#strategy

I’ve been here long enough to notice how often the company seems to shift based on the latest trend. Some trends fade fast, while others stick around much longer, and I don’t think we always know which is which. I wish leadership would think further ahead instead of treating every new moment like the whole strategy.

Anyone remember how beneficial BCG' analysis was to Ford' meteoric rise to profitability in the past?
Not!
I just want to hear stories from the older crew.
On another note, does anyone remember their attempt at implementing a Matrix Management model?
Maybe if they understood the difference between producing a quality product and the stylish management trends of the month, Ford would be a great car company.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4601923-activist-jana-wants-fiserv-to-sell-more-assets-refresh-board---report

The reality is that if you want to survive in this bank, becoming a manager is often the safest path. Look at Indians, women, Indian women —they’re smart, strategic, and know how to play the corporate game.

Stop being naive. This is corporate life. If you end up with poor ratings and get pushed out, don’t expect the company to look out for you. Wake up and understand how the system works.

We lack vision and long term planning. We opt for layoffs because it's the easiest option to free up capital when our stock is going down the drain. We forget that the employees that we let go have context and knowledge domain expertise. By the time we realize, we're going to try and patch it up with rehiring but getting ramped up and onboarding takes time. At the end of it, we would have lost capital, opportunity cost and market share. I genuinely want to know who is driving our transformation and strategy? Are there not any business case studies we can look at? How many companies have successfully pivoted away from third-parties to DTC? Even Apple sells their products at other stores. How many companies have succeeded in GC? For a company of this caliber, I would have expected that we have some risk-based assessment when making these plans. I'm sure Nike would have its own Harvard business case study one day at this point.

@kp+1krea8g33 hits the nail on the head.

ConocoPhillips had extensive and profitable operations in Venezuela. With the country’s expressed interest that oil operators return will ConocoPhillips return and use its technical acumen with horizontal wells and frac technology to deliver exceptional results in Venezuela?

FDS seems to want to give the impression that they’re investing in real-time. What’s the strategic thought process there, seen the fact that it requires substantial investment to set up. It seems an odd choice when you’re already struggling.

Dan here. Announcing our 2026 strategy: We’re looking to globally engage end to end catalyst for change by intrinsically productizing cross-cultural channels and competently expediting seamless alignments. Artificial Intelligence. We want to rapidly create advanced dynamic customer experiences and compellingly scale user centric stories. Artificial intelligence. We’re going to be uniquely targeting low risk, yet high yield web readiness. Our exploratory research points to deconstructive relative contingencies, and now is the time to revamp and reboot our holistic asset projections, with our interactive 3rd generation paradigm shifts. Artificial intelligence. I’m sure we can make a window here to really discuss with our customers holistic, monitored innovations. Artificial intelligence.
And now’s the time to chart this opportunity and take the company forward. By now, you should be clear on the vision and purpose of the business. With this strategy and artificial intelligence, we will increase our targets 10x. Play to win. Artificial intelligence. All gas, no brakes. Artificial intelligence. Go team. AI.

I genuinely want to understand what's going on with CDO. She regularly brings sales people to speak at her town halls, the CEO directs AI roadmap questions to her instead of the product engineering leader, and right before the new CEO takes over she picks up yet another business unit. She came in as a operations leader, but now it feels like every strategically important BU reports into her.
At what point do we stop viewing this as a series of unrelated decisions and start seeing it as a deliberate concentration of leadership? Is the company effectively positioning her as the executive responsible for product, strategy, operations, and business execution all at once?
It's starting to look less like a traditional functional leader and more like someone accumulating power across the company, leading to a centralized executive structure similar to what existed under Mark's leadership, where significant influence and decision-making authority was concentrated under a single leader.
Time will tell whether this is the right approach. But given the company's experience with one man leadership, it's fair to question whether we're heading down a familiar path.

So are we all just going to nod along, or is somebody going to ask the obvious questions like, "What's the strategy again?" and "When exactly are we planning to factor human capital into it?"

