Reading this board makes me realize that Nike either attracts awful people or turns good people into bad ones. It's hard to find so much hate in one place on so many bases as here.
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I have a perfect strategy that requires 20 headcount, 5m budget and 10 dependencies without a legit business case or ROI model.
I currently have 2 headcount but my C level loves me.
I get 4 additional headcount and 1m budget in AOP. I spend 500k on events, offsites etc.
My team is composed of 2 SDs, 2 directors and a 2 leads
None of the dependencies are funded in AOP.
I bullsh-t my way in next AOP to get 2 more headcount (2 principals) and 3 million additional budget.
I blow 2 million this time on useless cr-p. My team works on decks the entire year without delivering anything.
This time I blow 3 million on consultants for a promised board seat. they also produce useless work.
I create a fancy CV as a strategic program leader managing a giant team with 10mil budget and working on a porfolio of 5 trillion$
The C level that loves me secures me a promotion.
My team gets chopped in the reorg and 10 million goes down the drain.
Useless sh-t in my team blame me for being incompetent here and speak about maxims and sh-t without realizing they were useful id--ts all along.
now, multiply this by x hundred and you have the reason why the company is sinking lol
Hahahaha.
Classic Nike “leadership”: blame the minions for not executing the brilliant strategy developed by the amazing senior leadership team.
@ct Hopefully some of what we are announcing at investor day will show some of the steps we are putting in place to work on these deeper issues. It's not like leadership isn't aware, it's just a question of how well we end up executing on these changes.
@OP - The real question isn't whether people are expressing anger or frustration. It's whether what they're saying is true.
Nike has developed a culture that too often rewards the wrong behaviors, attracts the wrong people, and ultimately compromises even those who arrive with the best intentions.
There are still talented, principled employees inside Nike who genuinely want to contribute. They believe in teamwork, respect strong leadership, support their colleagues, care about their communities, and want to create something meaningful. But many eventually discover that the system isn't designed to reward those qualities. It's designed to preserve itself.
That's the deeper institutional failure.
EH and the SLT undoubtedly recognize that the problems extend well beneath the surface. Addressing them would require genuine change leadership, accountability, difficult personnel decisions, and the courage to dismantle entrenched behaviors. Instead, leadership appears more comfortable managing through the rearview mirror, hoping that nostalgia, brand equity, and incremental adjustments will somehow substitute for cultural transformation.
They won't.
The culture has become self-perpetuating. The institution protects the very behaviors that undermine it, while the people most capable of making it better are too often marginalized or driven away.
You wrote: "It's hard to find so much hate in one place on so many bases as here."
Perhaps. But dismissing widespread criticism as hatred is an awfully convenient way to avoid confronting why so many people, including those who once believed deeply in Nike, have reached remarkably similar conclusions.
The problem isn't that people stopped believing in Nike. It's that Nike stopped giving them reasons to believe.
And perhaps the greatest indictment of the current leadership is that an organization once synonymous with courage, innovation, and challenging convention now seems institutionally incapable of challenging itself.
The answer is both. Good people can only be around toxicity for so long before they either break or corrupt.
Agreed.
Whenever I've read posts written here by alleged Nike employees, 9 times out of 10, the vibe comes off as being really negative, pushy/frenzied, and borderline evil.
It's like individually and collectively, they're all finally coming to the realization that everything they thought was cool or worth striving for in life, actually isn't.
LULZ
That's the price you pay for being easily misguided, self-centered, prideful and phony.
Eventually you're left with nothing much more than dust.
Mine breeds a special type of hate turning good > bad. They want to see the iconic brand become non iconic and just a textbook paragraph of how not to run a businesses.
I love Nike as a kid but as an adult working here. Let it burn down and let private equity treat the break better.
To be fair, Nike has hired no small percentage of blatant social climbers, arrogant wunderkinds, Greek system je-ks, fiscal sociopaths, braindead college jocks, exhibitionists, deviants, d-bag hipsters, and fawning sycophants over the years.
Gut HR and then start hiring across all departments for competence and ideas instead of looks, fashion sense, and whatever passes for "cool" or "edgy" these days.
The lack of etiquette to the rules of successful engagement of a debate- example proven by @am
People disagreeing doesn't mean they hate each other. They just disagree. You have been programmed to say everything is hateful or racist. Were you always this judgemental? You can do self reflection too.