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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS32

The combination of logic and intuition into whole-brain thinking typified
by Knight permeated the whole company.

the combination of logic and intuition
into whole-brain thinking typified by
Knight permeated the whole company

It was NIKE’s co-founder, Bill Bowerman, for example, who while
watching his wife make waffles for breakfast realised that a waffle-
patterned outer sole would improve traction and produce faster running
times. In a classic example of rapid prototyping, Bowerman poured rubber
into his wife’s waffle iron. Folklore maintains that Bowerman’s attention to
left-brain detailed thinking apparently extended to removing the branding
strips from an athlete’s running shoes in order to save even a microscopic
amount of weight, and to weighing the ink on the university running
singlets. In later chapters, we will see how Clive Woodward, businessman
and English rugby manager extraordinaire, used comparable whole-brain
thinking to bring his team to World Cup victory in 2003.

Whole-brain thinking was also facilitated in NIKE’s early, smaller days
by the management culture of perceiving problems as company issues,
in whose solution everybody had an interest, rather than seeing
problems along departmental lines. In part, this culture was the creative
response to the company’s financial inability to recruit specialists in
every area; instead, NIKE recruited can-do multi-skilled individuals who
became ‘specialists in the company, not the job’. Significantly,
management difficulties arose as NIKE grew and the intuitive sense of
senior managers – more street-savvy than Wall Street – was not
necessarily shared by incoming managers.

Knight’s personal management style combined divergent innovative
thinking with convergent evaluation, leading NIKE management to
compare the visionary Knight to Christopher Columbus, continually
seeking out new worlds. His preferred working style was to spend time
alone identifying opportunities and obstacles, conceiving where the
company should be and how it was going to get there, before meeting
with close colleagues to probe, evaluate and refine the ideas which he
had generated. From such unconstrained forward thinking came the