#leadership

Look at Nike’s stock price over the past 50 years. There have been ups and downs, but nothing compares to the decline since 2020. The five-year downward trend is crazy.

It’s hard not to see this as the point where Nike went off the rails. Leadership, business strategy, and company culture all changed for the worse. I wonder how business analysts will explain what happened years from now.

Everyone should tune into 2Q earnings on Wednesday and witness “leadership’s” spin on their reality vs ours and our customers. What’s the anticipated playbook? If like other earnings or townhalls it will go something like this:
1) Credit Hoarding and Blame Deflection: Stankey will take personal credit for all successes, but scapegoat realities or market factors for any poor metrics, failures, or missed targets.
2) Spinning Data: He’ll present metrics selectively to inflate achievements while minimizing or altogether hiding negative data/results.
3) Focusing on Optics Over Substance: He’ll prioritize vanity metrics like PR splashes or superficial growth instead of addressing structural issues or the long-term sustainability of the corporation.
4) Gaslighting Employees: He’ll publicly contradict internal realities; he will claim the company is thriving while employees experience understaffing, canceled projects, and record level layoffs and burnout.
5) Silencing Dissent: He’ll negligently ignore bad news, punish employees (no matter their level) who report operational failures or low morale, and exclude critical voices from high-level conversations.
6) Lack of Empathy for Stakeholders: He’ll dismiss the toll that poor organizational performance (e.g., RTO and targeted layoffs, restructuring) takes on the workforce and quarterly results.

When are we going to be rid of this terrible regime? Any light at all at the end of the tunnel?

“You can’t shrink your way to greatness”

• Seth Godin

Dan, you have highly competent employees, functionally adequate systems / processes / tools, a strong band, and multiple engagement points with most customers. Try reimagining the customer experience and lifting walletshare capture through the assets you have. Reducing your human capital now is just the junkie’s next fix but cannot, logically, achieve increased shareholder value. you know it, we know it.

Rumor has it that Kamal & Mange are out early August

Given the headcount of AEG, we are heavily investing in AI. Our strength in AI chip design lies in the vast internal data within our tools, which can be directly leveraged by AI models, a luxury that customers and other AI chip companies simply do not have. That said, it is striking that neither my team nor neighboring teams appear to be working directly with AEG to integrate this AI into our tool workflows. It seems to me that AEG is another den of scammers. Meanwhile, we are laying off many contributing employees while expanding a group that lacks profitability, clear direction, and a viable strategy.

Has anyone else noticed or heard about ongoing ethics and leadership culture issues in Nike’s Sports Marketing group?
There’s been significant turnover at the senior levels over the past couple of years. Some current and former employees are saying the ethical standards and decision-making in the group still need real improvement, even with new leadership in place.
Wondering if others have seen similar issues or if things are actually getting better.
Appreciate any honest takes.

We have lost market share for years so now LFG has been rolled out moving many specialists to the portfolio teams. Are they replacing the failed portfolio sales and engineering leadership at all levels that are responsible for this.

So many people are quitting from burnout. Leadership doesn't care because they don't have to pay severance. They think they're winning.

The people running this place don't know what they're doing. They just play games and waste time. It's obvious and it's hurting everything.

Treating people well isn't complicated. When you respect employees, they stay and contribute. Mistreat people and it brings everyone and everything down, including productivity. Why can't leadership figure this out?

I heard that most of the experienced people we laid off recently were immediately snapped up by a competitor at a much higher salary. If that doesn't show how clueless our leadership is, nothing will.

It's awful seeing coworkers lose their jobs, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. At the same time, this place has had serious issues for years that leadership never bothered to fix. Looking back, almost everyone who's left has ended up happier somewhere else. I'm starting to think the people who walked out last week may have gotten the better deal.

They keep promoting young, inexperienced people into management positions while the people with years of experience and real qualifications get passed over. So we end up losing our best talent, and replacing them with people who don't know what they're doing most of the time. Solid business strategy. /s

We have reorgs constantly, with new structures, new reporting lines, new everything and always many, many layoffs. You'd think with all that effort and all those changes, we'd be perfect by now. But nothing ever truly changes. Why isn't anyone holding leadership accountable?

When a company’s performance deteriorates year after year, every oversight function should be forced to answer a basic question: did its leaders challenge executives, or did they become too comfortable maintaining access and relationships?

A function that appears more focused on executive schmoozing, polished presentations, and avoiding difficult conclusions than on confronting persistent underperformance is not providing meaningful oversight. It is providing institutional cover.

Accountability should begin with the head of the function and extend directly to their leadership team. If they repeatedly failed to identify, escalate, or communicate the seriousness of the company’s decline, leadership changes and a fundamental restructuring are warranted. At some point, shareholders should stop funding oversight teams that seem unwilling to challenge the people they are supposed to hold accountable.

