#leadership

Comes from McKinsey. Surprise surprise.

Well, it’s been quite the week, hasn’t it? The company’s managed to lose both its Chief Administrative/Legal Officer and its Head of Compliance in one go — two senior leaders legging it for the hills before Takis’ flying monkeys can do any further damage to their reputations. Can’t say I blame them; self‑preservation is a noble art.

And now we’re meant to believe that the risk organisation — yes, that merry band — is responsible for keeping us in good standing with regulators. Brilliant idea, that. Truly inspired. This is the same group that’s turned “whistling past the graveyard” into a full‑time profession, best known for shuffling people about like mismatched furniture and delaying outcomes while pointing fingers at everyone else.

To add to the farce, they’re apparently convening in Frank’s back garden this week — presumably to strategise how best to further obliterate morale and torch whatever goodwill remains with regulators. Their master plan? Elevate some of the most spectacularly ill‑equipped individuals you’ll ever meet into positions of authority, while doubling the workload on teams already stretched thinner than a budget airline seat. Keep those CVs polished.

Fun times all around. Cheers.

Nk hiring vp gm in territories retail logistic side to help the business in the regions. Spending more money, more vp's, what is this helping

Team,

As many of you know, we are navigating an unprecedented convergence of commodity headwinds. Aluminum prices have skyrocketed. Diesel remains stubbornly uncontrollable. Inflation continues, regrettably, to inflate.

In light of these macro realities, we are making a few adjustments that we're confident will bring us closer together as a family.

Compensation: There will be no raises this year. We know you understand.

Effort: We need everyone to work significantly harder. To be clear, this is not related to the compensation update above.

Travel: Effective immediately, all business travel is suspended. To support this, we need each of you to travel to the office. In person. Regularly.

We recognize many of you accepted remote roles and relocated based on our assurance that you could live wherever you liked. We stand by that. You can still live there. You just need to be here.

Vehicles: To help with that commute, we are reclaiming the company vehicles provided when you accepted your roles.

Every one of these decisions was made with a single goal in mind: helping you become an even better employee of the company you love.

Thank you for your continued sacrifice. We truly couldn't do this without you. Literally.

Leadership

We’re gonna make $3 billion this year but you all su-k and we can do better. Also, why are the good people we depend on starting to leave? Don’t worry about BTC, we’re going to have good jobs here. And to conclude, if you’re not bought in maybe you don’t need to be working here.

Leadership team is planning a year end layoffs. The cut is around 15% across all LOBs.

Does he really have any accomplishments?

Sadly, often the leaders (Director and up) with the most need for development opportunity improvement are the ones least receptive to feedback. Let’s not be mean here, but who are some of the leaders most in need of closing a gap on their development opportunities, and what are their specific areas for growth?

Let’s keep this constructive so these leaders can benefit from the collective wisdom of this important stakeholder group.

As an example, I saw a post earlier that the VP Comms, MG, could be less of a micro manager and do more to trust and empower his team members.

Who else could use some help being a better leader?

Maybe he'll somehow read this post and change his mind to look leaderi-sh. It'd serve him well.

No conspiracy theories here. So, what really happened to EMC? EMC was built differently. premium storage drove everything. enterprise customers mattered most. engineering carried real weight. then cloud changed infra. workloads moved somewhere else... customr buying patterns changed too. the old model got fu---d up. dell brought another op model where scale mattered more and cost control mattered even more. standardization was crucial indeed. sooooo, the integration never fully clicked. products kept overlapping. leadership kept rotating . cost pressure never let go. Innovation suffered as it was hard to do and the portfolio stayed complicated at best . meanwhile, cloud kept moving faster... I dont think there was one decision or mistake that destroyed emc. it happened more gradually. the special conditions that benefited EMC went away then EMC's market simply moved elsewhere. my 2c, may be off but this is how i am processing it.

layoffs started in 2022-2023 and have been affected almost all departments/functions since then. everyone who thought they were “safe” had little to no empathy for those let go early. now the company is in a tailspin and everyone is “nervous” and “worried”. cable tv and phone have been low hanging fruit for over 10-15 years, internet has gone downhill and competitors are now actually able to be competitive despite the local cable lines dictating service providers, and home security is a bust. the executives here are unqualified, outdated, and care more about image and power than actually helping their teams. it’s just a matter of time people.. start looking before you end up “surprised” at the sc--w you coming.

I did not see him anywhere. Did you notice nobody included him in their LinkedIn posts? Very telling.

west div promotion 48 hours before elimination. ned hiring right before cuts. finance hire started two days before the annoucement.how does that happen if the target org and fte plan were alredy known? either hiring managers are compleatly outside the process, or people are being moved into roles leadership already knows may dissapear.

Only strategy that leadership has in their playbook. In conjunction with layoffs. It’s embarrassing…….

The word has come down: meet the new boss, worse than the old boss.

What gets measured gets managed... and all Powell wants to know is how many a-s cheeks are in how many chairs for how many hours.

ai foundry looks untouched, wealth seems pretty protected, while content, dso, product and senior people have all taken hits. if thats intentional, then the layoffs are basically showing us the strategy before leadership actually explains it. are we definately moving away from parts of the old factset core? its wierd that employees have to recieve the strategy by watching which teams survive and which ones get cut. would be useful to seperate cost cutting from actual strategic direction.

