft leather show called the Freestyle. Reebok’s Freestyle was hardly what hard-core “Nike guys”- there were very few women in any position of power in Beaverton in those days- would have respectfully referred to as “high-performance sports gears.” That the Freestyle lacked the firm torsion control and deep, durable cushioning of Nike Air scarcely mattered, however, to the millions of men and women who had enthusiastically purchased it in the early eighties. Some proudly wore theirs on the street, while still others wore theirs to the gym, to practice a strange new fitness pursuit called “aerobics”.
To continue the story, check out the book! (This excerpt ends on page 25)
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