#innovation

What do you think about today's USET Connect or townhall themed "Lead to One" : Work Faster, smarter with less.

Realistically?

The vibe of the townhall seemed like a 3 hr 1970s indie movie were absolutely nothing happens!
The usual cry over the ongoing demise of Chemicals business (probably the 10th quarter and still pending).

Funny that an organization that keeps talking about Decision Quality (they spend millions in building those very DQ tools) had such poor time management in their townhall that half of the VPs weren't able to present - a prime demonstration of how pathetic Technology org is in planning, management and execution!
Leaders incharge of innovation within Technology, feeling absolutely delighted about working with Universities and external parties, rather than focusing on innovating something within Shell. Unnecessary blabber about Data and AI when infact IDT are the rightful owners of it.
The sheer audacity of the leaders to say that 'there is no reorganization planned for technology', at a time when all other functions have been shaken to their core, is pure delusional if not foolishness.

Any Thoughts? Comments?

All employees and shareholders need to do is watch this innovation roundtable hosted by Fast Company and featuring the brilliant incompetence of our design leader PM.

Here is the video: https://www.fastcompany.com/91608012/inside-nikes-innovation-reset

This solidifies our fate under his rule. Clueless, stuck, dusty, ready for 2005. He had done zero in his 15 months in this leadership position. Pathetic and embarrassing for our company!

I retired fairly recently after working for CMCSA for 17 years all of which was in HQ. I am not disagreeing with comments about leaders not changing focus, product development issues or competing/over-lapping groups but what tech or product should CMCSA have "pivoted" (man I hate that word) to?

It was only a matter of time before video would die and the theme park experiment was just that. So where should they have invested in?

Seattle's mayor has initiated a plan to lessen the city's dependence on major technology companies. A commissioned report revealed that the city's tax revenue is overly concentrated in a few large businesses. This initiative aims to broaden the economic base and reduce this reliance. The goal is to create a more resilient and varied local economy. This effort is a direct response to the findings of the economic development office.

Seattle, Washington

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2026/09/09/mayor-katie-wilson-business-community-amazon.html

Etsy announced significant workforce reductions, impacting approximately 12% of its employees, primarily in product and engineering roles. This restructuring is intended to streamline operations and accelerate innovation, not as a cost-cutting measure. The company reported strong second-quarter revenue that exceeded analyst expectations. Despite the layoffs, Etsy also raised its full-year gross merchandise sales forecast. The stock experienced a decline in after-hours trading following the announcement.

New York, NY

https://stocktwits.com/news-articles/markets/equity/etsy-cuts-12-percent-workforce-after-q2-beat-says-layoffs-not-a-cost-cutting-move/cZoIPhcRJek

Ford n Ed's to go back to the drawing board and hire new engineers who has talents and innovation. The new Ford Fathem is just another Ford Maverick compact pickup truck the EV. No one will turn heads of they see this truck on the road.

Gartner predicts that by 2029, one-third of positions eliminated due to AI-related layoffs will be refilled. This suggests that many companies made premature and excessive workforce reductions. The research indicates that these cuts deplete talent and institutional knowledge, leading to higher recruitment and training costs. Organizations prioritizing cost savings from AI risk being outpaced by those reinvesting in innovation and upskilling. Many executives are reportedly using AI as a pretext for budget-driven layoffs.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4220413/layoff-remorse-gartner-says-at-least-one-in-three-positions-eliminated-by-ai-will-be-restored-by-2029-at-a-higher-cost.html

Not only is OT late to the party, but they're rushing to join the worst party.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-the-ai-bubble-3-0/

Another bring new idea :-)

Enrique is an engineer turned businessman. If you want to know how he treats his employees or his customers, just look at his track record. He's not a good guy, he's a good businessman. He uses all the financial levers at his disposal to increase the share price. He makes money, but it leads to eroded customer sentiment and poor morale.