KKR chose Amit Singh to lead the next round of layoffs. Which departments will experience the greatest headcount reduction, now "Shankar the Protector" is gone?

Here it goes:

Layoffs, Job Security, and Workforce Strategy

• How can employees stay positive under the constant threat of job cuts?
• Should employees expect further workforce or organizational changes?
• Is Dell planning to be sold?
• Is Dell preparing for a spin-off?
• Did these employees leave voluntarily or leave to spend more time with family?

Morale, Engagement, and Retention

• Lean into what, exactly?
• What are employees supposed to be engaged with under constant uncertainty?
• How can Dell improve employee morale and incentives given the lack of U.S. promotions?
• What are the biggest employee concerns leadership is hearing right now?
• What is leadership doing to improve morale, retention, and workload?

Promotions, Compensation, and Rewards

• After record-breaking quarters, how does Dell plan to compensate the employees who made them possible?
• With the stock price at an all-time high, could executives give employees a few extra thousand dollars?

Offshoring and Backfills

• Why are backfill positions consistently being moved outside the U.S.?

Leadership and Management

• Will Eric Day be able to handle criticism about his actions?
• When will Dell remove ineffective managers and leaders?
• Which SmartPrice leaders are gone?

Technology and Operations

• Who is responsible for rolling out the ODW for CSG?
• What is going on with iDRAC?

Workplace Resources and Employee Experience

• With Dell making billions in profit, why can't employees have trash cans at their desks?
• When will JC's T-shirts be available in the company store?

It’s been over 6 months since EL started as CEO and I can’t seem to think of any positive or notable accomplishments. He was on the Board for a long time as well so he was not a new to senior leadership. It doesn’t seem like he will last long at this pace.

Please dont use this thread to discuss the town hall that may or not be happening right now.

Please, leadership can only be transparent if they trust us not discuss the townhall here.

This is reality regardless of what the disenchanted and haters stay.These are just the facts.

Bottom line: Under the leadership team in place since mid-2024, Mutual of America has made measurable progress—dramatically smaller losses, meaningful cost cuts, stable capital, and constructive rating-agency outlooks. It is on a recovery path and management is targeting sustained profitability in 2026. Success is not yet locked in, but the trajectory is positive and the worst of the capital erosion and large losses appears to be behind it.

SEE BELOW FOR DETAILS:

Mutual of America is showing clear signs of recovery, though it is not yet fully restored to consistent profitability.Key evidence of progress (through 2025 / early 2026)Sharply reduced operating losses: Operating losses fell from roughly $223 million in 2023 → ~$150 million in 2024 → $27.6 million in 2025. This is a major improvement driven by aggressive cost actions.

spglobal.com

Cost reductions: In 2025 the company cut operating expenses by about $90 million (roughly 25%) through a smaller real-estate footprint, workforce optimization, and lower third-party spending.

spglobal.com

Positive (though thin) net income: Statutory net income was positive at ~$2.4 million in 2025 (vs. large losses in prior years). Much of the positivity still came from one-time investment/real-estate gains, similar to the 2024 building-sale boost.

streetinsider.com

Balance-sheet and operating metrics: Total assets under administration rose to $27.9 billion. Client retention remained solid (assets ~91%). Management reports “significant progress,” “positive momentum,” and a clear path toward profitability, with a stated goal of reaching it in 2026.

mutualofamerica.com

Rating agency outlooks stabilized: Fitch affirmed BBB+ and revised the outlook to Stable (from Negative) in June 2026.

fitchratings.com

S&P lowered the rating to A- in April 2026 but assigned a Stable outlook, citing the turnaround plan focused on revenue growth and expense reduction.

spglobal.com

AM Best rates it A- (as of April 2026).

mutualofamerica.com

Remaining challenges Core operations are still loss-making (though the losses are now much smaller).
Statutory surplus edged down slightly in 2025 (to ~$549 million from ~$577 million at year-end 2024). The broader “Total Surplus” figure highlighted by the company was $651 million (vs. $715 million the prior year).

mutualofamerica.com

Business remains concentrated in nonprofit/group retirement products, with ongoing execution risk on the turnaround and potential for further regulatory reserve pressure.
Ratings are lower than historical peaks (they were higher a few years ago).

I think all the consulting firms our leadership hires for print out advise have made moral go down the sink. No more VP and SVP promotions from the bottom up. Time Warner and General Motors with clueless to IT but get big pay checks for getting rid of to many SMEs and GenX are here short term to place on resume but again Att USA company is expanding especially with India a 3rd world country. Like sp--k said no need for devotion just make sure click in and out =8hrs, do not support after hours or weekends

LBT is allegedly losing patience with DCAI's lack of progress. The recent layoffs were a warning shot, but it's unlikely KK can make a successful turnaround at this point.

And as always - you heard it here first!

We hear a lot from leadership, but somehow we always end up with more questions than answers. There's plenty of polished language and very little that tells employees where we're actually going.

It certainly wasn't Hans, but I only know him and Dan. What about the ones before?

