I’ve been browsing this site for almost a year now, and I’ve probably read most posts and replies during that time. This might be the best post I’ve seen. Everyone should read it.
“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.”