I recall many years ago reading an interview with Steve Jobs in Playboy magazine. With stunning simplicity, Jobs articulated one of the basic concepts of his work. Computers should no longer look like a tangle of components from Radio Shack. A computer to be a beautiful object.
Brilliant. Simple, and brilliant. Yet years before that interview, Phil Knight had already created an equally innovative, equally unlikely, and equally brilliant innovation. Just as Steve Jobs was determined to make computers beautiful, Knight did the same thing with what used to be called "gym shoes."
Gym shoes were, first and foremost, smelly. They were black or white. They had flat, rubber soles that were all right on a basket ball court, but the average person couldn't run very far in them with any degree of comfort. There were also track shoes, of course, but those were for specialized athletes. Many of them had spikes on the soles, and they weren't especially durable.
Without going into the details, Phil Knight reconfigured the humble gym shoe in several stunningly original ways. First and foremost, as Steve Jobs did with personal computers, he made them aesthetically attractive -- and to women as well as men! Secondly, on a practical level, he used a breakthrough idea of his partner Bill Bowerman to create a sole for his shoes that made long distance running possible and even comfortable for everyone. Third, Knight made Asia an integral part of his business plan, as both a manufacturing resource and a vast consumer market.
There's much more to know about Phil Knight and Nike, so I urge you to explore the links below. It's my belief that, without Nike, there would be no New York Marathon, no Whole Foods stores, no "sports medicine" as a clinical specialty, and Michael Jordan's net worth would be much, much lower. And perhaps Steve Jobs' iPod would not have been especially big either. The next time you're out for a jog, notice what people have in their ears, and how that connects to what they have on their feet.
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