PEP stock is sitting right in the middle of 2021's range - well below 2021's year-end close of ~$159 - Can doomed PepsiCo turn things around? How much Ramon has left in the role? Is this a real business value of our Strategy & Transformation over the last 5 years?

I plan to resign soon and hope to leave on the same day or the following day. Although I know I am not legally required to provide two weeks notice, I would like to do so as a courtesy. Is there a specific phrase that could facilitate being sent home immediately upon offering two weeks' notice? For instance, would mentioning that I am joining a competitor work? I am looking for a dignified and graceful path to fulfill both objectives, ensuring no bridges are burned and no sour grapes.

‘On May 26, 2026, Synopsys entered into a cooperation agreement with activist investor Elliott Investment Management that includes appointing Elliott managing partner Jesse Cohn as an independent director, effective June 1, 2026, expanding the board to 11 members.’

The vultures have arrived, surely things will get better now.

I don’t understand why we own ships and have such a large maritime presence/teams? Seems like a ripe area for ENGINE or simply rent ships from someone else. I can’t imagine we operate ships less expensive than the open market!

A friend of mine just got and email title "Strategy Change" from their Sr. Dir. (she is a GL 28) There are no invitees, it's a BCC: It's for 10AM CDT

https://www.ncrvoyix.com/newsroom/ncr-voyix-partners-with-u-s-bank-voyager-to-enable-fleet-card-acceptance-through-voyix-connect

"With Voyix Connect, the company is focused on simplifying payment enablement and supporting scalable integrations that help fuel retailers serve fleet customers efficiently."

This is the exact same playbook that Corpay had 15 years ago, when it was calling itself Fleetcor. And it worked! But someone should tell James Kelly and co. that the this is not an exit strategy will work for him or Voyix, because the payments industry is not what it was back when he was fleecing Global Payments. (For anyone not paying attention, the only two payment industry investments worth owning are Visa and Mastercard.) Better find another savior, James. And another playbook.

I have been at Open Text for a while, and I still can't tell if leadership has any kind of long term strategy or if we are all just responding to whatever crisis popped up most recently. My previous employer had plenty of problems, but at least they had a roadmap. Here, it feels like we are always reacting to something and never actually moving forward.

I’ve never worked at a company that changes course as much as this one, constantly chasing whichever way the wind happens to be blowing, whether politically or technologically. One minute it’s one strategy, the next it’s the complete opposite, like nobody even remembers what they were pushing six months ago.

Appian has changed over all senior leadership in the past two years. Except for the founders, of course.

In that time Appian has lost 1/3 of its value, while industry peers like PEGA and even the broader enterprise software ETF stocks (IGV) have gained 12-14%.

There’s nobody left to blame but yourselves. You aren’t good at your jobs. You can’t hire well. You can’t run a company well. You’re in over your heads but are too arrogant to see it. You’ve done your best to force alignment under a single old strategy… silencing any challenge to the boss. It’s not working.

Cash out. Let new people run this institution. Or continue to flush value down the drain,

Just a thought, maybe start chasing VAST/Weka/Qumulo before they eat all your NAS lunch?

During the Q2 Town Hall, a question was asked about our strategy to replace commodity IT roles with external partners.

The answer was that we're moving to more of a factory model of labor, and we're going to reduce the need to have specialized 3M knowledge.

Between that and the other half of the town hall being about how we need to scale up our use of AI, it's clear that they're looking to reduce headcount.

Nike just kept moving forward for last 40 years at 90 MPH.

the issue with Nike is that they are too big. They are in every aspect of sports business.