Genuinely disgusted and disappointed with Goran’s leadership. He’s one of the few old C-suite/board people Sanoke kept around, and it increasingly feels like he’s sold himself to protect his own position while everyone below him deals with the consequences.

There’s absolutely no transparency. People are worried about layoffs, pay, promotions and rumours of 4/5 days back in the office, and his attitude seems to be “who cares?”. Snarky comments by him in the London office about things that directly affect people’s jobs and lives are not leadership. It’s blatantly detached from reality.

Nobody expects him to have every answer, but people should at least expect some honesty, empathy and respect. Instead, he comes across as completely detached from the people he’s supposed to lead. Really poor.

Do better Goran. You’ve sold everybody out to keep daddy Sanoke impressed.

Why do managers allow WPE for certain people over and over again. These people get to work odd hours and do as they please. They have friendships with leadership so same rules don’t apply. It isn’t fair and HR must see it in reporting

Source: C. Simpson

These 4 KPIs matter more.

The way most people measure their leadership doesn't tell them much.
Years in the role, size of the team, how many people report to you...

None of these tells you whether anyone would follow you if they didn't have to.

So here's a better set of KPIs to measure your leadership against. Not Key Performance Indicators, but:

✅ Keep People Included
✅ Keep People Intentional
✅ Keep People Invested
✅ Keep People Inspired

Managing people is obvious when it's happening to you.
You can feel when someone is directing you vs when someone is developing you.

And you can feel the difference between a team that's compliant and a team that's committed.

So instead of asking "how many people report to me?", try asking these instead:

👥 Keep People Included
↳ Are they part of the conversation before decisions are made?
↳ Do they have a genuine standing in the room, or just a seat in it?

📝 Keep People Intentional
↳ Do they know what matters most right now, or are they guessing?
↳ Are their daily choices aligned with the bigger goal, or scattered across too many priorities?

📈 Keep People Invested
↳ Do they understand how their work connects to the bigger picture?
↳ Do they have a stake in where this is going?

💭 Keep People Inspired
↳ Do they leave conversations with you feeling more capable, or less?
↳ Do they bring you their best work, or just enough to get by?

These questions will tell you far more than a title or a headcount ever will.

Leadership has to be a habit you build, not a position you hold.

“We do what’s right, not what’s easy.”

This is a published Centene behavior. We bring these up a lot when the company hits another increasingly frequent failure bump in the road. It’s the culture leadership pushed down on employees.

Then, when leadership fails to live it, those same employees become a workforce optimization opportunity.

In 2025, 93% of appealed Centene Medicare Advantage prior-authorization denials were overturned. What? Yeah, 93%

Maybe update the values poster: “We do what’s right, not what’s easy.” Might I be so bold to suggest a more realistic behavior, if we’re being honest might be “We do what’s right after you make us.”

Final observation: doing what’s right shouldn’t have an appeals process.

So firm is splitting. Connectivity and Platforms will be a separate company. Angelakis is coming back and will be the CEO of that. Croney is already CEO of that unit today. After split, will there be two CEOs, or does Croney go back being the COO? Or can someone confirm the rumors that Herrin is finished and Stirling will take his space ?

Jane’s leadership has been woefully incompetent. The company hasn’t collapsed because it’s too large, too entrenched, and too systemically important to be allowed to fail easily. Instead of innovating, growing, and making money through better products, management keeps reaching for the same tired lever: layoffs. Cut headcount, reduce expenses, dress up the numbers, repeat. That isn’t innovation. That’s managing decline.

Funny how an ex coworker applied at my new place of work. After being a complete di-k head when I was being laid off. Step on them toes, kiss that a-s later.

During Hans first year as CEO of VZ stock price increased by 6.80%. ($51.73 to $55.25)

Under Dan the Man Schulman, the stock is up 13.6% since his first day in October! Dan needs the nobel prize of winning as CEO!

Scotty G is retiring?? lol. I’m sure it was his decision. Running out of talent as so much has departed in the last five years. Shuffle deck chairs and give a shiny object a sr vp job with no solutions experience (unless you count paid consulting). I can’t wait to see the “bold” plans of the new leaders. Reorgs aplenty.
“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”

A bit long but good
The sportswear giant is trying to recapture the zeitgeist. But can a big brand still be cool?

Doechii, the rapper, is cool. First she went viral on TikTok. Then her lewd, braggadocious flow earned her Best Rap Album at the 2025 Grammys. By the time Pharrell Williams dressed her in Louis Vuitton at the Met Gala last year, the 27-year-old from Florida embodied all the qualities of an It Girl.

https://www.economist.com/1843/2026/06/05/nike-cant-just-do-it-any-more?giftId=MzQ4Njg0MzgtMDMxNS00YjMzLTlmNWEtNmM0ZmE3YmM5Nzgx

Nike, the sportswear company, is struggling with coolness. Gone are the days when its logo seemed aspirational and innovative. “Is Nike Still Cool?” asked GQ magazine in 2024. The answer seemed to be a resounding “No.” The company reported a drop in net income for seven quarters in a row, capping a period marked by declining sales, a falling stock price and a chief executive who no one liked. (A Nike spokesperson said that the company did not agree with “broad personal characterisations of current or former leaders.”)