He publicly defended third-party ink blockades on CNBC by stating that customers who don't buy HP supplies are a "bad investment" for the company. https://www.techspot.com/news/101593-hp-ceo-customers-who-dont-use-companies-supplies.html#:~:text=Tap%20to%20unmute.%20Your%20browser%20can't%20play,use%20our%20supplies%2C%20it's%20a%20bad%20investment.%22

He maintained software policies that remotely deactivate working Instant Ink cartridges inside a user's printer the moment a monthly subscription is canceled. That's bullsh-t, but it makes a lot of predictable money.

Executed multiple rounds of mass layoffs (up to 10%) while simultaneously authorizing billions of dollars in share buybacks and dividend increases to boost earnings metrics. https://www.pcmag.com/news/hp-to-lay-off-4000-to-6000-employees-over-the-next-3-years#:~:text=Updated%20December%201%2C%202025.%20HP%20will%20cut,artificial%20intelligence%20adoption%20and%20enablement%2C%22%20HP%20says.

Enrique spearheaded the HP+ ecosystem, making permanent internet connections, mandatory account setups, and zero third-party ink usage strict requirements for basic hardware operation.

Enrique shifted corporate resources away from core product innovation and technical support toward financial restructuring, leading long-time staff to criticize the abandonment of traditional engineering-first values ("The HP Way").

I think C-Suite Executives consider replacing engineers with AI as being the equivalent of replacing humana cashiers with automated checkouts.

Well, all of you engineers know that the good ones know how to not just how to handle the “normal” mold fit scenarios but also how to handle scenarios that do not fit the mold and find innovative ways to come up with solutions that most others, including AI, would.

From what I have seen, AI even struggles handling the most basic tasks and processes without an abundance of handling by their human creators. So, as to the non-conforming mold fit processes, forget about it!

Why am I posting this? Because I am so sick of all the AI hype being shouted on the roof tops. Please, can we now start having real honest conversations as to the very limited scenarios for which AI maybe can be used?

Nike built the LeBron James Innovation Center to look like the future. And inside, they’ve apparently figured out how to manufacture the past.

The Innovation team has a pretty simple process: Start with a decent idea. Overthink it. Add a bunch of stakeholders. Rename it three times. Build a ridiculous prototype.

Make a very cool video. Put together a 75-slide deck explaining why this is going to change sport forever.

Then, after everyone has had their moment, dump it on Inline. CFO: Just Flush It. 🚽👟

I think it’s about time to employ these “small” business losers and run it like a real insurance company

Can someone please explain to me the Horizon Challenge? Is this a new concept or a fancy name for an old problem? Thanks for any insights.

If we had products people wanted to buy would we be in this situation? If we were selling products hands over fists, a lot of the issues we see today would be swept under the rug.

Placing the state of Nike right now solely on the whole innovation team for not creating or bringing to market anything that customers remotely want for the last I don’t know how many years. The last wave of Nike innovation was arguably 2017-2019 when we dropped zoomx/vaporfly/react?

I’d just wipe out that whole org, anyone a part of product design, product innovation, etc and start from scratch. Poach people from our competitors who are actually growing. Genuinely curious what people in product design/innovation have been doing the last 5+ years.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if VA eventually replaces EH as CEO. A lot of people senior leaders are frustrated that we still haven’t seen the turnaround everyone was promised.

EH is unable to get the business moving again, especially around innovation, product, and brand momentum, the board is going to have to seriously consider a change. VA could be a logical next choice given his experience and understanding of the company. Sad part is that we don’t have any good replacement options with our stock teetering in the 30’s.

Anyone notice this trend increasing? ES leading supply chain planning innovation is a good example. She consistently represents work she knows nothing of as her own. Weird, because she does it mostly on the topics/project she knows the least about. She also does it a lot externally to non-Nike folks.

https://www.forbes.com/lists/innovative-large-companies/

https://x.com/RamMNK/status/2092642709416837126

Nike never misses an opportunity to tell everyone it is the world’s most innovative company—a fearless champion of creativity, self-expression, and the rebellious spirit of sport.

