Books like
Shoe Dog

Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs is the authorized biography of Apple's cofounder, drawing on more than forty interviews with Jobs himself plus extensive conversations with family, friends, colleagues, and competitors. Like Shoe Dog, the book captures the intensity of building a world-changing company, but where Knight writes with self-deprecating warmth, Jobs's story is told through the lens of his famously difficult personality.

Brad Stone's The Everything Store documents Jeff Bezos's construction of Amazon from an online bookstore operating out of a garage to one of the most powerful companies on earth. Like Shoe Dog, the book traces the arc from scrappy startup to global dominance, but Stone's account is more journalistic than personal, built from interviews with hundreds of current and former Amazon employees.

Ed Catmull's Creativity, Inc. tells the story of Pixar from the inside, written by the company's cofounder and longtime president. Unlike most business books, Creativity, Inc.

Sam Walton's Made in America is the autobiography of Walmart's founder, written shortly before his death in 1992. Walton started with a single Ben Franklin franchise store in Newport, Arkansas, and built it into the largest retailer in the world through relentless focus on low prices, distribution efficiency, and small-town locations that competitors overlooked.

Andre Agassi's Open is a memoir that shares Shoe Dog's rare quality among autobiographies: complete emotional honesty from someone who had every reason to write a victory lap instead. Agassi reveals that he hated tennis for most of his career, that his father's obsessive training left psychological scars, and that his public persona bore little resemblance to the person behind it. The writing is vivid and athletic, co-authored with Pulitzer Prize winner J.

Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit may seem like an unexpected recommendation alongside business biographies, but it explains something Shoe Dog demonstrates without analyzing: how organizational habits shape company culture. Duhigg describes how specific routines and cue-routine-reward loops drive behavior in individuals, companies, and movements. Several of the habits Knight describes at Nike, the running culture, the risk-taking attitude, the relentless focus on athletes, fit Duhigg's framework precisely.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers examines the hidden factors behind extraordinary success, arguing that timing, culture, family background, and accumulated advantages matter as much as individual talent and effort. Knight's story fits Gladwell's thesis remarkably well: Nike succeeded partly because Knight happened to be a runner at the University of Oregon under legendary coach Bill Bowerman, partly because the jogging boom created a market at exactly the right moment, and partly because Japanese manufacturing costs made his business model viable when it would not have been a decade earlier.

Howard Schultz's Pour Your Heart Into It is the closest sibling Shoe Dog has on the shelf. Schultz grew up in Brooklyn public housing, joined a small Seattle coffee bean retailer called Starbucks, got rejected when he pitched the espresso bar concept, left to start his own chain, and came back years later to buy the original company and merge the two.

Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity is Shoe Dog's louder, more reckless cousin. Branson dropped out of school at 16, started a magazine, opened a record store, signed the Sex Pistols, launched an airline by leasing a single 747, and crashed multiple hot-air balloons trying to circle the globe.

Ray Kroc's Grinding It Out is the founder memoir Shoe Dog readers should pick up if they want the older, more bare-knuckle entry in the canon. Kroc was a 52-year-old milkshake-machine salesman when he walked into a San Bernardino burger stand run by the McDonald brothers and decided he wanted to franchise it.