In 2020, JD laid off about 500 to 700 director or vp level positions, depending source of prints.
I always wondered that laying off that many middle to leadership position cannot be good for company.
Since many of you are witness of that layoff and afterwards.
Did 2020 layoff affected company in positive way? no impact or affected negative way?
Can anyone comment for people that is not in Beverton campus?
And also about 2024 Layoffs that said 92% of the layoffs were leadership roles.
JD threw Nike down the hill. Now it's hill's time.
How are engagement scores not considered in layoffs? Managers with low scores should be RIFd.
The problem isn’t just the people who they laid off, it’s equally who they didn’t - leaders with low retention and repeated rock bottom engagement results. The ones who have destroyed their team’s efficiency and morale (ex. AP)
I liken Phil Knight to King Lear. Like the tragic king of Shakespeare's play, he had unreal success but made one decision that ruined the whole thing.
I was little surprised that Nike hired JD who had absolutely no fashion experience as CEO. But Barron's later revealed that it was Phil who pushed for JD as CEO and liked him since he was at Bain & Co.
That is where King Lear moment comes in.
Phil might see end of his kingdom and company in his lifetime like Lear.
I have been following JD since he was hired as CEO of ebay. I was a big seller in that platform back then. Everybody saw that Amazon freight train was coming but JD was occupied with his head buried in Paypal and did nothing to slow down Amazon.
If anything, he made things difficult for sellers accusing them selling fake items etc.
That is when many sellers defected to amazon and never came back. No seller means no Buyer, it is a symbiotic relationship. And ebay never recovered.
Day after he lost proxy battle with Carl Icahn for Paypal, he got his golden parachute and resigned from ebay. Imagine your football coach quitting on 4th quarter when you are behind or your daddy walking away from family when things got tough.
That is how many felt. The man has no leadership quality nor he was brilliant.
JD will go down as a person who ruined 2 TWO fortune 500 company to the toilet.
If Phil wanted to hire someone to ruin his company, he could not have picked anyone better than JD.
To say that Nike will go bankrupt soon will be outrageous but growing 30 percent a year like before and hit 75 billion or 100 billion in sale in foreseeable future will be a stretch.
They have to stop bleeding in sales but that would be difficult without China, weak economy in far east, weak economy in Europe and slow sale in NA.
First thing that EH stop doing is wholesale layoffs that drains talents, morale and
loyalty.
This is Winter of Discontent for our old king.
The death spiral definitely started with the 2020 layoffs.
Laying off our best Brand marketing & brand design leaders ki-led the mojo for the ones that were left to pick up the slack.
JD was tone deaf and picked off the culture leaders of the brand.
Those left behind- they QUIT and got premium roles at other brands or started their own.
Those that were laid off- same thing! Better roles at other premium brands. Donahoe & MM sc--wed the pooch, we never recovered our innovative design momentum. Painful and we are still in the dust
In 2020, MM had sights set on non-DEI leaders. She crushed them. JD getting the blame a lot here, but MM pushed for quotas hard. Look and love like her, golden. Look and love like her predecessor? You’re out. One of the most influential and worst executive leaders NKE has ever had. She didn’t “control” JD like a puppet, but the policies she helped push and put in place were significant and still holding us back today. She didn’t influence marketing and business decisions directly, but she helped hire and elevate the unqualified leaders that chopped our market cap in half. MM pocketed millions and cost NKE billions .
Another state school marketing grad racist cult member thinking they’re okay. You’re only okay for now because you’re too milquetoast to register on EH’s consultant ki-l lists yet. Give it another six months before they find out you exist.
@cn This is in fact what the proponents of DEI think a world of “equality” looks like, SMH
Except MJ wasn’t drafted specifically for his skin color or gender… he was drafted because he was tall, athletic, and above all, exceptionally gifted at basketball! Now, if the NBA added a policy for short Asian women to be added to each teams roster, you might have a point … but they don’t, do they?
Keep bi--hing about “DEI hires,” you racist re----k d-mbasses. NKE only exists today because of a “DEI hire” - Michael Jordan, a black man. Without him it’s nothing.
See if PK is still interested in your or-l pleasuring services, cult drone.
@c5 Nah, I was referring to the best direct manager I’ve had, and a handful of other really great leaders who supported and advocated for their people and stood up against the B.S.
"People-first leaders"
Found the cult member.
Every one of those old leaders you worship would gladly crush your throat with their AF1s and watch the life drain from you if it got them another stock grant. Guys like MP, I assume you're referring to. He's already sold $40M+ in stock grants this year. In six months. Nice for him while the company falls apart.
Nike’s downfall started long time ago, under the MP era. Egoistic leadership, not able to get their head out of their a** and Clown FTEs following orders.
This company preys on the weakest in the society….for manufacturing their sh-t, for selling their sh-t. Using so called leaders (athletes and artists) preying on their own.