Apparently, the latest expression of that innovative spirit is turning a $169 stock into a $39 stock.

That is a 78% collapse from its 2021 peak, roughly $200 billion in market value erased, a 12-year low, eight consecutive quarters of declining sales in China, Nike Direct revenue down 7%, digital sales down 12%, and the stock heading toward its worst annual performance since 1993.

But please, tell us more about “Win Now.”

Only Nike’s leadership could lose approximately $200 billion, fall behind younger and more innovative competitors, watch Jordan and Sportswear lose momentum, and still walk into the next all-hands meeting congratulating themselves for being courageous disruptors.

The company celebrates self-expression—as long as employees express exactly what leadership wants to hear. It celebrates risk-taking—as long as executives never risk their own jobs. It celebrates innovation—then eliminates experienced innovators, reorganizes the survivors, and expects a new corporate slogan to design the products consumers no longer see coming from Nike.

This isn’t innovation. It’s institutional arrogance wearing expensive sneakers and carrying a PowerPoint deck.

Nike’s greatest recent innovation may be discovering how to turn “Just Do It” into “Just Keep Saying Innovation Until Investors Stop Looking at the Numbers.”

They haven’t.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_oIQ-tA6M

IBM features prominently in Sabine's new video.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4636198-ibm-unveils-first-dual-architecture-mainframe-processor-with-arm-tech

Nike used to lead trends. Now it feels like Nike is chasing them because it fell behind after years of bad product, uninspired colors, and questionable fashion decisions (lead by a mass wave of DEI initiatives).

And look at New Balance and Adidas. There’s nothing particularly flashy or revolutionary about what they’re doing, yet they’re eating Nike’s lunch because they’re executing better and giving consumers products they actually want.

Nike doesn’t need more discounts. It needs better product and a clear point of view. Lower the prices, stop training consumers to wait for sales, overhaul the board, and bring in a CEO who understands product, innovation, and the brand, not just sales.

Look at Apple. Steve Jobs was pushed out and replaced by a Pepsi executive focused on selling more product. Apple lost its way. When Jobs returned, he rebuilt the leadership team and focused on innovation, creating products people didn’t even know they wanted.

Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

That’s the problem with Nike right now. Nike shouldn’t be asking what consumers want from Nike’s competitors. Nike should be creating what comes next.

Nike needs real leaders. Smart leaders. Forward thinking innovators who understand that the answer isn’t selling more of what isn’t working. The answer is creating something people can’t wait to buy.

Phil built a company that changed the world. Nike needs to find its next generation of leaders before that legacy gets lost.

Perfectly said, @fe+1m0mxdc30.

Old colleagues who have left have told me they're developing AI agents at their new company that can assess inspection reports and output recommendations that are spot on in minutes. A small team of engineers doing the work that took our BTC months, without all the errors.
Anyone else hearing similar things?

Let’s be clear: this is not a criticism of women broadly and certainly not of the many women of color at Nike who consistently kick a-s, deliver exceptional work, challenge broken systems, and make the company better.

This is about a specific corporate archetype: privileged, entitled "leaders" who we-ponize victimhood whenever their competence or conduct is questioned. They demand accountability from everyone beneath them while treating accountability for themselves as persecution.

They turned personal insecurity into “leadership,” favoritism into “talent strategy,” and organizational politics into a substitute for results. They promoted one another, protected mediocrity, punished candid dissent, and surrounded themselves with people unlikely to challenge them. Competence became threatening. PowerPoint replaced product.

Meanwhile, the people who genuinely understood athletes, footwear, design, engineering, and innovation were sidelined while professional meeting-attenders accumulated titles and congratulated themselves for “transforming” the company.

Now, after helping dismantle a culture built by generations of talented people, they will undoubtedly insist that none of it was their fault.