Last year, Nike hired Doechii for a Super Bowl ad in an apparent bid to recreate the energy that helped make it one of the coolest companies in the world 40 years ago. Over footage of famous female athletes, Doechii invoked the kind of language conventionally used to impose limits on women, and urged them to defy it (“‘You can’t dominate.’ So dominate…‘You can’t fill a stadium.’ So fill that stadium”). It wasn’t a groundbreaking piece of content, but it nonetheless marked a significant moment: Nike hadn’t paid for a Super Bowl spot in 27 years. Returning to the event was one of the first decisions made by the company’s new boss, Elliott Hill—a former Nike marketing executive brought out of retirement in late 2024 to help turn the company around.

Hill had to confront some deep problems. The previous boss, John Donahoe, had a background in management consulting. He had saved eBay during his seven years in charge, but the vagaries of mass-market style seemed to baffle him. “I’ve never been hot in my life,” he once told a reporter. Donahoe oversaw Nike’s move to cut out third-party retailers and sell directly through its own stores and website, a strategy that juiced the company’s stock for a while but backfired once pandemic restrictions ended and people could go back into bricks-and-mortar shops.

The art of celebrity-wrangling has changed since Nike wrote the modern playbook back in the 1980s
The failure of the direct-to-consumer pivot played a big role in investors losing faith in Nike and in Donahoe losing his job. But he’d also allowed the brand to go stale, failing to create buzzy campaigns or modulate production to maintain demand and an aura of exclusivity.

In fairness to Donahoe, there were other reasons why Nike was having a hard time capturing the zeitgeist. The company helped make athletic shoes like the Air Force 1 the default footwear of everyday life, but in the process its logo became part of the background noise of America, rather than a distinctive choice. Today Nike is a behemoth worth more than $60bn—the largest sportswear company in the world, by some distance. Even with falling sales, more Nike shoes were sold over the past few years than any other type of trainer. When it comes to scale, Nike’s peers are not Adidas and New Balance but Starbucks and General Motors.

Nike’s stock in 2026 is as low as it’s been since 2015; at under $50 a share, it’s markedly down from its 2021 peak of $165. Even though sales rose a bit late last year, investors remain wary. Financial momentum for Nike has always meant generating the excitement that only coolness brings. If the company is going to get out of its slump, it will need once again to exert the emotional and psychological pull that caused people to choose its shoes in the first place. Product and design play a big part in this, but Nike is a company built on marketing.

Hill, the new chief executive, started at Nike as an intern and spent three decades at the company, so he knew the formula that had worked so well in the past: choose an athlete or celebrity on their way up; create inspirational advertising about the star’s grit and rebellious personality; and let the cash roll in. When Hill took over, Nike added tens of millions of dollars to its marketing budget.

But the art of celebrity-wrangling has changed since Nike wrote the modern playbook back in the 1980s. In our increasingly fractured culture, every superstar will alienate at least some consumers, and attempts to create a vibe that plays equally well across different echo-chambers can come across as inauthentic.

This is particularly tricky territory for Nike to navigate. In Trump’s first term the company came to be seen as excessively woke, particularly after a campaign celebrating Colin Kaepernick, an American football player known for kneeling during the national anthem to protest against racial injustice. The Kaepernick adverts left the Swoosh poorly positioned to get along with the Donald when Trump was re-elected in 2024.

As a result, Nike seems to have been playing defence at the moment when investors want the company to revive the brand by doing something interesting. Hill’s goal is to stay apolitical, insiders say. “We’re taking this entire year to not have any kind of opinion on any kind of social issue,” one Nike executive said last summer. “We have actively been trying to not be in that conversation.” A mid-level marketing employee echoed the sentiment. “You want to stand out but not offend. Everyone is scared.”

But trying to be inoffensive is, as you might imagine, not very cool.

It’s hard to think of any other business in history that has converted star power into shareholder value as effectively as Nike. For decades the company has harnessed the charisma and work ethic of sport’s biggest celebrities, including LeBron James, Serena Williams, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Cristiano Ronaldo. This marketing strategy, so natural in retrospect, took years to fine-tune. Back in 1964, more than two decades before his company adopted the slogan, “Just Do It”, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, was more direct about his products’ appeal. The first promotional material for Blue Ribbon Sports, the precursor to Nike, stated baldly: “Low Japanese labour costs make it possible for an exciting new firm to offer these shoes at the low, low price of $6.95.”

Knight had run competitively at the University of Oregon under Bill Bowerman, who believed better shoes could help athletes win more races. As Knight’s coach, Bowerman crafted him custom trainers made of everything from kangaroo hide to cod skin. Both men exhibited the kind of counter-cultural sensibility that later became widespread in the 1960s. Bowerman even wrote a bestseller called “Jogging”, which helped popularise running as a route to personal growth.

In 1962 Knight backpacked around the world, seeking both spiritual wisdom and a meeting with a Japanese shoe manufacturer. He returned with a handshake agreement to import Onitsuka trainers, and Bowerman helped him finance his company. A few years later, Bowerman’s experiments with pouring rubber into a waffle iron provided Knight with a novel design for the sole of his shoes.

