‘Air’ Highlights Nike Founder Phil Knight’s Unique Business Genius

The silence hangs like MJ himself. 

“Hmm,” says the Knight character, who is dressed in a regrettable 1980s wardrobe. “I don’t know.” 

“Seriously?” 

“Maybe it’ll grow on me.” 

It’s a fictional scene, but it manages to capture a truth about the real Phil Knight’s business philosophy in a few lines of dialogue: 

I don’t know. Maybe it’ll grow on me. 

For a billionaire who was influenced by Buddhism, this could have been Mr. Knight’s mantra. He wasn’t sold initially on the name Nike. He wasn’t a big fan of the swoosh logo, either. He ran with them anyway because he listened to the people around him. 

It’s a formula that can apply to every company: hire employees who are good at what they do and let them just do it. 

His willingness to delegate and keep an open mind about ideas that he didn’t particularly like may have been the most unusual and valuable aspect of Mr. Knight’s management style in the years when Nike was taking flight. 

It’s how a side hustle that began in the trunk of his putrid green Plymouth Valiant became the world’s largest sneaker business. And it’s why there is a major Hollywood production about a shoe deal in which the chief executive and his direct reports get more screen time than Michael Jordan.

“I don’t know. Maybe it will grow on me” may not have the ring of a corporate motto. But it was essential to the early success of Nike. 

It’s not just Nike. It turns out many of the greatest and most beloved products were the result of executives overcoming their own skepticism. For example, the Egg McMuffin. When a local franchise operator named

Herb Peterson

pitched his invention to

McDonald’s

founder

Ray Kroc,

he wouldn’t even describe it before their meeting. “He didn’t want me to reject it out of hand, which I might have done, because it was a crazy idea—a breakfast sandwich,” Mr. Kroc wrote in his memoir. 

But masters of the universe rarely have the patience to green-light something in the hopes that it will grow on them. They typically behave in the opposite way: They’re too confident in their own beliefs. If you look at perhaps the defining CEOs of their generations,

Mark Zuckerberg

decided to rebuild a $1 trillion company around his own vision for the metaverse, while

Elon Musk

is busy shaping policy and building towns based on his personal whims. Mr. Musk is more likely to toss his phone in the ocean than to tweet “I don’t know. Maybe it will grow on me.”

Today’s strain of executive exceptionalism is one reason that seeing a character in “Air” stand outside his corner office and express uncertainty is so refreshing. 

This movie that spends more time in the boardroom than on the basketball court makes frequent references to a famous list of 10 principles from Nike’s formative years. But another explanation for the company’s ascent was that unofficial 11th principle. In fact, some of the most important decisions of Mr. Knight’s career were the ones that he wasn’t especially psyched about. 

He declined to comment for this column, but the chairman emeritus of Nike reveals plenty about his leadership in his memoir “Shoe Dog.” 

When he needed a logo for his company in 1971, Mr. Knight hired a graphic-design student named Carolyn Davidson. She took his guidance—“something that evokes a sense of motion”—and returned with rough sketches. But he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. “Fat lightning bolts? Chubby check marks? Morbidly obese squiggles?” Mr. Knight wrote. “Her designs did evoke motion, of a kind, but also motion sickness.” He sent her back to the drawing board. 

The next time she came into Nike’s offices, the morbidly obese squiggle was a slimmer, more elegant curve. Others in the room liked it. Mr. Knight didn’t quite get it. He still had doubts when he wrote a $35 check for her swoosh. 

“I don’t love it,” he said. “Maybe it will grow on me.”

He soon went through another productive bout of apathy when it was time to rename the company. The leading contenders were Falcon, Bengal, Condor and Mr. Knight’s suggestion: Dimension Six. As the deadline approached, that was his favorite. The guy really wanted to name his company Dimension Six! Then another name came to one of his employees in a dream. 

Mr. Knight agreed to go with it despite his reservations about calling the company Nike. 

“Maybe it’ll grow on us,” he told a colleague, channeling his inner Zen. 