That may be their most enduring Nike innovation: failing upward while presenting themselves as the victims.

The idea we can return Nike to glory or even growth just selling more to Wholesale has never been right. Sounds like an easy fix because it is too simple. On and Hoka didn't eat our lunch because of shelf space. Their products were innovative, comfortable and looked cool or different and our running products were not any of that - until at least the Vom18 which is a pretty good Hoka knock off. New Balance brought back retro running and got cooler and deeper in culture through athletes. Adi sparked a low pro trend as were overheating on chunky high pro Air Force, AJ1 and Dunks. They did sell those in wholesale. We now have lost all of the people who get all of this. If or when we ever get those types of people or a new visionary and our mojo back, Nike digital stores and wholesale will all grow. It's not complicated - innovative or cool/style right product and inspiring brand marketing and also being part of shaping culture have always been the answer. When that happens, our products sell everywhere. This is not a turnaround taking longer - what drives Nike's growth just isn't happening here any more - not now nor over the past 2 to 3 years. Even still, that's all easy to say, hard to do. Need visionaries who can also hire talent and inspire everyone. Layoffs are not the answer either.

DDAT locking down claude code and cutting off use by business teams that have already been using and have built substantial workflows of value at a fraction of the cost or that DDAT probably previously told them they couldn’t do right now…or they didn’t know how to do it… the AI revolution… it’s beginning…

New carts are just another way to push in more and more product!!

Is Wells Fargo going to start allowing customers to purchase cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and some sort of stable coin? If this is real when will this happen and how?

Copy architectire from one project put it to ai give specifications for this project, ask it to generate architecture. Architecture ready! that's architect DINOSAURS work in fidelity paid $200k+ shamelessly.

A German company with a Colorado presence is utilizing satellite technology to improve wildfire detection and tracking. OroraTech provides satellite imagery to fire departments, supplementing existing ground-based camera networks. This space-based monitoring allows for earlier identification of fires, even when traditional cameras are obscured by smoke. The company's constellation of satellites offers more frequent updates than existing systems, focusing on the critical afternoon hours when fires are most active. By combining satellite data with other sensors, OroraTech also generates fire simulations to aid in response strategies.

Colorado Springs, Colorado

https://gazette.com/2026/08/17/german-company-in-colorado-providing-wildfire-detection-and-tracking-from-space-2/

It will be $25 by end of year based on insight.

Leadership wants to cancel Investor Day scheduled for Nov. Weak innovation pipeline and Win Now strategy has no substance. We are in serious trouble with EH ousted in 2027.

The LeBron James Innovation Center was built to represent the future. Instead, it increasingly feels like an extraordinarily expensive monument to executive vanity, an architectural masterpiece filled with empty desks, empty language, and far too many empty suits.

Walk through the building on an average day and the most impressive innovation may be how successfully leadership has made actual leadership disappear. There is hardly anyone there, accountability is even harder to find, and yet the people in charge continue performing their roles as though everything is working perfectly.

From facilities leadership to the executives supposedly responsible for product design, development, and engineering, the operating model appears remarkably consistent: protect the narrative, protect the hierarchy, and never acknowledge the widening gap between what is presented in meetings and what is actually happening.

The building is world-class. The leadership seems better suited to a corporate costume department.

These leaders speak endlessly about innovation, collaboration, courage, transparency, and psychological safety. Nike has apparently perfected all five, as presentation slides. In practice, when someone raises a legitimate concern, challenges a failing process, or points to a red flag, leadership rarely addresses the issue. It simply begins treating the person who identified it as the issue.

Nothing says “innovative culture” quite like punishing the people who notice what leadership would prefer not to see.

Real leaders confront uncomfortable information. Empty suits manage the optics. Real leaders create clarity, accept responsibility, and protect their teams. Empty suits schedule another meeting, repeat the approved vocabulary, and wait for someone more disposable to absorb the consequences.