Akin to adidas in 70s, Nike is too many things!! License product, performance product, non performance product, accessories, skateboarding, boutique retros, winter sports, team sports on and on.
Perhaps the winning strategy is cut out category that does not help Nike and not doing a good job as we speak or there is no future in it.

adidas was in so many categories including perfumes LOL in the 1970s. And when Mr. adidas passed the whole thing came crumbling down and gave Nike a hole big enough drive train by. Let's learn from mistake, other people's mistake.

streamline your offerings!!!

if we are in same circle going on and on with demoralizing layoffs, same stupid upper managements who has no clue or leadership quality, no new design of revolutionary shoes and direction then Nike's clock is ticking as we speak.

EH and new admin has here past 18 months. And 3 to 6 months will put his admin past 2 years. If they cannot come out new strategy, design and campaign with Nike's resource then we can say that EH is not right person. Or bluntly put, a failed turnaround CEO.

IF EH admin. cannot come out with new direction any time soon then Nike will be in deep sh-t and time to look for someone new.

A Czech boutique investment fund called STARTEEPO Invest just bought 6.7 million shares of Xerox overnight.

They now own 5.15% of the company. That officially makes a group most people in Norwalk couldn't point to on a map the 4th largest shareholder of Xerox.

What is the move?

This isn’t a passive retirement fund quietly collecting dividends. STARTEEPO filed a Schedule 13D. In corporate speak, that means they plan on speaking up. They just bought a ticket to the party and now they (somehow) want to play the music.

Why now?

Because Xerox is currently on the operating table. The company’s stock price looks like a clearance rack. STARTEEPO looked at a business generating (well, trying to) half a billion dollars in free cash flow with a deeply depressed market value and thought (right or wrong): "It's free real estate".

For the Board of Directors: the cozy, quiet boardroom days are over. Carl Icahn left a vacuum when he exited, and the board probably thought they could restructure in peace. Enter František Bostl (STARTEEPO’s chief). The fund has already explicitly stated they want to "discuss board composition and strategy".

Translation: Pack your bags, some of you are getting evicted.

For Xerox Management: expect a massive fire under executive chairs to accelerate, tweak, even change the plans underway. If management can't turn a profit fast enough, this fund will happily find people who claim they can.

Xerox spent years trying to "reinvent" itself into a sleek, modern tech-and-services company; instead, they moved so slowly they became prime bait for a mid-sized European activist fund looking for a cheap, cash-generating target.

Now, Xerox either delivers on its promises immediately, or a fund from Prague is going to dictate the terms of its survival.

I hope they talk about the strategic layoffs that are to come for dfs folks

Unfortunately, if things are falling apart, the only way to turn a profit is to reduce headcount, and that is not sustainable. That works on Wall Street but not with a private company. You do not have investors to impress and no stock price to move , only members who have given more than most and deserve an experience that reflects that commitment.

While expanding membership eligibility may address volume concerns in the short term, it risks diluting the brand's unique identity and the trust that took decades to build.

It is increasingly difficult to demonstrate genuine care for members and their financial well-being when it becomes harder to differentiate from competitors. For the first time in my life, I am looking at other options.

Giving three billion dollars back to members sounds significant until you do the math. Spread uniformly across 14 million members, that is roughly $214 per member per year, while USAA simultaneously raised my home insurance premium by $1,000 with no prior claims. The net result is a loss of $786 before I even start counting.

Meanwhile, member attrition is often attributed to external factors, but internal dynamics are worth examining too. Until member service metrics are quantified and honestly compared with competitors, nothing changes, and the members who built this company will keep doing the math and ask, "What do I get in service to justify the extra cost ?" Right now, no one can answer that question. Pretty sad.

OP: @ke+1krm5bf35

Bumping this up for visibility.

1) Current leadership appears to believe staffing levels expanded too aggressively during prior growth periods. Recent layoffs and return-to-office initiatives are being framed around AI and efficiency concerns, although many employees do not view the reductions as directly connected to AI adoption.

2) A broader organizational issue remains unresolved despite restructuring efforts. Cost reduction initiatives continue to focus primarily on headcount reduction, particularly among contractors and remote employees, because those areas are easier to target operationally.

