Case 5 • NIKE Europe

Company background

NIKE is a name that scarcely needs any introduction. It has been one of the business phenomena of the 1980s and 1990s, second perhaps only to Microsoft in its pursuit of global dominance from very humble beginnings. Founder Phil Knight famously made his first shoes using a waffle iron in what he has called' a tiny operation in my mother's laundry room'. By 1992 it had become a $4.5 billion turnover corporation.
In fact, NIKE's history goes back to 1963, when Knight (still today very much the head of the business) set up Blue Ribbon Sports to import running shoes from Japan to the US, or even to the late 1950s when he ran for the University of Oregon track team and started looking for better footwear. The name (Nike was the Greek goddess of victory) did not appear until 1972, and sales grew steadily thereafter on the public's new-found enthusiasm for fitness. Having overtaken Adidas, NIKE was caught napping by Reebok who stole US market share leadership in 1986. Far from admitting defeat, however, NIKE was 'reinvented' and fought back using sponsorship of sports stars such as Michael Jordan, Andre Agassi and (more recently) Eric Cantona to spearhead its positioning as the maker of top-flight performance athletic wear. Today it is the undisputed industry leader.
NIKE's culture is easy to recognize, if hard to define. It prides itself on being a bit different, creative, iconoclastic. The senior team used to meet together for six-monthly strategy reviews that became known as 'buttface' meetings, with no holds barred and plenty of shouting at each other. Inevitably, as the company grew to have 10,000 employees (or associates as they are known), something of the informality