Thread regarding Nike Inc. layoffs

The fact that the head of Finance and Sales have managed to keep their jobs after a string of quarters where results are missing the mark is astounding!

I would have more respect for execs if they just flat out said “”Let’s make more money and get that stock price up.”

Instead of all this comms corporate speak buzzwords.

Anyone who thinks Nike Tech is in better place than under MP is delusional. We had some exceptional leaders at a VP level during the digital/cloud rollouts and were capable of building enterprise grade capabilities in house. The Rat under JD drove out all the talent at the top and it trickled down into middle management. The people running the show today aren’t even B or C players. A majority aren’t even employable in today’s market at their current level.

@h3 I’m convinced they move out of Oregon after Phil dies. It’s a common Wall Street complaint that it’s a challenge to get exec talent to move here.

Do we know if the board even WANTS to save the company?

So far it feels like we’re getting Sears or Toys R Us’ed. Hollow out payroll, get kickbacks in the process. Steal from the charitable giving wallet, write it off our taxes. Cash out the brand name by flooding the market with what had once been premium & rare products.

What is next to sell? Our athlete’s contracts? The WHQ campus (it’s no longer our ‘world headquarters’ after all)? Converse? Will we take on billions in debt? Oh wait, we already did.

We have all the hallmarks of a once great brand now sitting in the clutches of private equity butchers. Enjoy your jobs while you have them.

@f9 CS is warming the bench!

Nike’s business model is not that hard. We make and distribute shoes and clothes.

We have to have a bench… who’d be next CEO?

@ce funny, if we have great tech capabilities but the biz is hurting….maybe we shouldn’t be investing in tech capabilities.

We deeply cut the business and creation functions to stand up this tech org. It’s time to pare that back. It’s a drag on every other part of the business.

Solid comments here! Insightful, seriously

Yes, the two times this company had an external CEO (Donahoe and Perez) it ended up being a disaster. Hopefully that mistake isn’t made a 3rd time.

As for Nike’s future prospects, what’s happening right now - with sales being more challenging - has been a long time coming and has been caused by broader market forces as much as anything.

Nike is a legacy company that came of age when everyone watched the same TV shows and we all broadly shared the same cultural zeitgeist. Those of us over the age of 40 or so can remember Nike commercials and marketing campaigns that became “water cooler talk” all across the land. Basically, there was a widely shared understanding of what was “cool”. And Nike was often at the heart of that.

Starting with Millennials however and picking up steam with Gen Z, that ability for legacy companies like Nike to define “cool” started losing its steam. This allowed new market entrants like Hoka and On to enter the picture in a way that would have been difficult 20 years ago.

So now Nike is trying to hang onto its legacy bonafides while also attempting to connect with consumers who, these days, are just much harder to establish deep relationships with. This means that while Nike isn’t going to go away anytime soon, the consistent high single-digit growth that many of us assumed was going to last forever…won’t.

Nike needs to get back to sport in a big way, focus on performance, and stop assuming that if we simply spend a couple billion dollars on sponsorships every year the product will essentially sell itself.

We also likely need to become a leaner company, even though that’ll mean saying “Bye” to a good number of colleagues. Twitter let go of 80% of its employees and be honest…can anyone REALLY tell that much of a difference? I’m not suggesting that Nike should shed 80% of its jobs. But I’m absolutely suggesting the company needs to seriously and significantly reduce its headcount to recalibrate for the new market reality. Most of us could easily name at least five people for whom, if they left tomorrow, nobody would notice. This shedding of headcount will need to happen, and hopefully before it becomes a forced option.

@ce We simply don’t have ‘better’ Tech since MP’s era.

Name the last thing successfully delivered on time without any cut or broken features. Tech has gone to heck since the offshoring started. Forcing collaboration across 5 time zones, without any overlapping working hours, is complete lunacy.
You do realize our newest “engineers” are paid half the salary of a Mickey D’s burger flipper right? They’re nearly worse off than our shoe manufacturers.

That kind of genius can only be found in a room where ‘leaders’ spend their days sniffing each others farts while writing poetry about roses.

Am I happy with EH? As happy as I’ve been with anything Nike lately. He has at least worked enough honest labor to know the smell of 🐂💩. The question is does he have enough political currency to make deep cuts in the most politically entrenched.

PK setup some billionaire trust fund company legal tax loophole thing to pass the majority of his shares to his kids. He's set for life and so are his kids, probably next 2-3 generations, regardless of what happens

PK doesn’t give two sh--s. He’s well past that.

PK was a salesman. This whole company was built off salesmen. I have no issue with a sales guy as CEO. What we need is a Bowerman at his side, someone to help innovate in the right areas and certainly not a CFO who continues to survive admins.

We need an external CEO, SLT is a cesspool.

Mate, Tech’s a bloody soft target on here at the moment. We’ve got way better tech capability now than we ever did back in MP’s day, yet the business is still going backwards. The only mob not pulling their weight is the business teams, full stop.

Nothing new being executed in the playbook. All the old plays being run with some new corporate BS terms! Let’s see how far the stock rises because recent earnings are not driving the stock higher!

I can pretty much guarantee one thing - there won’t be an external CEO of Nike in our lifetime…

Agreed on EHill being a sales guy, but more importantly a team guy. Is that enough - maybe in the short term.

I wouldn't expect any CEO to clean up previous CEO's mess in just 1 year. Tech, in particular, has significant misalignment with business priorities.