Morale is in the gutter due to cuts and leadership couldn't care less. They don't seem to realize that stressed employees aren't productive employees. Or they don't care.

This has been one of the most volatile Org changes period i have experienced in my 17 years at USAA. At the core we have amazing & inspiring mission. However behind curtains this has been messed up in last 12 - 14 months. Constant layoffs, rapid changes, mindless promotion of people, New leader Introductions means wiping out complete existing leaders, Zero interest for people development, Completely demoralized workforce. I know people in HR & Communication read this site. PLEASE SINCERE REQUEST. Do all layoffs, changes what ever once & give us some psychological safety & focus so we all work to deliver best for members.

Who will be the next CEO? If the board lets Khalaf stay until 65 or if they cut him, they need a successor, stat.

What happened in Claims a few weeks ago? Heard there may have been some senior officers departing? Performance, or is this an exercise in flattening the leadership structure and cutting costs?

IBM has a major gap in its product portfolio. We don’t make and sell devices that have GPUs. This is what enterprises are clamoring for AI training and inferencing at scale, which is way more powerful than the accelerators we have on IBMZ and Power. And IBM Cloud can’t compete against the hyperscalers, which are expensive, however ideal for running AI use cases at scale. We have a strong AI product portfolio, although so do a lot of companies. We’ve acquired a lot of companies that complement our core products and have a massive ecosystem. But most days, I wonder -
What does IBM even stand for? Where do we even belong in this rapidly evolving world?

I don’t believe IBM will fail. However we all, especially our Senior Leaders, need to really think about what we actually stand for. Not this BS hybrid cloud leader statement. It’s about crafting a real vision that inspires the world. It’s about culture change to invigorate low morale at the ranks. It’s about picking up this company and giving it a really good shake. If we don’t do something drastic, then the free fall will continue.

I wrote my resignation letter in 15 minutes.

The real version took 2 years
to write inside my head:

The one I submitted said "pursuing a new opportunity."

Professional. Clean. Polite.

The one I actually meant said something very different.

It said I brought you solutions for two years and you treated every one of them like an inconvenience.

It said I worked weekends you never knew about on projects you never acknowledged.

It said I walked into your office looking for a leader and walked out feeling like I was bothering you.

But resignation letters do not say those things.

They never do.

And that is the problem.

Companies never hear the real reason. So they never fix it.

And the next good person walks out the same door for the same reasons six months later.

79% of employees who quit say the reason was a lack of appreciation.

Not money.
Not a better title somewhere else.

They just wanted someone to notice.

30% of workers say they have felt invisible at their own job.

Nearly a third of the workforce is showing up every day wondering if anyone would notice if they stopped trying.

I was one of those people.

And I can tell you the moment I stopped being one.

It was not when I found a better boss.

It was when I stopped looking for one.

I started building something where my effort was the product.

Where every hour I put in went directly into something I owned.

Where I did not need anyone's permission to matter.

And here is the part nobody talks about.

The same traits that made me a great employee, the initiative, the problem-solving, the willingness to go above and beyond, those are the exact traits that make someone a great builder.

You were never the problem.

You were just giving your best skills to someone who did not know what to do with them.

If you have been writing your own resignation letter in your head for months, that is not burnout.

That is clarity.

Something in you knows that your energy deserves a place that actually values it.

And if you are ready to start building that place yourself, I put together a free toolkit to help you take the first step.

It walks you through how to take what you already know and turn it into something that actually belongs to you.

I’m reading managers and directors. Is there any more info on which managers and which directors? What channel

Others seeing this already... Managers running scared schmuck. There time has finally come to learn technology or retire.

Drain the swamp and focus on revenue. Hans had no plan!

Did anyone else hear this rumor? It seems he is a rising star and on Dan and Alfonso's good side...

And the stories just keep coming.

AK touted how he could eliminate jobs and replace them with AI. Well, now he stew in the aftermath.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-has-nowhere-to-hide-from-ai-c9ff290f

The once-great tech giant’s place in the new tech cycle is in disarray

By: Tim Higgins | July 18, 2026 5:30 am ET

The problem for IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna is that things are going too fast and too slow—all at the same time—and he’s stuck in the middle. That’s a bad place to be in the AI revolution.

Krishna bet big on a hybrid-cloud approach in response to the rise of hyperscalers and has long sold investors on IBM’s role in quantum computing—a next-generation technology he says is three to five years away.

It’s hard to imagine IBM in three years, let alone five, if it has too many more days like this past week.

The stock dropped 25% Tuesday after IBM warned second-quarter results would be far worse than expected. This showed AI isn’t only jeopardizing IBM’s software business, it is making it harder to sell its legacy offerings in an IT market where the new technology is reprioritizing corporate spending away from Big Blue.