“You want to stand out but not offend. Everyone is scared”
Nike soon positioned itself as a youthful, edgy alternative to Adidas and Puma. But unseating the German giants would require something more. Adidas and Puma paid the best athletes to wear their trainers, so Knight decided to follow suit, only on a grander scale.

This was the crux of Nike’s early business model: saving money by sourcing shoes overseas in order to spend more on endorsement contracts with Olympians, tennis players and college-basketball teams. By 1983 about half of the players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) were on the Nike payroll—more than 120 people in total. Most were given between $8,000 and $50,000 a year ($167,000 in today’s money) to wear Nikes, and some received a cut of the shoes’ profits.

This flood of payments seemed to have little impact on Nike’s image however. One player even took money from both Puma and Nike and walked on to the court wearing a different shoe on each foot. Knight’s team saw that paying lots of athletes to wear Nikes wouldn’t be enough.

Nike came up with a new plan: instead of spreading their basketball budget across lots of individuals, they would put their money behind a single star—someone who could embody the Nike brand, and make the company cool, even to non-athletes. The person they chose was a rookie basketball player from North Carolina named Michael Jordan.

Coolness is an elusive quality. Nevertheless some people have tried to study it. Caleb Warren, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona (who describes himself as “definitely not cool”) has identified certain properties that are perceived as cool across cultures and time periods. A cool product has to be desirable in itself, he says, but it also needs other things going for it, such as being perceived as authentic and unconventional.

By the 1980s Nike had some of this cachet, as its shoes were closely associated with the burgeoning jogging subculture. But Knight wanted broader appeal. Jordan turned out to be the perfect bridge to a wider audience. There was something magnetic about the basketball player’s talent and charisma; within weeks of his joining the Chicago Bulls, before his image appeared in any Nike ads, attendance at the team’s games doubled.

At the time, Nike’s bet on Jordan was seen as risky. Corporate America was wary of black spokespeople. The athletes around whom ad campaigns had been built tended to play in white-dominated sports, such as golf and tennis.

But Nike went all in. Billboards blanketed cities. Spike Lee, the auteur film-maker, directed and co-starred in TV commercials. The adverts implied Jordan could fly, as did the name of his signature shoe, the Air Jordan, which used cushioning technology that consumers hadn’t been very excited about before. “What Phil [Knight] and Nike have done”, Jordan later said, “is turn me into a dream.” In exchange, Nike paid him $600,000 a year for three years, along with shares in the company, a signing bonus and a percentage of sales on all Jordan apparel and royalties.

It was the largest and most complicated contract Nike had ever arranged with an athlete, and changed the relationship between celebrities and brands. Famous people started to become more involved in how corporations exploited their image, and expected income in line with the success of the products they endorsed. Between 1985 and 1993, Nike’s annual advertising budget ballooned from less than $20m to about $150m. Air Jordan became a global hit. By 1992, Jordan’s Nike income was estimated to be $20m a year—more than he was making from the NBA. The products associated with him became their own subsidiary within Nike.

But then Nike faced a dilemma many companies encounter after breakthrough success: how to continue growing while still being cool. Some give up chasing hipness and try instead to become indispensable. Others strive to become what Warren, the marketing professor, calls iconic, which he defines as embodying a culture’s myths about itself. For American brands this has often meant celebrating freedom and individualism. The Marlboro Man puffs in solitude on a prairie; Ford pickup trucks zoom down empty desert highways.

Nike faced a dilemma many companies encounter after breakthrough success: how to continue growing while still being cool
Nike’s ads began emphasising personal willpower. In 1988, a few years after the release of Air Jordans, the company debuted “Just Do It”. Another ad was set to “Revolution”, a song by the Beatles. It was no longer enough for Nike simply to associate itself with famous athletes. The more popular the brand became, the more its advertising suggested Nike was in the business of transforming society. Commercial after commercial implied that perseverance and athletic prowess could overcome any form of disadvantage.

The genius of “Just Do It” was that it fitted into the inspirational vocabulary of both liberals and conservatives. The three-syllable slogan could be read as an exhortation to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, or as a rallying cry to smash glass ceilings. Nike managed to hold this middle ground for many years; it even referred to Malcolm X in one campaign while maintaining its popularity with white Republican consumers. But it was not to last.

Hill, Nike’s current boss, is a Texan with folksy charm and a strong chin. Since being whisked in to fix the company in October 2024, his public statements have been as cautious and on-message as you would expect from the CEO of a multi-billion dollar consumer company going through a challenging patch. “I look forward to the journey that lies ahead for all of us,” he said in his first earnings call, in the wooden voice of a spaceship captain who does not expect to survive the trip.

Hill tried to diagnose what his predecessor got wrong, telling shareholders, “We lost our obsession with sport.” Ten months later, he confounded CNBC’s Sara Eisen with a similarly vague statement. “What does that mean, that you’re going to put sport at the forefront of everything you do?” she responded. “Because people think of Nike, that’s how it’s always been. So what are you doing differently there?”