3) The challenge with this approach is that it may not address underlying performance issues. During the pandemic, the company significantly expanded access to national talent pools through remote hiring. If productivity metrics such as revenue per employee are declining despite broader access to highly qualified technical talent, the more important question may be why the organization has struggled to convert that talent into stronger business outcomes. Cost cutting can improve short-term financial optics, but it does not necessarily resolve structural execution problems.

4) Recent operational and strategic missteps suggest that many issues originate at higher management layers rather than within technical teams themselves. Even after workforce reductions, competitive challenges are likely to remain if leadership and organizational alignment issues are not addressed. Managing distributed teams effectively requires different operating models, and return-to-office mandates alone may not solve coordination or productivity concerns.

5) A stricter return-to-office policy may also reduce access to specialized talent that competitors continue to recruit nationally. “But Amazon is doing RTO also” is a failure of leadership to understand their competitor - Amazon has headquarters in every tech capital
of America. RTO does not affect their access to this pool of talent. An alternative strategy could have been deeper investment in fully remote corporate operations alongside stronger management accountability, clearer execution priorities, and improved organizational communication. Employees generally respond more positively to leadership engagement that produces measurable business outcomes rather than highly polished internal presentations with limited operational impact.

6) Many employees joined the company because it was perceived as having a stable culture and experienced workforce. However, there appears to be growing disconnect between leadership and technical staff. Compensation structures and long-term incentives that may have retained prior generations of employees do not necessarily create the same loyalty among newer talent pools. Leadership may benefit from evaluating how effectively the organization supports, retains, and empowers the employees responsible for maintaining and building critical systems. After this abject failure of management, it will take years to earn any trust at all.

Hello are the rumors true that Cisco is considering purchasing NetApp?

Billionaire Jim Goodnight Built An Analytics Profit Machine. AI Is Forcing Its Reinvention.

ByPhoebe Liu,Reporter.

May 15, 2026, 06:30am EDT
Updated May 15, 2026, 10:36am EDT

Unlike most of today’s biggest AI companies, SAS—once America’s largest privately held software company—has always operated slowly, steadily and profitably. Competition from all sides and an upcoming leadership transition will test the company’s longstanding strategy.

Clad in a plain white shirt, Jim Goodnight, billionaire cofounder and CEO of analytics firm SAS, eases into a leather rolling chair in a Cary, North Carolina, meeting room that looks less like a corner office than a geology exhibit. Behind him are glistening gemstones. A clump of pyrite. Purple amethysts. A fossilized dinosaur egg—a 69-million-year-old Hadrosaurus found in the Gobi Desert. A meteorite. “It’s not something you want to get hit in the head by,” he deadpans.

SAS is 50. Its CEO is 83. And like the rocks on display, both are artifacts from an earlier time long before fast-growing, deeply-unprofitable AI shook the world. SAS analyzes large troves of data from its customers in real-time to help them make better business decisions.

“People like to dismiss us by saying, ‘well, that’s legacy software,’” says Goodnight, a statistics pioneer who helped define what analytics would be long before AI became an umbrella term for everything. “But it’s not. We’ve been improving it for 50 years.”

Now SAS has to prove that endurance isn’t the same thing as stagnation.

The company generates just over $3 billion in annual revenue from most of the Fortune 100—including 90% of the financial services companies and all of the health and life sciences firms, plus most every government department. It has stayed private, profitable and debt free.

The AI bo-m is stress-testing that posture. OpenAI, Anthropic and a swarm of newer data-and-analytics rivals are selling the future as a clean break from “legacy” incumbents. Hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon are bundling data and AI into cloud contracts. Public-sector competition is heating up. And inside SAS, the next chapter is no longer theoretical: Goodnight has been hinting for years at a leadership transition, including an IPO as a possible succession plan. “When we go public, we need a different CEO,” he says. “You don’t want an old fa-t like me going around trying to sell stock.”

