Philip Knight born in 1938 is the founder and head C.E.O of Nike, the number one athletic shoe company in the world. Already a legend in the retail and marketing world known for his hard work and coach like attitude. Philip has turned into something of a mainstream hero, usually being the subject of admiring articles in popular magazines. It is a reputation Knight has earned over the years as both a visionary businessman and a hard nosed CEO.
Philip is an American business magnate and philanthropist now, but he started out just as a regular teen looking for his first job. When Philip wanted his first job he went to his father William Knights who was a newspaper publisher at Oregon Journal. Believing that his son should go out and find a job on his own William refused to give Phillip the summer job. After this ordeal Philip went to the rival Oregonian, where he worked the night shift arranging information about sports scores every morning and running home after work a full seven miles.
Knight continued his education at the University of Oregon where he soon graduated with a journalism degree in 1959. At the university of Oregon Philip played on the middle distance running team. excelling at the sport, Philip’s…show more content… The thing that really caught the track runners eye the most though was shoes, the way they were made, and marketed especially. In the late 1950s Philip consulted his head coach about the subject, the famed Bill Bowerman, who himself would become a senior member of the Nike team. Together the two men found out that the american running shoe was inferior in style and quality, too heavy and to easily damaged. The Japanese, on the other hand, were experimenting with new, trimmed-down styles, fashions and lightweight, with hardy nylon material that changed the running shoe we know today. Philip wrote his Stanford business-school term paper on the