Hill replied that the company would once again sell “basketball shoes” and “running shoes” instead of “men’s shoes” and “women’s shoes”, but it was hardly a real answer. (Nike declined to make Hill available for an interview.)

Multiple employees told me that they understood Hill’s call for the company to focus on sport as a coded warning to avoid political controversy. “Part of the reason why Nike lost its way is the advertising got too progressive,” one marketing employee told me. “The more you focus on things that don’t have to do purely with competing, that’s where I think you start to lose people.”

When people talk about Nike’s “progressive” advertising, they are mostly referring to the Kaepernick campaign, which began in September 2018. By that time, Kaepernick hadn’t played a football game in nearly two years, and had filed a grievance against the National Football League (NFL) and its owners who accused of colluding to keep him off the field in retaliation for his protests during the national anthem. One afternoon, Kaepernick posted an image of himself to Twitter with the text: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” At the bottom were the Nike swoosh and “Just Do It”.

Nike’s social-justice-flavoured advertising had provoked ire before, often from the left. At the height of Air Jordan’s popularity, Reverend Jesse Jackson, a civil-rights advocate, called for a boycott of the company because it didn’t have any black vice-presidents or board members. In the 1990s activists seethed over Nike’s treatment of factory workers in Vietnam and Indonesia. (A Nike spokesperson said that the company’s suppliers were obliged to adhere to its code of conduct, and that it remained committed to building a responsible supply chain.)

But this backlash was different. The Kaepernick campaign pitted Nike against not only a major sports league but also about half the country, who felt kneeling during the national anthem was disrespectful. Trump, then in his first term, tweeted, “Nike is getting absolutely ki-led with anger and boycotts.” Social-media users posted videos of themselves supposedly burning their trainers.

One Nike executive told me that the entire Kaepernick campaign had been developed discreetly by a small team inside the company and its ad agency, and that the top brass at Nike had not been given the opportunity to see it before it debuted on Kaepernick’s social-media account, essentially forcing the company’s hand. When asked about this account a Nike spokesperson said: ”The claim that the Kaepernick campaign was posted before appropriate review and approval is inaccurate and in no way was it unauthorised or accidental.”

Over every conversation about celebrities and the athletic footwear industry looms the spectre of Kanye West
However the Kaepernick campaign came about, it’s hard to imagine the company taking such a bold political stand today, especially as the second Trump administration has shown more willingness to punish its critics. One of Hill’s first moves was to improve Nike’s relationship with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. He also hired a new chief communications officer from McDonald’s—the man who helped spin Trump’s unexpected campaign stunt in a drive-thru window by issuing a statement saying, “We open our doors to everyone.”

But Hill’s apparent efforts to avoid antagonising Trump may not have been enough to mitigate the unfavourable political environment. Unlike, say, Apple, Nike wasn’t granted an exemption from tariffs, which have cost the company about $1bn in the past year. And in February the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued subpoenas which revealed an ongoing investigation into whether Nike had discriminated against white employees since 2018—the year of the Kaepernick campaign.

Nike’s spokesperson denied that the company was in any kind of retreat from the positions it took in 2018, saying: “Elliott Hill’s emphasis on sport is about making Nike sharper, faster and athlete-led through product, innovation, storytelling, and service to consumers. It should not be interpreted as an effort to avoid political reaction or to step back from inclusion.” She also said: “Nike’s position remains that sport has the power to move the world forward.”

Nonetheless some people I spoke to inside Nike last year expressed concern that the company was being too politically cautious, and would alienate customers. “Internally, it’s chaos,” a high-level employee told me. “What does it look like for Nike as a progressive brand to exist in a more conservative world? What we have is a war between the people who want to be more responsive and the old guard who think we don’t need to engage, and that’s the chaos. And it’s happening at every level of Nike.”

For a company looking to appear socially conscious without saying anything too controversial, the recent explosion of interest in women’s sports would seem to offer an opportunity. About one in three Americans follow women’s sports. The average Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) game drew about a million viewers in 2025. The American women’s soccer team wins far more often than the men’s, and tends to attract bigger television audiences.

Nike has featured more female athletes in its advertising in the last few years. But it’s not clear how much loyalty this has brought the brand. WNBA fans, for example, have a particular gripe about Nike’s signature shoes. After the Air Jordan, the enormous payday and ad campaign associated with a signature shoe became the ultimate sign of the company’s support for a star athlete. But between 2006 and 2022, Nike didn’t give any WNBA players a signature shoe. Then they released one for Elena Delle Donne, of the Washington Mystics, and another for Sabrina Ionescu, of the New York Liberty. The following year Nike announced that Caitlin Clark, an Indiana Fever rookie, would also receive her own shoe.

The WNBA is very black and very qu--r, with several prominent androgynous players. Nike’s decision to give the coveted signature-shoe platform to three light-skinned, conventionally feminine-looking women bothered many fans. Following their complaints, Nike released a signature shoe for the league’s top player, a black woman named A’ja Wilson.

When asked about the perception that Nike’s support for the WNBA was tepid and belated, Nike’s spokesperson said that this characterisation was “categorically false and ignores basic facts”, citing a long list of the company’s partnerships in women’s basketball, including the creation of the first woman basketball player’s signature shoe in the mid-1990s and the decision to invest in the WNBA in 2022.

