The billionaire more than quadrupled his initial investment in Nike and now owns $1.4B in shares. This is an activist investor who is very vocally against DEI. Food for thought.
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One white man did something bad, ergo all white men are bad and the root of everything harmful. /s
I've since left the company. No idea if this is still the policy. But heregoes...
HR ONLY provides hiring managers with "diverse" resumes. The candidate must be from 1 of 3 ideal races. This isn't 'diverse' in an academic sense and fails to solve economic inequity because candidates that have the necessary credentials (for 95% of positions at Nike, remember how competitive it is to get hired here) come from a certain elevated background.
The problem for Nike starts when you take a look at how (un)diverse the applicant pool is. If you're rejecting 99 of 100 applicants based on the color of their skin you're not hiring the best & brightest. Even worse, HR has now created a culture that places doubt on the actually talented & diverse that we've managed to hire.
Its funny how people talk about DEI hires destroying Nike, but JD, white male, was the biggest mistake Nike made and had more to do with Nike's downturn than so called "DEI" hires and pronoun training. It just makes sense to at least attempt to make people from all walks of life, especially marginalized people, feel welcomed. But I guess your privilege won't allow you to be inconvenienced by taking 20 minutes of your day to learn how to treat people decently. But wait, my 50 years on this earth of being inconvenienced by privileged people who have never had to consider other people's feelings at all, was all fine.
Say what you want, but the whole ‘go woke, go broke’ meme really does seem to have some truth to it.
@1rlh+1vwYQwhK - How much time did you spend on the pronoun training? It was 5 minutes of a 20 minute workplace harassment training.
You must have been failing it repeatedly for days if you spent more time on that than on strategy this year. 😬
As said in prior posts, this means zilch unless Phil listens to him and wants to make changes. Silly to compare Nike's share ownership structure with that of DIS and MSFT. Disney and Gates families have very little influence over those companies.
So Ackman walks into the board room “he, I bought this stake so I can reverse the DEI policies”. Seriously???. “He, I bought this stake, what’s the plan for China?” “Show me the 3 year innovation roadmap”. “Why, with maybe the exception of TC, is the board still here? Let’s revamp the board”. “Sell Converse”. It will be fun to watch.
DEI isn’t “the” big problem with Nike but it is “a” problem. I’m not sure why some of you seem to think it’s either Nike’s biggest problem or not a problem at all.
The ironic truth is that I never saw any racial animosity at Nike until DEI became a thing. When I and others started seeing people either get hired or receive unwarranted promotions due to having the “correct” physical characteristics, it understandably rubbed us the wrong way. You don’t correct historical wrongs by repeating the wrong but just on the other side. Simply put NO ONE’s gender, ethnicity, race, or other physical characteristic should play any role in their career prospects. This is not a radical idea. On the contrary it’s actually the real vision of civil rights activists: NO ONE should be treated different because of an accident of birth.
Thankfully the DEI tide is slowly turning and companies are starting to reevaluate whether they took the pendulum too far in the other direction.
I’m not OP. I was replying to simply clarify that activist investors don’t need to own a majority of shares to have influence.
@2sll+1vwYQwhK So what’s your point here? Predicting the future? Fear mongering? How is this helpful to speculate on and how does this move us forward?
Nike clearly has a lot of issues and DEI isn’t even close to the biggest issue.
Ackman’s stake in Nike has quintupled to 1.5%, not 0.25%. That’s significant for an activist investor like him.
PK and his family control nearly all Class A shares, but Ackman doesn’t need control to make an impact. Activists like him use their stake to rally other shareholders and push for changes through public pressure, lobbying, or proxy battles. Look at Nelson Peltz at Disney or ValueAct at Microsoft. With 1.5%, it’s definitely enough for him to have a say.
He owns what, a quarter of a perfect/0.25% of Nike now, and PK and family owns over 20%? Not exactly a “big stake”.
You also have to look at class of shares. More than 97% of Class A shares are still controlled by PK.
Your Math ain’t mathin .
@1lwg+1vwYQwhK seems like you don’t know much about how Bill Ackman invests. We don’t know exactly what he’s thinking with Nike, but one thing’s for sure… he always shakes things up at companies where he buys a big stake. That’s how he makes his money.
He is a billionaire who believes that the stock will bounce back and he will make more money if it does. All this activist investor BS is hopium for the sheep. DEI is definitely Nike's problem because Nike is filled with a diverse group of unqualified and unskilled white people who are just bench-warmers.
P.S. The last comment was willfully meant to highlight that every time someone uses DEI as the convenient scapegoat for a company's downturn, he/she is deflecting the blame away from the C-suite leadership and Board of Directors who happen to be mostly white.
You know we’re sc--wed when we spend more time in “pronoun training” vs “how can we be better/more innovative as a company training”. Newsflash: no on gives a s!it about your pronouns!
@1pnh+1vwYQwhK unpopular opinion but 100% correct
@1mwp+1vwYQwhK 🤣 💯
Don’t bet on it. DEI is not a real issue at Nike. Ungrateful unskilled employees are.
Point is, Nothing goes without PKs vote, Akeman won’t have massive sway either way.
@1pnh so true
Ackman believes that eliminating DEI from the company's mandate will allow NKE to finally unload all the dead weight diversity quota hires, and he's 100% right. The only problem is DEI caused all non-diversity quota hires with actual talent to bail on what was clearly becoming a sh!thole company.
Believe what you want.., most while Ackman has a history of pushing for changes big and small at companies where he invests, analysts say his activism might be less effective at Nike, where the board is dominated by one man, company founder Phil Knight
He doesn’t just buy stocks at a low price - he acquires significant ownership in companies that have lost direction and pushes them to make meaningful changes. This approach is called ‘activist investing.’ Look up the term and his past investments.
Has nothing to do with his values and everything to do with how far down stock is and his confidence in it bouncing back.