Thread regarding Nike Inc. layoffs

Hahaha. This thread is no doubt making Nike HR and Comms sweat hard.

This story is a gold mine with plenty of angles to cover.

Hi Lily, here is another angle for your article or possibly a new one. Nike isn't the only company with a large Oregon/Portland presence that has gone from having what seems like an insurmountable lead in their industry and then falling to be an industry has been. Intel has similar roots in the NW even though it is based out of California. Hillsboro has been Intel's largest single site since the 90s and was responsible developing manufacturing technologies as well as product designs. Both companies gave up their industry leads through arrogance and poor management decisions. While each of the companies are still viable businesses they will never return to their former greatness. The rise and fall of these two giants is eerily similar. Both of these companies recruited and imported tens of thousands of people into the greater Portland area over the years. Maybe this polluted the Portland/NW culture that made these companies successful when they started or maybe it is in the water... Looking forward to reading your article.

HR is going to cry and try to hide the truth. Then they are going get pushed out.

Agree, this is accountability that we need. Next is a union

I am connecting with her next week. This is the accountability

She’s legit, I spoke with her.

Me either. No reason to be afraid. I've emailed you.

Thank you.

I am not scared of Nike. I emailed you.

Looking forward to connect AB

@OP

Hi Lily, not DM’ing you, but reporters keep filing the lagging indicator (headcount) and skipping the leading one (culture).

The through-line: leadership behavior → people stop raising hard truths → decisions slow and politicize → commercial results slip → then RIFs look “strategic.” Employee relations sits in the middle: whether investigations go anywhere, whether HR protects employees or executives, whether “performance” exits follow complaints.

That mechanism runs across Nike Inc., not just Oregon. It’s visible where the business was already in trouble: struggling units show the same ER and fear patterns, just with faster revenue collapse beforehand.

Ex-employees who can walk you through dates and org changes on background are the story; one-line rants on this site aren’t.

@bn Of course it’s not an “objective view,” you id--t. It’s @bj+1m4958qfh giving their subjective opinion and making an argument.

Then you immediately offer your own subjective diagnosis as if it were objective fact: “The problem was simply their shift to digital… That’s it.”

And your genius solution? “They should have allocated more product to wholesale partners and not scaled back shelf presence.”

That’s your opinion, not an objective fact. Your ignorance of the shoe business is self-evident.

Explain why you hate the greater Portland and Multnomah County area.

Hi Lily, On a 2020 Nike corporate All Hands meeting (it was recorded and transcribed), John Donahoe publicly and brazenly proclaimed to employees the VP % ratio of minorities they had a goal of hitting. Highly illegal, and just before a mass layoff at that. Nike and Donohoe should be sued for discrimination. Please obtain a copy of this recorded all hands meeting for your story/coverage of this leader and the implicit leadership around him. It was absolutely disgraceful and might have been the beginning of the end for Nike.

In 2019 Nike HR identified that we were 5-10 years from a retirement cliff of experienced leaders who had been with the company for ~30 years. We identified a number of up-and-coming leaders who were being groomed to backfill these leaders. Due to the location of Nike in Oregon, the experienced leaders and the backfill candidates were mostly all white dudes. Donahoe comes in with his Stanford Business School strategy of firing 15% per year, combined with aggressive diversity targets and we fire all the experienced leaders and the backfill candidates. Easy as that.

@bq at least clean up the em dashes. Sloppy stuff

I don't much care for Nike, but @Bloomberg, you're a bunch of sc-mbag vultures. It's pathetic watching you scrape along the floor, begging for crumbs like the spineless trash you are. Gross.

@bn, the fact that you say you hate Portland and Multnomah County, while also suggesting that Nike’s focus on digital assets or reducing wholesale business (while growing DTC and Nike's Retail business) as the only reason for the company’s current situation, makes it pretty clear that you know very little about the business - and even less about the community that built it. I wonder where you live.

People should read the history, and learn something! It was AIR JORDAN (and Strasser was the one who got him).

Knight and Strasser were Oregon boys. Nike grew out of a distinctly Pacific Northwest culture - one that was unconventional, competitive, irreverent, and deeply connected to this place.

What exists today is something very different. In my view, Nike lost touch with much of the culture and identity that made it special in the first place. Call it “Go Woke, Go Broke” if you want—the larger point is that when a company abandons the culture, consumer connection, and product obsession that built its brand, there are consequences.

’Nuff said.

@bj Let’s not leave out that MAGA and Trump ruined this great country, our US economy, and the World hates American Brands. Only part of the story, but let’s not just tell your extremely one sided and ill informed opinion.

@bj I hate portland but this is not an objective view. All companies have a cultish ideological capture. That was not Nikes problem. The problem was simply their shift to digital against all evidence it was a sound decision. That’s it. They should have allocated more product to wholesale partners and not scaled back shelf presence.

I hate multnomah county.

RIP Rob. And, we have a lot of thanks for Sonny Vaccaro too. Most of my co-workers have no idea who these giants were. I don't blame Phil for erasing them - he showed everyone that there is one Shoe Dog.

@bj Yes. It was always Strasser. When they got Jordan it was a wrap. Unfortunately Strasser died very young in 1993 at 46 years old. And the urban b-ball trend is now dead.

https://www.pdxmonthly.com/news-and-city-life/2016/06/meet-the-man-who-reinvented-nike-seduced-adidas-and-helped-make-portland-the-sports-gear-capital-of-the-world

Hey Lily — there’s a much bigger story behind what has happened to Nike: how decades of increasingly one-party political dominance in Portland and Oregon coincided with an increasingly homogeneous corporate culture at Nike.

Nike and Portland are remarkably similar stories. Both became enormously successful and then increasingly insular institutions where progressive ideas were rarely challenged internally, good intentions too often substituted for accountability, and questioning the prevailing consensus could carry consequences.

The same dynamics that contributed to Portland’s struggles — ideological conformity, bureaucracy, weak accountability and an unwillingness to acknowledge when well-intentioned policies weren’t producing the intended results — took hold inside Nike.

Donahoe didn’t create that culture; he inherited it and exposed its weaknesses. And two years into Elliott Hill’s return, the underlying problems have not been addressed. Elliott doesn't have the stomach to lead.

The Nike/Portland connection is an important and largely untold part of this story. What happened in both places is a cautionary tale about what happens when one worldview becomes so dominant that institutions lose the internal tension necessary to challenge bad ideas.

The people driving these changes were often well-meaning. They believed they were building something more equitable, compassionate and socially responsible. But good intentions can become extraordinarily destructive when they're coupled with political or institutional power and insulated from meaningful dissent or accountability.

And that is where Phil Knight belongs in the story. He built an extraordinary company in the place where he grew up, but then watched as the culture of both Nike and Oregon changed around him. Rather than using his enormous influence to force a reckoning inside the company he created, he largely allowed it to happen.

The result is striking: the company and the city that once represented so much of Oregon’s ambition and creativity have spent years struggling with problems that share some of the same cultural roots.

That’s the story which is still largely untold.

Can you write about how Oompa Loompa VA made Nike Indian

She’s legit and really nice.

Still doing research, but the email adress looks legit.

@af doesn’t seem to be HR. She’s on LinkedIn with the same request.

Nice try HR