For a company designed to outlast market volatility, an uncomfortable question is suddenly immediate: can SAS modernize fast enough to matter in the AI era—without abandoning the slow, profitable discipline that made it an outlier in the first place? And can it do it without Goodnight?

Goodnight is confident it can; he’s seen this cycle before: the dot-com bo-m, when he considered outside money and passed; the dot-com bust, which rewarded that restraint; failed investments, including an airline; and the 2022 market correction which may have forced SAS to delay its IPO plans. He’s unmoved by the idea that generative AI has rewritten the laws of business.

AI is “just picking the next word in a sentence based on probability,” Goodnight says, correctly, of large language models. “How’s that going to solve anything?” He thinks SAS’ decades of customer trust and “domain expertise,” particularly in finance, healthcare and government services, will help it retain its edge.

Yet Goodnight will likely leave SAS’ future in the age of AI to younger hands.

In recent years, he has ceded more of the daily operating work to a new generation of executives, especially chief technology officer Bryan Harris and chief operating officer Gavin Day. Goodnight says he’s training Harris and Day to take over, though he hasn’t yet decided which of the two he would like as CEO.

The plan they are inheriting is simple to describe and hard to execute: persuade customers that SAS is not the same company it was 50 years ago, sell them on AI that helps them make smarter business decisions instead of merely sounding like it might, and mold the products to meet every customer where it’s needed.

“Incumbency is our biggest headwind,” says Harris.

That incumbency can be seen in SAS’ sprawling North Carolina headquarters. Its 300-acre tree-lined property boasts a day care and doctor’s office, fields dotted with employees playing intramural soccer at lunchtime, one of the state’s few five-star hotels and dozens of docile sheep grazing underneath the company’s solar panels. Turn left from Analytics Drive onto Research Drive and walk down Binary Way, and you’ll be blinded by a shining silver sculpture of the mathematical constant pi. The company’s campus, as they call it, reflects Goodnight’s vision and SAS’ academic origins.

SAS, short for Statistical Analysis System, was born out of North Carolina State University where Goodnight—then a young faculty member fresh out of a statistics PhD—teamed up with Tony Barr in the late 1960s to create software that sifted through and analyzed N.C. State’s agriculture department data. After the tool attracted more than 100 outside customers, Goodnight, Barr, John Sall and Jane Helwig incorporated SAS Institute in 1976. Barr sold his 40% stake for $340,000 in 1979. Helwig, who died in 2021, left and sold her stake a couple of years later. Goodnight now owns two-thirds of SAS, making him worth $13.3 billion and the richest man in North Carolina; Sall owns the remaining third, a $6.5 billion stake.

From the beginning, the company was bootstrapped. Back when SAS software was sold as physical books, all staff—including the founders—would form an assembly line every time a new shipment of books arrived to unload the books into an employee’s basement, a tradition cofounder Sall recalls as “book brigades.”

When the phones from prospective customers stopped ringing, Sall says Goodnight—in keeping with his upbringing as a hardware shopkeeper’s son—forced the cofounders to split up SAS’ potential customers into four (grouped alphabetically) and do the marketing themselves.

The approach worked. SAS was cash-flow positive from day one and generated $600 million (revenue) on an estimated $300 million in operating income by 1996, Forbes previously reported. SAS grew steadily, always prioritizing profitability over the fastest possible growth, Sall says.

Along the way, as evidenced by its campus, SAS built up a reputation as a company that takes care of its employees. Extensive benefits—beginning with free M&Ms (11,000 pounds per week, company-wide) then expanding to on-site doctors and a pharmacy, subsidized on-site childcare and a hair salon—weren’t common in the ’80s and ’90s. It was Goodnight's retention strategy: keep employees happy, keep turnover low and avoid the expensive churn of bonuses and dilutive stock options.

He used to joke that 95% of SAS’ assets, its people, drove out the front gate every night. After the pandemic and a remote-work policy, the line no longer works quite the same way. “I can’t even get ’em to come in,” he says.

