I'm just wondering whether removing the entire ELT and bringing in a competent team could still help right the course of Nike, or if we have already reached the point where the damage is so deep and the brand so compromised that no amount of fixing would make a difference.
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Nike's problems go beyond internal politics and moribund management. Nike has a brand problem. We are continually in the news for all the wrong reasons, with stories that alienate large swaths of potential customers. For those living "in the bubble", I can tell you that funding chemical castration experiments on minors is not a popular stance with most of the public.
And changing market strategy to chase niche market customers who are not traditionally athletic-minded is not a winning strategy when you're the highest selling brand in the world. It diverts advertising money from your largest markets to target smaller markets. It's diminishing returns and unlikely to move the needle to higher sales.
It does not bode well for the future.
this is so based that even HR is not downvoting like usual here
'company should run like a sports team high performance, no dead weight, no politics just raw competence, emotion with a sprinkle of team spirit and fair play.'
Wow you have a way with words! Loved your entire post. Spot on and great writing. If Nike goes belly up, you definitely have a career in writing and communications.
I really needed to read these comments today. It’s reassuring to know there are still people out there who actually get what Nike is supposed to be.
The whole CDO and CDA reshuffle triggered a major leadership shakeup, and a lot of the most experienced, culture-defining people were pushed out. Now it feels like the place is packed with “smart” people who focus more on managing up, playing it safe, and saying yes to leadership than actually doing what’s right for the brand. Dissent isn’t welcome. Just follow the script, even if the idea is flawed or the long-term risks are obvious. It’s all about staying in your boss’s good graces to fast-track that next promotion. Doing what’s right for Nike? Not a priority.
I know this won’t be a popular take, but I also don’t think prioritizing women’s growth above all else has been the best strategy. Nike used to be about performance, edge, and that win-at-all-costs mindset. It didn’t matter who you were. What mattered was that you brought the fire. Now the messaging and talent management leans so hard into inclusivity and appealing to women that the brand feels… softer, more corporate, more political. The edge is gone. The sooner Nike refocuses on that elite, no-compromise, rebellious mentality, the better. That’s what made the Swoosh cool.
Nike was never supposed to work. It was a chaotic mess from the start but somehow, it caught fire. Then it got too big to hold onto the very thing that made it matter in the first place:
Culture.
PK built his Nike as an act of rebellion. He was done with the generic corporate BS, and he surrounded himself with loudmouths, misfits, and anti-authority weirdos who made magic happen by refusing to play nice. They argued, they clashed, sometimes fists flew but out of that chaos came a brand that felt raw, real, and uniquely American.
While the competition was busy polishing their image, Nike was selling something primal:
Freedom and authenticity
Rebellion
andthen? It scaled. It sold out its soul. It became the same bloated, soulless machine it once set out to destroy.
Let’s be honest young PK wouldn’t last a week as a new hire in today’s Nike. He’d get chewed up by HR, written up for “tone,” and left in anger.
Leadership swaps won’t fix this. It’s lipstick on a corpse. Years of political a-s-kissing, empire-building, and backdoor promotions have bled this place dry of the edge and talent it desperately needs.
JD tried to run Nike like a fintech startup, data-obsessed, process-perfect, efficient, sterile. That might fly at eBay, Bain, or ServiceNow. But Nike? Nike was never supposed to be safe.
The culture’s gone. It’s not sleeping. It’s not in a coma. It’s dead. HR ki-led it. Death by a thousand bad hires, cover-your-a-s policies, tolerated discrimination, retaliatory witch hunts, nepotism, and a DEI strategy that was performative at best, cynical at worst that enabled the worst kind of diverse talent (white women) to be elevated to roles that they do not deserve.
To anyone in EHs orbit reading this place, scrap the entire HR department. Build a culture org instead. One with teeth. One that can set fire to the rot and rebuild something worth bleeding for.
Go read what Netflix did when they hit their own inflection point:
https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr
Don’t copy them. You should’ve been the ones to pioneer this jees. You’re Nike, for god’s sake. You should’ve been the first to say that a company should run like a sports team high performance, no dead weight, no politics just raw competence, emotion with a sprinkle of team spirit and fair play.
Build a bold culture strategy. Make it fierce. Pitch it like a product. Sell it to the BoD. Sell it to shareholders. Own it. And most importantly:
Do. Not. Flinch.
Or? Keep sleepwalking into irrelevance. Kodak and Nokia still exist—barely—because they had patents to pawn off to cr-p by through b2b sales. Nike won’t even have that when the lights go out.
And to the HR bloodhound reading this trying to trace the scent back to me?
Eat sh-t.
People like me are the reason why you are still get paid for doing a horrible job at reigning in sh-t leaders. Which is also funny, ultimately you people will end up laying off yourselves just because you collectively turned a blind eye and enabled horrible leaders.
@bz+1jvnynzz9
Exactly this. Great summary.
You'd have to have a complete overhaul. It's not just ELT. You need to get rid of the incompetent and ignorant middle management (Directors all the way to Sr. VPs) that does nothing but create chaos, manage up, and jump on the latest shiny object train to make themselves look good instead of doing the right thing for the company - which is to do the unglamorous work (that is typically in the form of cleaning up the mess from all the failed shiny object initiatives or addressing tech debt that no one could get to because of said shiny object initiatives).
No one who has decision rights wants to do the actual work. These "leaders" want the title and salary and none of the responsibility that comes with it. Meanwhile, all the people in the trenches doing the work have to spend their time getting yanked around with no clear direction or being forced to follow a directive that defies all common sense logic. And ratio of the number of people just using smoke and mirrors to either take credit or pretend they're contributing to the number of people doing the work is getting a LOT higher.
Factor this in with the fact that not all pertinent information makes it to the people who make decisions (got to love that management filter) so people are making, at best, uninformed decisions or, at worst, completely id--tic and self-sabotaging choices. We no longer have a culture where everyone can speak up. We have a culture of fear that pits people against each other, smothers innovative thinking and ideas, and short-circuits any dissent a subject matter expert may have when it comes to calling out risks. It's not about doing the right thing, it just about "following orders."
Nike's a big company, but even a giant company can only take so many bad decisions at this magnitude before it just ends up plateauing as a best-case scenario and then slowly withers away into irrelevancy.
The damage is done and it started in 2017.
I went on vacation last year and shopped a couple of cities and didn’t see one swoosh. It was like Nike didn’t even exist. Also the past two years, I’ve seen random posts of people asking for recommendations of a good sneaker and I read the comments. Not one comment mentioned a Nike. Not one. Looked up the top running shoe and Nike wasn’t even mentioned.
I’m not saying they can never bounce back as I’ve seen slumps before but this is very, very different. Direct to Consumer was the worst decision ever made and bouncing back from that is going to take years. I don’t think we will ever be where we were again. There’s too many competitors now. You add in letting go all the main people at Nike and losing its culture, it’s an almost a total rebuild at this point. In the end though, I will hopefully be here because I would like to see it rise again.
when answering this question, remember that phil knight gave us jd and fought for jd to stay as long as he did
Nike is in a gulley. Incompetent leadership have cleared the ranks of anyone threatening. It would be best to hire from within but the talent is largely gone. But hiring from outside is an even worse option. That has led to us hiring trend followers that give away hundreds of millions to snakeoil salesmen, AI, S4 ‘upgrade’, blockchain. The list goes on.
Who would we bring in, or promote within? I don't have many names in the lower levels. There is no names in the wings, same was happening in MP time. We've had show boaters not innovation drivers.