Donald Katz Audiobooks

Just Do It: the inside story of Nike, told by the journalist who founded Audible

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.2/5 average

51 listener ratings

Who is Donald Katz?

There is a neat circularity to finding Donald Katz on an audiobook shelf. He spent two decades as a magazine journalist, writing long-form reporting for Rolling Stone, Esquire and Outside, and collected a National Magazine Award and an Overseas Press Club award along the way. Then, in 1995, he founded Audible and helped invent the format you are browsing.

Before the company came the books. The Big Store took apart the crisis at Sears; Home Fires, a portrait of one American family across four decades, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Katz belongs to the school of business writing that treats a corporation as a social organism rather than a balance sheet, and he stages it the way a novelist would, from the inside, with people rather than metrics carrying the argument.

He should not be confused with the American chemical engineer of almost the same name, a tangle the reference works cheerfully invite.

Donald Katz in audiobooks

The title we carry is Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World, his 1994 account of the year he spent inside the company at Beaverton. Fourteen hours gives him room to do what he does best: follow Phil Knight from a car boot full of running shoes to a global empire, and let the designers, the athletes and the marketing people talk until the culture explains itself.

Listeners have been generous with it, and the rating sits comfortably above four stars. It works three ways at once, as business history, as sports history and as a period piece about the moment a training shoe became a totem.

Begin here if you prefer your corporate reporting narrative rather than instructional. The listing sits below.