9780593801581

In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands. In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike s annual sales top $30 billion. In an age of startups, Nike is the ne plus ultra of all startups, and the swoosh has become a revolutionary, globe-spanning icon, one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today. But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, in a memoir that is candid, humble, gutsy, and wry, he tells his story, beginning with his crossroads moment. At 24, after bac

From the author of the bestselling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive, New York Times bestselling biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built

Inventor. Visionary. Genius. Dropout. Adopted. Steve Jobs was the founder of Apple, and he was all of these things. Steve Jobs has been described as a showman, artist, tyrant, genius, jerk. Through his life he was loved, hated, admired and dismissed, yet he was a living legend; the genius who founded Apple in his parent's garage when he was just 21 years old, revolutionising the music world. He single-handedly introduced the first computer that could sit on your desk, and founded and nurtured a company called Pixar, bringing to life Oscar-winning animations Toy Story and Finding Nemo. So how did the man -- who was neither engineer nor computer geek -- change the world we live in, making us want every product he touched? On graduation day in 2005, a fifty-year-old Steve Jobs said: "Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. My second story is abou