Retreating into books
Nike
Nike seems to be on a tear lately, and it might be more than just the goodwill generated by the excellent Shoe Dog (the memoir of founder Phil Knight).
It is, however, my book of the year. The quotes from the covers are all accurate - Phil is an excellent storyteller and writer. Imagine something akin to the glorious business insanity of The Social Network, but remove Silicon Valley and tech entirely and set it in a sleepy 1970s American town prior to globalization and the internet. On every occasion I picked it up, I wanted to stay up all night to keep reading.
As someone who frequently thinks of entrepreneurship, I find an easy sympathy for Knight and his business adventure.
A coworker with an unparalleled eye for detail was quick to criticize for leaving out Knight's entire dark side, which is alleged in University of Nike. It's real. The book effectively ends at Nike's 1979 IPO and only gives a tiny epilogue to cover the events of the 21st century, which is where the controversy lives. The sweatshop controversy gets a defiant (but ultimately passing) mention, but the book doesn't acknowledge the existence of any of the allegations about the University of Oregon and Nike's veto power in many areas, including academics and research, as well as a nearly House of Cards-esque power play over specific administrators' personal lives.
I think these things can exist in parallel and I give the book a pass. If you're writing a memoir, wouldn't you leave out your misdeeds and worst moments? If you're an American president, do you leave in the things that could be seen as war crimes? Are you obliged to tell the whole truth? I'd much rather read Shoe Dog than OJ Simpson's If I Did It.
If Walter Isaacson was writing a biography, this critique would be entirely on point. But no, this is Knight's memoir, written in first person. (And it's pedantic to make the point, but Knight doesn't quite fit into the league of people who Isaacson covers.)
The book goes a long way to try to describe the Nike ethos, which is centered on athletics but in a way that's accessible to all. Nike's apps are living that ethos and the results can be really great.
The Running Club app is a great companion for runners, and has been for years. They were perhaps the first to put tech into running, beginning with the Nike+ chip and iPod connection back in 2006. As soon as the iPhone got location tracking, the app made use of it for maximum precision in distance tracking. And lately, Guided Runs (with a spoken word soundtrack over your run) seem like the latest killer feature. The latest ones sound more like coaching, which is super welcome. Even though I've been a minor runner for over 10 years, this audio coaching helped me shift my mindset and find new enjoyment in running, even as I age and slow down.
The Training Club app is similarly hitting new heights and is a mainstay on my phone. The simplest parallel I can think of is Beachbody, best known for the P90X workouts. Except where Beachbody charges $15/mo for a subscription to a premium product, Training Club has roughly comparable workouts and is free, instead making Nike products and e-commerce first-class citizens in the app to make money.
Both apps have excellent integrations with Apple Health, for you iPhone folk, and the workout times and calorie burns are piped in for tracking in MyFitnessPal and other apps.
Interestingly, in Japan specifically, multiple friends of mine have gone to work for Nike. Any Japanese company can push out ambitious and smart people, especially foreigners. I wonder what Nike Japan's pull factors are.
The Game Awards
I love the freedom of being on digital. In many ways, our show looks better on digital - we're live in 4K on YouTube, which you can't even get on traditional television. We're on the new TV; most gamers around the world, they watch the show on their 85" television through Twitch or YouTube. It's the same experience, it's just not through traditional TV.