Inspiration in the time of AI everything

We live in the time of AI everything. Strategy decks generate themselves. Copilots draft the vision, the values and the town-hall speech. Any leadership team can produce a hundred pages of polished direction before lunch.

And yet one of the most-shared pieces of business writing in this era is a single typewritten page from 1977.

What it actually is — because attribution matters. The page circulating on social media is Nike’s internal “Principles” memo. It was written in 1977 by Nike executive Rob Strasser — not by Phil Knight, as many reposts claim. Former Nike employees retained copies, and Nike historian emeritus Scott Reames confirmed the authorship; Business Insider’s reporting authenticated the document and its history. It was never an official corporate manifesto — it was an influential internal memo, which is precisely why it rings true. You can read a clean reproduction and transcript here: Rob Strasser’s 1977 Nike “Principles” memo.

Ten numbered points, hammered out on a typewriter — in full:

1. Our business is change.
2. We’re on offense. All the time.
3. Perfect results count — not a perfect process. Break the rules: fight the law.
4. This is as much about battle as about business.
5. Assume nothing.
   • Make sure people keep their promises.
   • Push yourselves push others.
   • Stretch the possible.
6. Live off the land.
7. Your job isn’t done until the job is done.
8. Dangers:
   • Bureaucracy
   • Personal ambition
   • Energy takers vs. energy givers
   • Knowing our weaknesses
   • Don’t get too many things on the platter
9. It won’t be pretty.
10. If we do the right things we’ll make money damn near automatic.

Three words of point one survive everything the following five decades threw at business writing. Why?

Principles survive technology waves — content does not

Every technology era produces its own flood of content, and the current one produces more than all previous eras combined. What it cannot produce is commitment. A generated vision statement commits nobody, because generating it cost nothing.

Strasser’s memo is short because every line was a decision someone would be held to. Results over process. The job isn’t done until the job is done. Beware of bureaucracy. And the line that no AI would ever draft for an executive audience, because it optimises for approval rather than truth:

“It won’t be pretty.”

That is the difference between inspiration and decoration. Decoration tells the organisation what it wants to hear at scale. Inspiration tells it what it needs to hold onto when the programme slips, the budget tightens and the pretty version of the plan meets reality.

Three readings for the AI-everything era

When change is your business, AI is not your threat. “Our business is change” was written about running shoes and waffle soles. Read today, it separates the organisations that treat AI as a compliance topic from those that treat it as the next form of the change they were already in the business of making. The technology is new; the posture was available in 1977.

When process becomes cheap, judgment becomes the product. The memo values results over perfect process — a provocation in 1977, an operating necessity now. AI agents make process astonishingly cheap: drafting, checking, documenting, coordinating. What they do not make cheap is the decision about what should be built at all, and the accountability for whether it worked. The scarce resource has moved — the memo knew where it would move to.

Bureaucracy now automates beautifully — which is the danger. Strasser listed bureaucracy among the dangers. The AI-era version is subtler: it has never been easier to automate a bad process into permanence, to generate reports nobody needed faster than ever. The memo’s test still applies — does this serve the result, or the process? — it just needs to be asked of every automation, not every department.

A personal note

This one is close to home twice over. During my SAP years I led the Premium Engagement work for the Pacific Northwest — Nike among the accounts — and saw from the inside how that culture handled enterprise technology decisions. And the person who carried Nike’s global technology leadership, Nina Simosko, now writes The Growth Mandate on this platform. Her first column asks the question Strasser would have recognised immediately: when does technology investment become growth, rather than a cost program?

A typewritten page from 1977 and an AI-everything boardroom in 2026 are asking the same thing: what are we actually committed to — and would we still be committed if it won’t be pretty?

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Attribution: Nike’s 1977 “Principles” memo was written by executive Rob Strasser. Authorship confirmed by Nike historian emeritus Scott Reames; authenticated in Business Insider’s reporting. Clean reproduction and transcript: designmanifestos.org. It was an influential internal memo, not a formally issued corporate policy. Nike is a trademark of Nike, Inc.; sapperment is independent and not affiliated with Nike or SAP SE.

Next: the decisions behind the posture — the Executive Clarity Decision Library · or start with The Growth Mandate.