The genius plan was:
Yeah… shocker. It didn’t work.
JD is a convenient scapegoat for all of the cultists who wish it was still 2005, but the uncomfortable reality is that the brand and company started its downward spiral well before Jay-Doh took the reigns. For example, Nike completely dropped and ignored the running market, especially the exploding trail running market, ceding it to On, Hoka, Salomon, and Altra. Billions in revenue left on the table right there. By 2020 it was a shell of its former glory, focused mainly on pushing yet another boring colorway of the Dunk, and slapping the swoosh on ugly sweatshirts that invariably ended up on a clearance rack at an outlet.
JD correctly recognized that falling revenues and product quality coupled with a bloated, directionless structure focused on everything except the actual product was a recipe for eventual disaster. He was correct in noting that better manufacturers don't run their businesses and supply chains solely using MS Excel and Powerpoint, and pushed back on the corrosive "not made here" and "that's not how Nike does it" attitudes endemic to those inside the berm.
He may have been the hated executioner, but what exactly has EH done that differs in any substantive way from JD's plan? Putting on a smile and bringing a jocular "I like sneakers" attitude while laying off yet more people and demoralizing the survivors? Begging Big 5 for more shelf space? OK, maybe that, but isn't that a little late and a dollar short by now?
@ad, why do people here complain about the Oregonian? The media has helped avg employees and helped put pressure where needed
Nike is on the death spiral, old tired brand slapped on garbage products. Nobody under 40 sees Nike as a premium cool brand anymore. Way to go JD your pound of flesh & incompetence destroyed Nike, would love to see that piece of shi* on the street someday.
This round of layoffs, piled on the 2024 layoffs, stacked on the 2020 layoffs is a culture kiss of death. The fatigue, the lack of safety, the request to just keep going whrn direction is unclear and layoffs choices have made no sense every time will all take years to overcome.
A tragic waste letting consultants and then those who don't know the work or workers make the decisions. So unnecessary.
Why does no one talk about NDDC? It’s a fake function that has no sharp point / value add to a specific discipline?
Bunch of LARPs who pretend to be product managers, designers, marketers, analysts, operators, etc…
The 2020 layoffs should have been postponed. That restructure and corresponding process shifts explicitly asked teams to work together “organically,” when we were all trying to keep things together over Zoom. The process changes and org changes were not well coordinated, leaving important bodies of work with no place to land, eventually getting picked back up by teams under-resourced to do so.
The impacts were so negative that within a year, work was underway to attempt undoing some of the damage. Some of the most inspiring, people-first leaders I’ve ever worked with were let go in that layoff, only to have their positions resurrected with new leaders who were cool kids, popular in VP circles and great at managing up, but uninterested in the well-being of their teams, and ill-equipped to truly lead the business. And we all know the strategy behind that reorg failed massively.
I remember around early 2023, JD shared a set of “behavior shifts” in an all hands. One of them was along the lines of FROM: A culture of fear TO: A culture of caring and pride.” My team already operated from caring and pride. The chaotic environment that JD presided over post-2020, with never-ending org shifts and mishandled change, caused the whole culture to curdle into a swamp of fear. Even in that ugly period anticipating the layoffs last Spring, my team at least had a leader who truly cared, and we continued to deliver our best and show up for each other despite the fear. So of course our leader who helped us all get through that period was laid off. Since then, the fear and chaos has not stopped.
My POV.
In 2020 we reduced areas that we shouldn’t have, like product teams.
We also reduced the amount of VPS because there were too many opinions and directions. Got better for a year or two and it was noticeable, but suddenly we again had a lot VPs, too many leaders want to grow their career by hoarding headcount and having senior roles reporting to them. It looks better to have 2vps reporting to you than having 6 specialist, but this leaves with a lot of talkers and few doers.
Apologies if this didn’t make justice. I think 2020 there was more performance review involved, I personally didn’t see a lot of high performers go like last 12 months.
I also think 2020 there was more middle leaders involved, which is why they probably kept best performers and critical roles, versus 2024 when it seem to be only super senior global folks and the consultants, impacting good people and roles that left big gaps.
This is my lowly person opinion having seen both cases.
Layoffs might’ve been fine if they brought in the right people after. But nope, we promoted a bunch of sh-t leaders. Maybe they were great as individual contributors, but as leaders? Total garbage. No direction, no vision, no coordination, just vibes.
This feels super Oregonian to me
I've yet to see a director worth their job. Buh bye
Well - i worked with a lot of folks that were laid off (director and above) and most of them had jobs that were completely unnecessary since it overlaped with what others were already doing and after they were gone it made things a lot more efficient since you didn’t have all these additional layers of approvals, discussions etc. I also know many directors who were laid off that left major gaps in work so they made some really smart moves even though i dont wish layoffs on anyone and they made some pretty d-mb moves.