It’s the sort of bad dream terrifying plenty of CEOs these days as they try to navigate the revolution. While the biggest tech companies’ cloud businesses have helped position them to adapt to AI, many, like Krishna, find themselves trying to manage legacy businesses even as they struggle to keep pace with emerging, pure-play rivals.

It’s a familiar story that has repeatedly played out in other sectors during prior tech waves. Media, music and cars spring to mind. They all showed that a middle-ground strategy is tough to pull off. Many try, few thrive.

IBM’s current predicament is especially galling given it was once at the forefront of AI with Watson, a natural-language computer processing system that won “Jeopardy!” Big Blue squandered that lead, languished in the following years and today is far, far behind the likes of AI leaders such as Anthropic, which created leading model Claude and is chasing the kinds of corporate customers that once made IBM so dominant.

“IBM trading like Claude mu---red Watson,” Ken Wattana, founder of an AI agentic company called Conto, joked on X Tuesday.

The stock fell harder than it did in the 1987 Black Monday stock-market crash.

For a while, Krishna, an IBM lifer, seemed to be pulling off the middle-ground balancing act. He used his army of consultants to help clients navigate AI while positioning the company to milk its legacy mainframe and software businesses and to offer more tailored AI products.

He essentially bet that corporate clients running critical programs on their own mainframes purchased from IBM couldn’t or wouldn’t migrate to remote data centers offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Instead, Krishna believed his customers would jump at being able to straddle the two worlds. They would gain cloud-computing-like capabilities while keeping certain digital needs in-house. And IBM would be the bridge making this happen.

It was initially a hard sell to investors, but Krishna was well suited for it. There’s something almost statesmanlike about the executive. His manners, his dress, his demeanor.

He even managed to turn a potential liability—at 63 he is older by decades than the executives running emerging rivals—into a selling point. Those extra years, Krishna argued to me in an interview last summer, give him insight into how tech cycles work—the ups and the downs.

“AI is in the first innings,” he said then. “It’s still early to see how the game works out and how it goes along.”

Investors eventually came around. Before this past week, IBM shares had more than doubled since Krishna was named CEO in 2020. That growth pales in comparison with Apple, Alphabet and other tech giants. But it was encouraging to some investors given IBM’s struggles the prior decade.

And Krishna showed he could weather a storm.

In February, Anthropic announced the creation of an AI tool that can rewrite Cobol computer code into a modern language. This seemingly blew a hole in the moat around IBM’s legacy business and Krishna’s hybrid strategy. The stock had what would be its worst day in 25 years—until this week.

Krishna suggested the market had overreacted in February. “I actually think that we were hit in a way that was unfair,” he said on the Norges Bank Investment Management podcast weeks later.

His argument: Rival software companies were at risk to AI while the role of handling client databases and key business functions—presumably IBM’s role—would remain valuable in the years to come.

But he understood investors’ angst. “To give full credit to investors, they’re saying, ‘Look, I can’t decide today…who are the few who might benefit…If I can’t determine that, I’ll take the sector down and then over time that’ll determine itself based on the numbers that you print,’ ” Krishna said.

He was correct for a while. A pair of announcements about AI and quantum computing in May helped IBM shares not only recover from their February swoon, but reach new heights in June.

One of those announcements included IBM and the Commerce Department detailing plans to invest billions of dollars to help fund a quantum chip foundry. This would produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors.

IBM has spent decades working on the idea of quantum computing, getting increasingly more serious in the past 10 years. Krishna is targeting 2029 to deliver the first large-scale quantum computer. The technology uses quantum physics to perform calculations that today’s computers can’t even approach. The potential for discoveries in material science, healthcare and beyond are staggering.

Krishna has staked a lot of IBM’s future on the belief that quantum will unlock the same kind of growth potential that was seen with GPU chips. Those chips popularized by Nvidia have been at the heart of the new AI race, powering much of the advances and, in turn, making that tech company among the most valuable in the world.

But some believe the technology won’t be commercially viable for 10 years or more, far longer than Krishna is hoping.

In the meantime, investors are left with, in Krishna’s own words, “the numbers that you print.” Suddenly, for IBM and Krishna, there’s no middle ground in those.

Rumors roaring about September layoffs… Leadership wants you to keep doing your job like nothing is happening.

As a 40 year Vz employee who was fortunate to enjoy a friendship making career at Verizon I can't help but think HBS is writing a business case for MBA students to examine.

I believe the foundational thesis will be "When meitocracy and execution failure"

To think Ivan achieved CEO status as a formet IBEW Tech and grew up in the most competitive New York Telcom Market in the World, the standard was set.. results are rewarded and winners get rewarded based on results.

Then we transition to a different CEO.. Lowell.. Ivy education, obviously bright in academics but history shows could never build a cohesive strategy and Executive Team and badly mismanaged aquistions, integration (gotta have AOL, Gotta have VODAPhone 40% at extraordinary price), stop funding fiber expansion at significantly lower CapEx that now Vz is playing catch up. You get the point.