Three years ago, Harris brought Goodnight an idea he loved. SAS could use computer vision to analyze video feeds from farms and determine how illnesses spread among chickens. The tool would help farmers keep their flocks healthy. Goodnight ki-led it with a single question: “How much do the cameras cost? The farmers would never pay for that.”

From the perspectives of both customers like those farmers and SAS itself, Goodnight has been laser-focused on cost and profitability for decades. He criticized AI innovation for being 90% wasted dollars, and repeatedly emphasized SAS’ need to get further into the green.

The CEO credits SAS’ durability to that desire to stay profitable, even at the expense of rapid growth. While Anthropic has reportedly grown revenue at roughly 10 times year over year for three years, SAS’ revenue rose 9% last quarter, roughly in line with Morningstar's prediction that software companies will grow at around 10% per year through 2029.

Goodnight thinks the AI companies’ pace “needs to slow down.” But that doesn’t mean SAS has ignored the market. In 2023, the company announced a three-year, $1 billion investment to develop AI-powered products. “It looked like we were going to spend that much anyway, so we announced it,” Goodnight says flatly.

The problem is that SAS is hardly alone here. It is up against rivals that bet on AI first, and more heavily. On the mega-cap side, there’s Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. Slightly newer entrants: Snowflake, Databricks, Alteryx and others. On the public sector side, Palantir has been siphoning U.S. government contracts from SAS and others. (Palantir’s U.S. government revenue grew by around double SAS’ total government revenue last year.)

SAS’ modus operandi is to meet customers wherever they are most anxious. The company works with nearly every major bank and the Big Four accounting firms, helping them use AI in ways that are secure, traceable and useful for fraud detection and financial risk. Healthcare, government, finance and other regulated industries are natural terrain for a company that has spent decades selling caution as a feature. Even there, the pressure is rising. Anthropic has been hiring industry experts and in May announced a suite of financial-services products that compete directly for the same customers.

“Everyone is in ‘coopetition,’” Harris says. Customers have asked SAS to integrate with its rivals, and the company has happily obliged.

That has made SAS uniquely malleable among its peers. If customers want their data analysis done in the cloud (Microsoft, Amazon, you name it), SAS can do it. If they want it done on premises, SAS will do that too—and in the programming language of your choice. That matters in hospitals and government agencies, especially when sensitive data and regulation collide here and abroad. In the executive building where customers are flown in for meetings, one screen recently read, “Welcome, U.A.E. Government Delegation.”

Harris thinks new revenue streams can come from digital twins—AI-rendered versions of complex physical facilities like manufacturing plants that are used to figure out a facility’s most efficient layout, predict safety incidents without putting workers at risk, and perform virtual testing—via a partnership with Epic Games. Paper products manufacturer Georgia Pacific, for example, uses them to test and train robots in its Savannah River Mill facility, keeping costs down and employees safe. Digital twins currently generate single-digit millions in revenue, but Harris believes the business can grow to $500 million within three or four years.

SAS is also experimenting with quantum computing for ultra-complex transactions, like in fraud detection for banks, that traditional computers can’t handle. Also in SAS’ plans: using data and AI to help sports teams. In December, SAS announced a partnership with Liverpool to use its products to market to the soccer team’s fans better. At SAS’ 50th anniversary conference, the company announced a smattering of new tools that incorporate AI agents.

“SAS has never met a problem they didn’t want to go after,” says IDC research director Kathy Lange, who previously worked at SAS and suggested that the company could benefit from more focus. “It’s a double-edged sword.”

Believing it’s the best way to sell some of his stake without needing to sell SAS for parts, Goodnight still wants an IPO. But five years after SAS first said it was preparing to go public, the window has narrowed, shifted and occasionally looked like a regret chute.“We don't want to go when all the money has been already used for SpaceX,”

The numbers also need work. Before hitting the roadshow, Goodnight wants to meet the Rule of 40, a common software company benchmark in which revenue growth rate and profit margin sum to 40. That might help the company defend its share price in public markets, especially when pitted against fast-growing competition. But with both components sitting at around 10%, Goodnight says SAS isn’t even halfway there.