But when Nike’s swoosh hooked Michael Jordan, a courtship depicted in “Air,” which makes contract negotiations as thrilling as a casino heist, it was a pivotal moment for the company. In 1984, Nike reported its first quarterly loss, which meant one bad decision could have been the beginning of its end. One brilliant decision would flip the script.

Mr. Jordan was ready to sign with Adidas when he grudgingly visited Nike’s headquarters, where a pitch video set to the Pointer Sisters song “Jump” culminated in two words that would alter the course of basketball and business history: Air Jordan. 

Nike took off after the first Air Jordan was released in 1985. Over the next year, the company’s basketball sneakers outsold its running footwear for the first time, and Nike’s annual sales cracked $1 billion. Mr. Jordan told friends to consider buying Nike stock, which turned out to be wise financial advice: An investment of $10,000 on the day his shoe dropped would be worth nearly $15 million today. 

Any movie based on a true story is not entirely truthful. But the key part of Nike’s flight that “Air” nails is the way Mr. Knight trusted the employees underneath him, which meant deferring to the marketing whizzes and Sonny Vaccaro when they insisted that Mr. Jordan was a superstar worth betting on. 

“The movie is about how these small moments in time that end up looking like huge moments in retrospect were just happy accidents, kismet and all the right people being in all the right places at the right time,” said

Alex Convery,

the “Air” screenwriter. 

He would know. Mr. Convery spent the first months of the pandemic frustrated, between projects and watching the 10-part Jordan documentary “The Last Dance.” Unlike the rest of us, he spent the next year secretly hammering out the first draft of “Air” on spec. “I went back and forth a million different times about whether it would work,” Mr. Convery said. None of his scripts had been made into movies before. Now his name can be found on billboards right next to Mr. Affleck’s. 

The very existence of “Air” is a reminder that so many little things have to go right for any big project to be a success. And the most lucrative decisions might just be the ones that need the most room to grow. 

“Life is growth. Business is growth,” Mr. Knight wrote. “You grow, or you die.”

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com

The silence hangs like MJ himself. 

“Hmm,” says the Knight character, who is dressed in a regrettable 1980s wardrobe. “I don’t know.” 

“Seriously?” 

“Maybe it’ll grow on me.” 

It’s a fictional scene, but it manages to capture a truth about the real Phil Knight’s business philosophy in a few lines of dialogue: 

I don’t know. Maybe it’ll grow on me. 

For a billionaire who was influenced by Buddhism, this could have been Mr. Knight’s mantra. He wasn’t sold initially on the name Nike. He wasn’t a big fan of the swoosh logo, either. He ran with them anyway because he listened to the people around him. 

It’s a formula that can apply to every company: hire employees who are good at what they do and let them just do it. 

His willingness to delegate and keep an open mind about ideas that he didn’t particularly like may have been the most unusual and valuable aspect of Mr. Knight’s management style in the years when Nike was taking flight. 

It’s how a side hustle that began in the trunk of his putrid green Plymouth Valiant became the world’s largest sneaker business. And it’s why there is a major Hollywood production about a shoe deal in which the chief executive and his direct reports get more screen time than Michael Jordan.

“I don’t know. Maybe it will grow on me” may not have the ring of a corporate motto. But it was essential to the early success of Nike. 

It’s not just Nike. It turns out many of the greatest and most beloved products were the result of executives overcoming their own skepticism. For example, the Egg McMuffin. When a local franchise operator named

Herb Peterson

pitched his invention to

McDonald’s

founder

Ray Kroc,

he wouldn’t even describe it before their meeting. “He didn’t want me to reject it out of hand, which I might have done, because it was a crazy idea—a breakfast sandwich,” Mr. Kroc wrote in his memoir. 

