Leadership doesn’t want to be transparent because you wouldn’t like what they told you if they were transparent.
Mainly, that they are now not trying to manage a “comeback” as much as they are trying to manage “an orderly decline in Nike’s previously hegemonic industry position.”
Nike isn’t going away. But it is also no longer a growth company, and for several reasons I won’t get into here the company likely reached a plateau a few years ago. The market in which Nike was established and grew effectively no longer exists. Or at least, the old rules that allowed Nike to continuously succeed are no longer the rules.
As a result Nike needs to balance “doing what Nike has historically done” with the reality that the company still needs to significantly downsize. If you’re management, there’s no polite, nice, or pep-talk way to communicate that. So they don’t.
Like I said the reasons for Nike’s decline are multi-faceted and in some ways complex. Nonetheless the company IS now just trying to hang on to what it already has. Talk of a “comeback” is sort of what they have to say but make no mistake; leadership is not naive to broader market trends that disfavor any sort of tangible “comeback”.
My partner will sometimes put on some ugly clothes and ask me, “How do I look?” My partner likes those clothes. So I answer with “You look great!”, and leave it at that.
Should I instead be more transparent? Should I instead engage in “more honest communication”? Maybe. But will that improve matters? Or create a new problem neither of us needed?
One could argue Nike is being kind by not being fully transparent. I’m not claiming that would be a GOOD argument. Just an understandable argument. Because if Nike leadership was fully transparent about the current field of play and what it really means, my guess is that it 100% would not make people feel better.
An on point post, the OP is @20q+1ks86w36m.