First, STOP WITH THE CONSULTANTS FOR OUR STRATEGY 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
They don’t know the business like we do. They don’t understand what has made Nike Nike.
Second, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS SACRED STOP CLOUT CHASING.
It’s honestly an embarrassment at this point. We bring people and companies on that have NOTHING to do with athletics or sport. Perfect example is the skims collab. The announcement of how Nike was partnering with skims because they had knowledge and understanding of the feminine form read (to me and many others I know who think the skims brand is mediocre at best) we don’t care about investing in ourselves and innovation for female athletes - we’d rather contract that out. Next this last drop literally looked like things I could buy at a dance studio. Nothing innovative. And the Travis collabs… cmon. He’s problematic and has nothing to do with sport. Who remembers his tantrum playing kickball during JDI day? I get that we are in the streetwear arena now but our athletic styles made it into streetwear without trying and without non-athlete celebrity collabs. One offs are great or if it’s someone who isn’t problematic a regular collection is cool. But let’s be smart.
Third, LISTEN TO THE EMPLOYEES and stop protecting leadership (and yes people).
Tech was screaming at the top of their lungs how bad RL was.. we’ve heard the allegations. Then comes MD, again, SCREAMING she didn’t know what she was doing. Lower level employees see a lot more of what’s working and not than leadership; or that’s what it feels like since they do nothing to improve anything.
Fourth, OMG LISTEN TO CONSUMERS (thought this would be obvious)
Everyone complains about how narrow our shoes are. I’ve heard some explanations about this saying elite athletes have narrow feet. My solution? Standard sizing that the average person can wear and elite sizing (our current fit). Imagine the marketing antics we could pull with that. Nike wasn’t built by everyone agreeing and falling in line. To expect us to thrive with a majority yes people is absurd, but we also need more focused on collaboration. One team, best team, team Nike.
Five, MARKETING WTF ARE YOU DOING. Our brand should be in alignment.
How tf did “Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated” pass through approvals?!?!!! Especially when one of core mottos/statements is “if you have a body, you’re an athlete.” Like are we inclusive and want everyone to make sport a daily habit, or shame people who are trying to be active? Alignment is key my guys and we can’t seem to pick a lane.
Six, WE NEED A BETTER FTE/ETW RATIO, not offshore all of tech and holy cow stop with the layoffs
We are literally always under investigation by the state for not having enough FTEs. Some ETW roles need to be converted, period. It’s not staff aug/special projects/SOWs/MSAs. It’s regular day in day out work that we are contracting out. Not just that the onboarding and offboarding costs (and the pain that that is).
I worked in GT. I do see the value in having ITC. However, I see bigger issues when the tech teams are working off hours. Tickets being closed because you don’t see their response in time because of the time difference. Tickets moving slowly because you can only send/receive one response per day. And it seems like with this shift changes have come down like, when an ETW converts creating an entirely new account for them (literally seems like they weren’t trained correctly or held accountable for this issue when for YEARS converting accounts wasn’t an issue).
Layoffs are bad. We do it to please wall street then have to ramp hiring back up or have to contract more work out. Not to mention the onboarding and offboarding costs associated. Plus these decisions are usually not made at Nike based on performance and it’s pretty evident.
Anyways EH let me know if you want to talk strategy cause I think I’ve got some great suggestions on correcting the ship.
Thanks for coming to my TEDTalk