Word: knightly
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Nike is no stranger to off years. Knight hobbled the company with a cockamamie expansion strategy in the mid-1980s, and sales skidded in 1994. "There's going to be a down cycle every four or five years," he says. "And our job is to recognize that and keep the downs as shallow...
Lately, Nike bashing has become a spectator sport. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau lambasted the company in his Doonesbury strip. Filmmaker Michael Moore featured Knight in his latest excoriation of corporate America, The Big One. Nike has been accused of bigfooting its way into soccer and despoiling academics by paying the University of North Carolina to wear its wares. A long-standing criticism is that it uses extravagantly paid endorsers to sell overpriced sneakers to underprivileged kids. The company has been tarred by an image as a sweatshop operator that exploits Asian workers who make shoes and apparel for Nike subcontractors...
...Basically, our culture, and our style, is to be a rebel, and we sort of enjoy doing that," says Knight, who created a jock empire based on hero worship backed up with good product and great advertising. "Now that we've reached a certain size, there's a fine line between being a rebel and being a bully, and yeah, we have to walk that line...
Nike is staying hitched to the stars. Indeed, it is hard to overstate Nike's veneration for top jocks. The company's verdant campus headquarters just outside Portland is a sort of perspiration museum. Knight's office is in the John McEnroe Building. Other structures are named for Jordan and marathoners Alberto Salazar and Joan Benoit Samuelson. Preschool linebackers are dropped off in the Joe Paterno day-care facility, while the grownups work out in the Bo Jackson sports center...
...sports heritage is genuine. Knight launched the company in 1964 with Bill Bowerman, his former track coach at the University of Oregon. Knight's business plan, hatched as an M.B.A. project at Stanford, was straightforward. He figured that by importing shoes made in Japan, where labor was then cheap, he could undercut the dominant player, Adidas. At first he merely imported Japanese running shoes. Then Bowerman, in the kitchen one morning, had one of those Aha! ideas. He made an outsole by pouring a rubber compound into the waffle iron. The waffle trainer was born--and Nike was ready...