https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-13/nike-nke-stock-upheaval-defines-ceo-john-donahoe-s-tenure
The vultures are circling. The article goes easy on him to be honest.
13 replies (most recent on top)
It’s amazing that Nike has lived so long on rob strasser and Peter Moore and their ideas of air Jordan. This step to hire a guy that is completely without shoe knowledge is embarrassing. It’s as bad or worse than JC Penney hiring the guy from apple or the new coke formula. Who pays the price? Stockholders and employees.
When I took SCU just after JD got his offer letter we were told he was an interim CEO brought on to train up one of three female candidates. Is that still the plan?
I hope the board drops him in January.
Contract expires end of the year. Eligible for retirement. He is done. It will be MP, HON or CW. That written, odds on CW are low. So MP so satisfy investors and employees. HON, despite the haters, is my bet.
Huh? Which comments are you suggesting were made by republicans…?
Oh the republican clowns are now speaking up.
No one will take your judgement as credible
HON
The article focused solely on JD. As CEO, JD holds ultimate accountability. However, the rest of the C-suite, especially HON, also deserves blame and scrutiny.
@lwa+1uuCfNJt Lol, what…? It’s obvious you either don’t work here or haven’t been paying attention. I don’t see how anyone can look at the last five years and claim JD was necessary. There were other qualified CEO candidates ready to step up, but the company made terrible strategic decisions instead. We lost focus on what really mattered because of JD and the changes he introduced.
JD was needed at Nike. Company was not any better under prior CEOs either. Don’t forget all the scandals during last 20 years. They used cheap overseas labor, cheap marketing strategies using athletes and celebrities to sell overpriced cr-p.
What is it going to take to get rid of this guy?!
We all should have known when the picture from 2020 olympic summit with Parker and Virgil came out - such a robot 😂
Some of my favorite quotes:
Instead of transforming the sneaker giant into a high-tech powerhouse, John Donahoe pi---d off partners and disappointed fans.
Donahoe flooded the market with sneakers shoppers couldn’t get enough of. Nike released more Dunks, Air Force 1s and Air Jordan 1s—models all developed around 40 years ago—in hundreds of colors, with new drops almost daily. These were lifestyle lines meant as streetwear, not to be worn on fields or courts by the athletes who’ve driven Nike’s business since its inception. Watching revenue pour in, Donahoe was hooked. (Oh wait the innovation stopped…. Weird)
Donahoe had learned the ways of ruthless cost-cutting at consulting firm Bain & Co. in Boston before going to San Jose to turn around e-commerce giant eBay Inc. Knight wanted to bring Donahoe’s Silicon Valley sensibilities to Oregon to modernize Nike’s e-commerce capabilities and shift more business to its own stores and online shop.
Under Parker, a soft-spoken, cerebral man who seemed more comfortable spending hours testing sneaker cushioning in a research and development lab than delivering a speech, Nike produced some of its biggest advances, including the Flyknit manufacturing technology and HyperAdapt 1.0 self-lacing shoes.
Nike hired Donahoe to transform its selling machinery for the modern age, cutting out middlemen so it could get better margins from each sale. He led a corporate culling on a global scale, ending relationships with more than half of his retail partners, terminating hundreds of agreements and downsizing sales teams in markets around the world. As Nike directed customers to its own stores and websites, it halted the flow of sneakers to retailers including Amazon, Zappos, Dillard’s and Urban Outfitters, and even curtailed goods at its closest partner in the US, Foot Locker.
Meanwhile, at the company’s headquarters, the pace of product development slowed as Donahoe took fewer risks on performance-oriented shoe lines across sports. By mid-2023, it was becoming apparent that Dunks and the other reliable lifestyle winners were losing their allure, and Nike had nothing to replace them.
Despite its superstar athletes, championships and world records, the iconic company not only had lost its swagger, it had also ceded ground in markets it wasn’t well positioned to take back. Even GQ questioned Nike’s coolness. “Nike is a mess and is deflated, as is any confidence we may have had,” Sam Poser, an analyst at Williams Trading LLC, wrote in an unusually personal and direct note to clients. “The Nike talent today does not, in our view, hold a candle to the talent at Nike seven years ago.”
Sometime during his Bain years, Donahoe met Knight, then Nike’s CEO, and the two hit it off. At that point, Nike, recovering from its ’90s sweatshop scandals, had successfully dominated practically every sports category with its breakthrough products and parade of celebrity endorsers. Almost four decades into leading the company he founded, Knight adopted Donahoe as a trusted adviser, a person with knowledge of the matter says. Nike became a client, and Bain consultants have wandered the halls there ever since. (Bain did not respond to a request for comment.)
At the time, Nike was thriving under Parker. But in 2018, at the onset of the #MeToo era, staff complained of a toxic boys-club culture. Employees circulated a survey about the work environment that eventually landed on Parker’s desk, leading Nike to investigate allegations of inappropriate behavior, including s-xual as--ult and harassment claims against some supervisors.
Donahoe would later blame the lack of progress on remote work, explaining that the office was critical to fostering innovation. (Nike had instituted a three-day policy in May 2022, which expanded to four days in January 2024.) That was news to the employees at the LeBron James Innovation Center, Nike’s R&D hub at headquarters. As far as they knew, the industrial designers, biomechanical engineers and sports medicine doctors had been working in the complex constantly since it opened mid-pandemic. How else could they use the equipment and machinery? Some muttered about Donahoe’s own office perks, like free personal use of the company’s private jets, valued at $293,000, and the weights he allegedly took home from the gym and never returned.
Nike employees had respected Donahoe’s business acumen from his time at eBay; it was his Bain-ness they feared.
The topic of firings came up, and Donahoe, sipping a can of LaCroix, shared his philosophy: “I have fired so many people in my career. And when I say fired, remember, I grew up at Bain. For every 10 people we hired, we managed half out within two years. We managed 75% out within five. … So I learned there, and you can’t be afraid of that conversation.” He explained how he’d role-play with the head of human resources and make sure the person being fired didn’t get to discuss it with him. “I’m going to let you process the grief and emotion with someone else, not with me, because I can’t afford the emotional energy—the emotional drain.”
Among those laid off were more than 30 software engineering directors and managers from the global tech division. When Donahoe was initially named CEO, no one was more thrilled than that group, say people who worked there. But under Donahoe it had devolved into a mess: a steady stream of engineers quitting, outsourcing some work to third parties, all under a chief digital information officer allegedly accepting bribes and doing “backdoor dealings” with vendors, according to a former employee’s lawsuit filed in Oregon against Nike earlier this year. (The case is still in litigation.) After the digital head resigned, staff had to wait nine months for Donahoe to name a replacement. “Everybody expected to have a great tech leader” in Donahoe, says a former executive who left amid the drama. “He just never showed up.”
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