For CFO Matt Parson, it’s optionality that’s the key here. SAS has to be ready for the public markets, but they can’t be the only path to helping Goodnight and Sall sell some of their stake. Why sell? The founders’ children aren’t planning to take over, but Goodnight and Sall might still like to leave them with some cash. They’ve yet to take much out of SAS: the company pays out a small dividend, but has invested most profits—“many billions of dollars”—back into the business over its lifetime.

In case an IPO isn’t possible, Parson thus wants to prepare the firm for other solutions: an acquisition or outside investment. The company routinely gets acquisition offers, but Goodnight hasn’t entertained any of them. (The last publicly reported bid was Broadcom’s $15-20 billion offer in 2021; it was progressing until Goodnight changed his mind.) A minority investment could be in the cards, according to Parson, if the right partner came along. If SAS can remain profitable, it can also stay as-is for the foreseeable future: private and founder-owned.

Sipping a cup of black coffee, this time in front of a piece of the Berlin Wall he helped smash, Goodnight is risk-adverse as ever. He is ready to stop being the face of the story he created.

“I wish people knew nothing about me,” he says, with a wink

The Future Maybe ! Absorbed, Sold or Discarded. What do you think?

We’re making a big bet on India and staffing down all over the world. But has anyone thought about what happens when our internationally unpopular president gets pi---d off at India and we no longer want to be each other’s friends? Seems like the company would be pretty sc--wed!

Time to simplify and monetize Oxy asap. The games and PowerPoints no longer work…serious integrity issues in the field coupled with disappointing performance results. New CEO will soon need to create a vision and reduce company footprint to only the highest performing assets. The rest need divestment asap.

Corporations are not necessarily pulling the plug on AI, but the initial, unbridled "gold rush" has definitely hit a wall of operational reality. The corporate approach has shifted from a frantic race to adopt any AI tool to a much more cautious, calculated, and sometimes frustrated effort to find actual business value.

The current landscape reveals why companies are reconsidering their initial "rush" strategy, pivoting toward a more structured approach:

1. The Productivity-to-ROI Disconnect

During the initial hype, the assumption was that massive individual productivity gains (like writing code or drafting copy five times faster) would automatically translate to corporate profitability. It hasn't. Recent data, including a 2026 enterprise study by Writer, shows that nearly half (48%) of C-suite executives now call their AI adoption a massive disappointment, and only about 29% are seeing a significant return on investment (ROI). Companies are realizing that adding expensive AI tools on top of messy, inefficient legacy processes just creates faster chaos, not better outcomes.

1. Strategy "For Show" vs. Reality

There is a growing, uncomfortable realization in boardrooms that early AI roadmaps were built more for investors and public relations than for actual internal execution. In fact, three-quarters of executives admit their company's AI strategy has been "more for show" than actual operational guidance. Leaders are hitting severe bottlenecks when trying to scale experimental pilot programs into production-ready enterprise workflows.

1. Culture Clashes and the "Two-Tiered" Workplace

The rush to implement AI has triggered significant internal friction.

The "AI Elite" vs. Non-Adopters:

Management is aggressively rewarding power users while planning to phase out employees who resist the technology.

Trust Deficits:

According to Cox Business research, nearly 50% of employees hide how much they rely on AI at work due to a lack of clear corporate policies, paired with a lingering fear (around 47%) that the technology will eventually eliminate their jobs.

Loss of Top Talent:

Gartner warned that companies focusing strictly on cutting payroll rather than training their people to use autonomous tools risk losing their best specialized AI talent to competitors.

1. Severe Security Gaps ("Shadow AI")

When corporate IT departments didn't move fast enough to provide official AI tools, employees took matters into their own hands. This explosion of "shadow AI"—workers dropping proprietary code, sensitive financial spreadsheets, or customer data into unapproved, public LLMs—has terrified risk officers. Two-thirds of executives believe their companies have already suffered data breaches or compliance risks due to these unmanaged tools, forcing a hard pause to establish strict governance frameworks.