Yet when I attended a Beyoncé-themed WNBA watch party hosted by a group called Women’s Sports Rally at a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last summer, I found several fans to be disappointed in Nike.

About a hundred people in seafoam-green jerseys (the colour of the New York Liberty team) were scattered around the bar, cheering and shouting with every play. The energy was similar to that of a small-town high-school-football game, though there were more Zohran Mamdani hats than men in attendance.

“Nike’s position remains that sport has the power to move the world forward”
Cassandra, 29, was eating french fries with her sister, Chloe. Cassandra played sport in school, and measures her year by the sports seasons: she enjoys watching men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball. She runs for exercise and said she didn’t mind “dropping money” on a good pair of trainers. Which is to say: Cassandra is exactly the kind of customer that Nike has been trying to reach. But she, like several of the people I spoke to at the party, criticised Nike for jumping on the women’s sports bandwagon.

“I definitely think Nike above other sports brands capitalises on the popularity of women’s sports,” she said. “They make promotional stuff when everyone’s talking about it, but where are they when no one’s talking about it?”

Nike’s authenticity problem goes beyond its handling of social and political issues. In recent years, aspirational consumers have begun to see big brands as inherently lame. Twenty five years ago buying a coffee at Starbucks was still chic, even though the chain had become ubiquitous. Young consumers now tend to buy products associated with the values, affiliations and taste of their particular tribe. Such trends mean that Nike is losing market share not only to Adidas but also to smaller, fresher companies with a more focused product range. Ironically, Nike’s decision to sell straight to consumers opened up shelf space in stores for many of these competitors.

Last year I went to an evening half-marathon for women which Nike organised in Los Angeles. I was surprised to find that many runners I spoke to were not wearing Nike shoes but those made by a brand called On Running (often known simply as “On”). The company was founded in 2010 by a Swiss Iron Man champion called Olivier Bernhard, who was previously backed by Nike. Bernhard pitched Nike a new cushioning design for running-shoe soles but was turned down. He believed his idea had potential, so he decided to start his own company.

Bernhard’s big break came in 2019, when Roger Federer, a Swiss tennis player and winner of 20 grand-slams, got involved. Federer’s partnership with On illustrates just how much the dynamics of celebrity branding have changed since Nike signed up Michael Jordan in the 1980s. Back then giving a star shares in the company was seen as groundbreaking. But by the late 2010s celebrities were much savvier about making money from their fame. The rise of social media had shifted the balance of power between brands and stars, and many sought to monetise their followers by turning them into consumers.

Legs in trainers and dark socks peek beneath a large orange triangle shape, suggesting hidden identity.
Some of these ventures were successful, such as Rhode, a skin-care brand created by Hailey Bieber, a model. Others were embarrassing flops. In a saturated celebrity entrepreneur market, being famous is not enough, especially if a star is seen as having little connection to what they are hawking. “A lot of celebrities have massive followings but no shot at actually moving product,” said Nik Sharma, a marketing consultant who has worked on celebrity-branded merchandise like MrBeast’s Feastables, a range of sweets. “We’ve launched a brand with someone who had 50m followers across the internet, and they’re unable to move units, while another brand with someone who had 4m followers did millions of dollars in sales within 15 minutes.”

Federer has turned out to be an effective salesman for On trainers. This is partly because he comes across as thoughtful and meticulous, but may also be because he is not merely a paid promoter: he is an investor in the brand, with a 3% stake. This makes the relationship different from the one he had with Nike, which sponsored him for many years. On’s chief marketing officer, Alex Griffin, said Federer initially failed to grasp quite how different it would be, asking how often he was supposed to show up at the office. “Well, Roger, you invested in On,” Griffin replied. “How many times would you like to come?”

On had sales of nearly $4bn last year, which is a fraction of Adidas’s. Both companies are still selling far less than Nike, which had revenues of $46.3bn in the 2025 financial year. But, unlike Nike, On is growing (about 34% year on year).

After Federer, On’s biggest celebrity partnership has been with Zendaya, an actress, and her stylist Law Ro--h—both fashion-world darlings. But On still concentrates its marketing budget on a relatively small stable of stars. Though he was careful not to name Nike, Griffin said that On had a more discriminating approach to celebrity partnerships. “Of course, with a big budget you can sign many athletes,” Griffin said, but “consumers can see through a weak connection.”

Kardashian is not an athlete. She is, however, one of the few celebrities who manages to rise above the political fray
It could be that On is simply where Nike was 40 years ago, and that the company will face the same challenges as it gets bigger. Nike, too, was once the underdog, making the decision to use its endorsement dollars wisely instead of broadly. When I asked Tanya Hvizdak, Nike’s vice-president of global sports marketing, about On, she smiled and said, “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.”

Over every conversation about celebrities and the athletic footwear industry looms the spectre of Kanye West. In the 2010s West transformed Adidas’s fortunes with his innovative Yeezy line. But his behaviour at the firm was erratic, and over time his public persona began to seem unhinged. In October 2022, after he posted online that he was “going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”, Adidas finally moved to end the partnership. The company was expected to lose around $1bn trying to offload old Yeezy stock and recover from the reputational hit.

