- In 1977, Nike executive Rob Strasser typed a list of 10 company "principles."
- The raw and unfiltered list captures the irreverence and combativeness of early Nike employees.
Editor's note: This story was first published in January 2023. It was republished after the April 2023 release of "Air," a movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan. The 1977 memo appears throughout the film, even appearing as a poster on a wall in Phil Knight's office. While a bedrock Nike corporate document, company insiders can't recall it existing in poster size on any walls.
In 1977, Nike was at an inflection point.
The company, still known at the time as Blue Ribbon Sports, was growing, but it had already been kicked out of two banks and it had yet to launch its industry-shaking Air sneakers. Michael Jordan was still playing high school basketball.
Sales that year: $28.7 million. The company employed fewer than 1,000 people. It had yet to go public or become anything like the blue-chip, $46.7 billion, 79,000-employee colossus it is today.
And most importantly: The federal government had just said the company owed it $25 million for unpaid tariffs on sneakers, an amount that cofounder Phil Knight said in his memoir would have simply put the company "out of business."
Against that us-against-the-world backdrop, Nike executive Rob Strasser sat down and typed out a spirited list of 10 "principles" that range from "Break the rules; fight the law," to "It won't be pretty." The list, which captures the irreverence and competitiveness of early Nike employees, once again is making the rounds on social media.
Memo reflects early days when Nike had to tangle with larger rivals – notably Adidas
Strasser is among the most important executives in industry history, both for his work during Nike's explosive early years and for establishing Adidas in the United States – work which led to a falling out with Knight.
In 1985, Willamette Week, the company's hometown alternative newspaper, published a Loeb-winning story about Strasser with the headline, "The man who saved Nike." Not surprisingly, employees mocked the story with T-shirts emblazoned with Strasser's photo.
The memo he drafted often is erroneously attributed to Knight, a falsehood that Nike historian emeritus Scott Reames corrected in a recent LinkedIn post.
Reames characterized the list as "raw," and reflective of the company's scrappy early days when it had to stretch budgets – "Live off the land" – and tangle with much larger competitors, most notably Adidas – "This is as much about battle as about business."
Reames's LinkedIn post noted Strasser feared too many employees had lost sight of Nike's values. Several former Nike employees replied to Reames and said they still have copies of the original document.
"For people to save a document that wasn't an official Nike decree, or put on a poster – for them to save it for 40 some odd years, that speaks for itself," Reames told Insider.
The memo taps into the shared sense of purpose that has driven Nike's culture, said Jana Panfilio, cofounder of 6453 Alumni, a Nike alumni group.
"It's brilliant, simple and straightforward," she told Insider. What Nike's done has "never been done before. You're always entering the unknown because culture is always changing. Innovation is messy. Growth is messy."
Knight didn't know about the memo before Strasser drafted it, according to Reames, but he later quipped about Strasser's memo-writing skills to Willamette Week.
"He can get a message across without a lot of memos," Knight said, in the 1985 report, a reference to Strasser's gregarious, intense, fill-the-room personality.
"Nike is the Miami Vice of the fitness business and Strasser is the keeper of the flame," a former Nike employee told Willamette Week for the same report.
Nike went public in 1980. Revenue had increased to $270 million since Strasser's burst of memo-writing productivity. It settled the customs dispute that year for $9 million.
Strasser left Nike in 1987 and started up what became Adidas' US operations, which Knight described in his memoir as an "intolerable betrayal."
Strasser died in 1993. He and Knight never reconciled.
"I wish Strasser and I had patched things up before he died, but I don't know that it was possible," Knight wrote, in his memoir. "We were both born to compete, and we were both bad at forgiving."
In 2001, Nike introduced a set of 11 corporate "Maxims." In 2018, the company revised the Maxims and whittled the list down to five.
One of them: "Be on the offense, always," a direct nod at Strasser's list, and a phrase that remains a favorite of Nike executives.