Tben tbe huge miss... recommends Hans to become CEO... this is 49% on Lowell and 51% on Board. To hire a Foreign CEO who was removed at Erickson as a failed CFO with zero experience on execution and zero USA market experience is a signicant reason for Vz free fail in stock and market performance. As a resukt Hans biught in an all European C level team to create Marketing programs, Finance, Operational metrics and a huge fail.

Verizon then transitions to a new CEO Dan who is on a running clock with sole focus to eliminate costs vs Customer value in marketplace. Employees are eliminated without regards to performance and skills. Rather on Salary in 90 day increments. Culture is crushed.

What remains is tbe keast experiences C Suite Team in the history of Ma Bell.

Finally, while quarterly results can fluctuate, the one tbing that Verizon has lost and accerated under Hans and Dan is the strategic advantage Verizon had over 100 years... Customer And Employee Integrated culture.

This entire Summary will be the HBS business case for future generations to learn from.

We can replace Stankey for around 5k, and save the company $30 million+ per year. This doesn’t even include stock losses this dum--ss boomer has caused.

We give AI The Handmaid’s Tale, Elon’s annotated version of Mein Kampf, and tell it to always make the d-mbest decision possible. Abracadabra, we’ve replaced John Stankey and saved the company 30 mil a year.

1) Bill Rogers
2) Ken Thompson and everyone else at Wachovia
3) Kelly King
4) Ken Lewis
5-10) let’s hear who else is bad?

In this week's blog post we dive into the Around The Table's look at Optimism with Brendan Mooney, the CEO of Kainos
https://underthetable2026.blogspot.com/2026/07/episode-5-optimism.html

Quite the pivot for a rudderless ship

If you work for belk don’t drink the kool-aid served by upper management and executive leadership, people of a certain age will understand this reference.

Seeing all the panic about no raises this year and past cuts. Honestly im not worried about job security at all.
Were going hard on AI with AgentStack and that Autonomous Knowledge Platform. Leadership is putting the money where it counts to actually win instead of little bumps. Cloud numbers looking good and we got cash from the SAP settlement. Feels solid to me.
On a personal note this place reminds me of the strength in the LDS Church. The Mormon Church does such a great job building for the long term, focusing on preparation, self reliance and helping people. Their community is so strong and they invest smart in the future. Tithing, welfare programs and emphasis on education its all about thriving even when things get tough. Grateful for that example it keeps me positive here too. As it says in the Bible "therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself" (Matthew 6:34). And "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). That faith helps a lot.
Still bullish on my role and the roadmap. No need for everyone to freak out.
Anyone else at Teradata feeling the same?

If Project Dolphin is backfiring and employees are no longer being forced between re badging with a vendor or severance (not enjoying that at all, nope), how will they be able to pay off everyone? The remaining Franklin Templeton legacy staff that was scheduled for layoff on 04/27/2026 was re badged over to other Transfer Agent mutual funds, were told that there was no time certain for their continued employment. They were needed to support staffing that was not meeting SLAs. They keep training them to handle more mutual fund clients because even with this talented, tenured help, they are still not meeting goals. It seems likely that they will not be laid off, but who can tell? No savings there, either. Because the business math ain't mathing, Project Dolphin is failing. FIS cannot outrun their sh---y leadership. Glug, glug, glug.

Pat Gelsinger says the chipmaker went off the rails ‘when it started to be run by business people’. (See: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/former-intel-ceo-says-chipmaker-185823655.html)

Same rule applies to EDA? A software maker derails the moment it is led by a CAE.

Mike Lyons has a Glassdoor approval rate of 70, while Takis has a 41. Takis, our new ceo, has a rating lower than most other CEOs. Is he this bad? Thoughts? Need to plan for my next step if he’s indeed so much worse than Mike Lyons…

Can we talk about this? Because I'm struggling to see how this is fair.

INC USUI team, has money for lavish dinners, unlimited upscale travel, "collecting points," cruise dinners, events... you name it. But somehow when it comes to their own TIS USUI counterparts? Layoffs.

Some people got told their roles "weren't sustainable." Weren't sustainable, but the boat outings were?
Make it make sense...........
If there's money for unlimited daily fine dining and over spend, there is money to keep people employed. Let's stop pretending this is about resources. It's about priorities. And right now, the people actually doing the work are not the priority.
You don't get to blow money left and right and then turn around and lay people off like it's a budget issue. That's not leadership. That's a failure of judgment, plain and simple. Shame on your leadership.
To everyone who got impacted, this is not on you. This says nothing about your worth or your work. You deserved so much better than this.
#Layoffs #Accountability #WorkplaceCulture #Leadership