But masters of the universe rarely have the patience to green-light something in the hopes that it will grow on them. They typically behave in the opposite way: They’re too confident in their own beliefs. If you look at perhaps the defining CEOs of their generations,

Mark Zuckerberg

decided to rebuild a $1 trillion company around his own vision for the metaverse, while

Elon Musk

is busy shaping policy and building towns based on his personal whims. Mr. Musk is more likely to toss his phone in the ocean than to tweet “I don’t know. Maybe it will grow on me.”

Today’s strain of executive exceptionalism is one reason that seeing a character in “Air” stand outside his corner office and express uncertainty is so refreshing. 

This movie that spends more time in the boardroom than on the basketball court makes frequent references to a famous list of 10 principles from Nike’s formative years. But another explanation for the company’s ascent was that unofficial 11th principle. In fact, some of the most important decisions of Mr. Knight’s career were the ones that he wasn’t especially psyched about. 

He declined to comment for this column, but the chairman emeritus of Nike reveals plenty about his leadership in his memoir “Shoe Dog.” 

When he needed a logo for his company in 1971, Mr. Knight hired a graphic-design student named Carolyn Davidson. She took his guidance—“something that evokes a sense of motion”—and returned with rough sketches. But he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. “Fat lightning bolts? Chubby check marks? Morbidly obese squiggles?” Mr. Knight wrote. “Her designs did evoke motion, of a kind, but also motion sickness.” He sent her back to the drawing board. 

The next time she came into Nike’s offices, the morbidly obese squiggle was a slimmer, more elegant curve. Others in the room liked it. Mr. Knight didn’t quite get it. He still had doubts when he wrote a $35 check for her swoosh. 

“I don’t love it,” he said. “Maybe it will grow on me.”

He soon went through another productive bout of apathy when it was time to rename the company. The leading contenders were Falcon, Bengal, Condor and Mr. Knight’s suggestion: Dimension Six. As the deadline approached, that was his favorite. The guy really wanted to name his company Dimension Six! Then another name came to one of his employees in a dream. 

Mr. Knight agreed to go with it despite his reservations about calling the company Nike. 

“Maybe it’ll grow on us,” he told a colleague, channeling his inner Zen. 

But when Nike’s swoosh hooked Michael Jordan, a courtship depicted in “Air,” which makes contract negotiations as thrilling as a casino heist, it was a pivotal moment for the company. In 1984, Nike reported its first quarterly loss, which meant one bad decision could have been the beginning of its end. One brilliant decision would flip the script.

Mr. Jordan was ready to sign with Adidas when he grudgingly visited Nike’s headquarters, where a pitch video set to the Pointer Sisters song “Jump” culminated in two words that would alter the course of basketball and business history: Air Jordan. 

Nike took off after the first Air Jordan was released in 1985. Over the next year, the company’s basketball sneakers outsold its running footwear for the first time, and Nike’s annual sales cracked $1 billion. Mr. Jordan told friends to consider buying Nike stock, which turned out to be wise financial advice: An investment of $10,000 on the day his shoe dropped would be worth nearly $15 million today. 

Any movie based on a true story is not entirely truthful. But the key part of Nike’s flight that “Air” nails is the way Mr. Knight trusted the employees underneath him, which meant deferring to the marketing whizzes and Sonny Vaccaro when they insisted that Mr. Jordan was a superstar worth betting on. 

“The movie is about how these small moments in time that end up looking like huge moments in retrospect were just happy accidents, kismet and all the right people being in all the right places at the right time,” said

Alex Convery,

the “Air” screenwriter. 

He would know. Mr. Convery spent the first months of the pandemic frustrated, between projects and watching the 10-part Jordan documentary “The Last Dance.” Unlike the rest of us, he spent the next year secretly hammering out the first draft of “Air” on spec. “I went back and forth a million different times about whether it would work,” Mr. Convery said. None of his scripts had been made into movies before. Now his name can be found on billboards right next to Mr. Affleck’s. 

The very existence of “Air” is a reminder that so many little things have to go right for any big project to be a success. And the most lucrative decisions might just be the ones that need the most room to grow. 

“Life is growth. Business is growth,” Mr. Knight wrote. “You grow, or you die.”

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com