The Shift to "Agentic" and People-Centric Models

Instead of backing away from AI entirely—corporate spending remains incredibly high—organizations are drastically rewriting their execution playbooks. The "rush" is being replaced by two specific trends:

Moving to Agentic Workflows:

Companies are moving away from simple prompt-and-response chatbots and focusing on specialized "AI agents" built to handle specific, cross-functional business workflows with centralized IT guardrails.

The 80/20 Rule:

Forward-thinking organizations are abandoning the idea of total human replacement. Instead, they are structuring roles around an 80/20 model:

80% of roles are "human-led, AI-augmented" (the Ironman approach, where human judgment is non-negotiable), and 20% are "AI-led, human-supervised" (for high-volume, low-risk, repetitive tasks).

Ultimately, corporate America is learning that while adopting AI technology takes weeks, successfully restructuring a workforce to actually benefit from it takes years. The current pause isn't a retreat; it's a strategic realignment.

_

How is it that the largest US nat gas company missed the boat on the ai/data center bo-m? Sounds like there’s lots of high level people working to get something moving who don’t have a clue, go figure, all the while, their E&P operations are struggling, planning is awful, lack of high level leadership and planning, get your act together, your PM stock has been worthless since the previous bankruptcy which is most likely happe i g again, smh…

Will Oxy pivot or concentrate on areas of strength or continue this bifurcated shyte show for ever…Oxy Greenway, Oxy Woodlands, Oxy International…when are all parties collaborating and when will Oxy have the courage to divest assets that no longer make sense

I see that the board is divided, some are all doom and gloom, some are more like 'business as usual'. i'd be curious to see what do you all think about our position a few years from now.

The new head of strategy was supposed to retire after the Hess integration. Why didn’t he? Is it because we don’t have anyone else capable?

That might complicate business for Nike since biggest team dealer for Nike is BSN (overwhelmingly) and they are already part of KKR.

So KKR will own UA and do business with NIKE. Will they be fair with Nike or use Nike while they support their own UA. That is intriguing.

Once again, Nike in their hubris went around closing almost all of the independent team dealers. And pivoted all of the Nike's team business with BSN. Another brilliant march towards corner by our smart former CEOs MP and JD. They thought that they will maximize the profit if they deal with one big guy. Hmmm....yes but if that strategy turns against you then it might ki-l you too. LOL
BSN has already been producing their private label apparels. And if it gets supported by UA then they don't need Nike.
One time, I talked to former BSN VP and he was not too happy that they have order too much futures because Nike demands it therefore eating their profits. Maybe they won't be forced to order too much futures with UA that owned by KKR.
Since Nike has no other option, they might have to continue to do business with BSN even if they emphasize on their own brands.

One of the scenario is that they might sever ties with Nike and go exclusively with UA.
That would be devastating to Nike since Nike don't have anyone as big as BSN when it comes to team items. Eastbay had team business but they have closed their business.

And I don't know how Nike will combat KKR if it really happens since Nike is pauper compared to KKR. Yes, KKR has more money than GOD.

That was brilliant MP and JD. It was your fault

Currently, BSN is serving Nike's key high schools like Mater Dei, St. John Bosco, de la Salle on behalf of Nike, all over the USA. They might try to sign those school for themselves.
Once again, KKR has more money than God. And in addition to it Nike stock is totally depressed now and losing their shirts in China (3 billion feet). I am not sh-t talking it is in today WSJ.

Nike is currently a company that has Plan A but no Plan B nor Plan C. Why? Becuase they ki-led them all. The little account that is.

Stock jumped, kind of like in 2022 when FLV had the media convinced we were a software and subscription company. But batteries don’t buy many subscriptions.

Sell, before the fall.