At the LeBron James Innovation Center, there is no shortage of impressive titles, carefully staged presentations, executive theater, or self-congratulation. What appears to be in critically short supply is ownership.

The irony could not be sharper: a building dedicated to innovation operating within a culture that can discourage honesty, punish dissent, and reward people for maintaining the fiction that everything is fine.

Innovation does not come from dramatic architecture, expensive equipment, slogans painted on walls, or executives pointing at presentations about “the future.” It comes from capable people being trusted to challenge assumptions, expose weaknesses, and solve difficult problems without fearing professional retaliation.

When leadership treats critical thinkers as disposable while protecting those who preserve the status quo, the organization is not engineering the future. It is engineering its own decline, apparently with executive approval.

Nike still has extraordinary talent. What the LeBron James Innovation Center appears to lack is leadership worthy of that talent.

But perhaps that is the building’s greatest innovation: proving that you can spend a fortune creating a monument to the future, fill it with empty suits, and still expect everyone else to pretend the emperor is fully dressed.

Nike Innovation Leadership: World-Class Excellence in Strategic Seat-Warming

Please join me in recognizing the extraordinary contributions of certain Nike Innovation directors—the courageous executives who collect enormous salaries while bravely enduring back-to-back meetings about meetings.

Their impact is difficult to measure, primarily because there isn’t any.

These visionary leaders have perfected a revolutionary management model:

• Protect your title.
• Protect your salary.
• Protect your friends.
• Protect the appearance of importance.
• Under no circumstances protect, develop, or advocate for the employees doing the actual work.

When talented people ask for support, mentorship, career development, or basic accountability, leadership suddenly becomes powerless. But when someone posts an uncomfortable truth online? Incredible. Immediate alignment. Urgent conversations. Executive escalation. A flawless demonstration of speed, collaboration, and decisive action.

Apparently, deleting criticism is the only deliverable this leadership team can complete on schedule.

Imagine if they invested that same energy in developing employees, removing barriers, making decisions, or producing something more valuable than corporate theater and expensive calendar invitations.

But let’s be fair: warming a premium office chair all day while protecting a six-figure salary is demanding work. Sometimes you barely have enough energy left to say “people first” before doing absolutely nothing for those people.

Innovation isn’t dead. It’s just trapped in a meeting, waiting for approval from someone whose primary contribution is occupying a director-level seat.

Just delete it.™

This is a company stuck in amber. Old school processes, old school thinking, old school resistance to anything new. Propose a fresh idea and watch it get crushed. Try to work differently and see how fast you get shut down. Individual contribution isn't rewarded, compliance is. And we're all slowly suffocating under the weight of "this is how we've always done it."

The office is like old folks home it’s an aging firm where nobody has the drive to push for innovation because of long service. Everyone is slacked any new projects or ideas quickly get throw out the window. Network / Data firm but it’s very outdated .
Need new blood transfusion of workforce before too late.

Nike Innovation has perfected a remarkable process: take an exciting idea, overcomplicate it, poorly position it, leave it half-finished, and then ceremoniously dump it on Inline’s doorstep.

“Here you go, team. Innovation!”

Except it isn’t innovation. It’s a tu-d wearing a futuristic PowerPoint deck.

The concept is incomplete. The consumer story is vague. The business case is missing. The execution is barely house-trained. Yet somehow, everyone stands around admiring the bowl and congratulating themselves on the flush.

Then Inline gets handed the plunger.

They have to clean it up, make it manufacturable, explain why anyone should buy it, and somehow turn the whole steaming pile into an actual product. When it struggles, Innovation can conveniently claim that Inline “didn’t protect the vision.”

What vision? The one circling the drain?

Nike Innovation doesn’t deliver finished solutions. It delivers Innovation tu-ds™: expensive, poorly positioned droppings packaged with buzzwords, dramatic renderings, and absolutely no toilet paper.

Just Flush It