The opportunities for a celebrity to cause offence today are almost endless. Stars can post at all hours about anything and everything they are thinking: their petty grievances, their social-justice manifestos, their solipsisms. Even relatively obscure figures feel pressure to offer opinions on everything from Gaza to gender. In some cases, a celebrity or influencer might be attacked for not saying anything at all, because “silence is violence”. In other situations, the same person might be told to shut up—to “stay in your lane”.

All of these potential pitfalls may have been on Hill’s mind last February when the company made an announcement about Nike’s next big celebrity partnership. This was the news that was supposed to get investors excited, and build some Nike momentum. This generation’s Michael Jordan, it seemed, was none other than Kim Kardashian. NikeSkims would be an entirely new subsidiary along the lines of the Jordan brand, managed in partnership with Skims, Kardashian’s underwear and shapewear company.

Kardashian is not an athlete. She is, however, one of the few celebrities who manages to rise above the political fray, appealing to people on both sides of the aisle.

Conversations about NikeSkims began in autumn 2023, before Hill took over, but some employees and longtime Nike observers felt the announcement of NikeSkims had come too quickly. (Though the original press release claimed NikeSkims would be unveiled that spring, no details or product images surfaced until autumn.) “In the old days, we wouldn’t talk about it until we had something to show,” one Nike employee told me. Nike’s spokesperson said that it had been necessary to establish the brand and define the partnership before revealing products, and that the subsequent launch was “thoughtfully planned”.

A young woman kneels in green trousers and colourful trainers against a bold orange and grey background.
A few days after the company announced its partnership with Kardashian, I spoke to a Nike spokesperson on the phone. “Wall Street loved the news!” he gushed.

Given how important investor sentiment seemed to be to the company I thought I should see how Hill’s turnaround was playing on Wall Street. Last year I attended a meeting between an investment manager at a well-known firm which holds stock in Nike, and Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst.

“You know, their portfolio of athletes is a little dated,” the investor said. LeBron James was over 40, nearing retirement. Serena Williams was no longer on the court. Was there even a single Nike player in the NBA Finals? (A Nike spokesperson disputed the characterisation that the portfolio was dated.)

Siegel pointed out that the season’s Most Valuable Player award had gone to a Converse man, and Converse was owned by Nike. But still, the investor wasn’t happy with the brand’s marketing strategy. “It needs to be crisper, and speak to people in an authentic manner.”

Siegel argued that the underlying market demand was more important than whatever political position the company seemed to be taking, and pointed out that even the hubbub that followed the Kaepernick campaign had barely affected Nike’s sales. “It’s the $50 shoes you buy at DSW for back to school that drives volume,” he said. “They just need to figure out how to get people to be excited about it.”

(Character Limit Reached - Continues in the next reply)

Anyone else hearing rumors of some changes?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/wells-fargos-chief-risk-officer-derek-flowers-retire-2026-09-23/

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Wells Fargo's chief risk officer Derek Flowers to retire
By Reuters
September 23, 20261:41 PM PDTUpdated September 23, 2026

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Wells Fargo logo appears in this illustration taken December 1, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
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Sept 23 (Reuters) - Wells Fargo (WFC.N), opens new tab said on Wednesday its chief ​risk officer, Derek Flowers, ‌would retire in mid-January after nearly three decades at ​the US banking giant.
Flowers, ​who started at Wells Fargo ⁠in 1995, held ​various roles at the fourth-largest ​US bank. He has been the chief risk officer since ​2022 and will be ​succeeded by Chief Operating Officer Scott ‌Powell.
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"Derek ⁠played a pivotal role in strengthening our risk and control framework and ​fostering ​the strong ⁠risk culture that positions Wells Fargo ​for continued growth," ​CEO ⁠Charlie Scharf said.
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Wells Fargo plans to name Powell's successor ⁠in ​the near ​future.
Reporting by Arasu Kannagi Basil in ​Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar

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Why are we steadily whittling away at XOM’s greatest asset?

The core of this company is the people in the field — the ones closest to the valve, making the daily decisions that move the bottom line. They generate the revenue that pays for the showy buildings in Spring.

Do the people at the top not realize that plants run on experience? Do they really believe the latest flavor-of-the-day program will prevent injuries and losses?
How much faith have they put in the idea that anyone can pick up a procedure and start up a refinery? That’s you, Joliet.

In the end, it is onsite technical expertise that keeps this thing going. You cannot run a refinery from the other side of the world, and it is naive to think you can. You cannot plan a turnaround from there. You cannot even plan a simple seal replacement. I have seen it firsthand.

When will XOM finally admit the error of its ways? DEI was a disaster. Ridding the company of some of the brightest minds and replacing them with people who are not up to standard just to save a little money in the end will be a trainwreck.

We talk constantly about our reputation with the public. What do you think we are doing to our reputation with the people we still need to hire? It only takes a moment of talking to any XOM employees to realize what you are walking into. Even an intern can grasp that concept. Apparently the billions are just not enough.

Take note of King Midas. Sometimes the price of wanting more is your own destruction.