What the heck is happening with this company? Every day, I'm surprised at how disorganized things seem to be. There are always delays, mistakes, and changes happening that leave me feeling like things are falling apart. It's making me anxious and uncertain both about the future of my job and the company as a whole.
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The core part of Nike works well. The designers, engineers, materials, marketing etc are pretty good. Peripheral functions like tech mostly suck a-s, though there are a good number of good people in the org. I am in that peripheral org and the ways it's been run is scandalous. Too many people from the old days living on how Nike "works". No new or even well worn ideas, because that won't work at Nike. They work every where else.
@ual, I’ve said for a long time that the immense power of the Nike brand covers up and mitigates an awful lot of dysfunction.
@1cmv, you’re 100% correct about the lasting impact of layoffs. After the last big layoff I saw a not small number of employees decide it was time to leave. As often happens the people who voluntarily left were mostly high performers. I can’t blame them for leaving. When you see other tenured high performers get kicked to the curb like yesterday’s garbage it really reinforces the idea that Nike is not a family; it’s more like a sports team where, no matter how good you are, your job is never guaranteed past this season.
You could say most large companies are like this but I’m not sure that’s true. A good friend of mine works at a very large company in the Seattle area and she said when they do layoffs it’s entirely performance based. The idea of laying off a 20+ year employee who is still performing well is unheard of. She told me “That would never fly here. If the company started laying off tenured employees for no good reason you’d see people leave in droves. Our company is successful in large part because loyalty is a two-way street. If employees here ever needed to start worrying that their high performance wasn’t going to be enough to secure their continued employment, and that a couple of bad quarters could put a quick end to their many years of loyal service, they’d view that as an unforgivable betrayal. They’d leave and go somewhere else where they didn’t have to constantly worry whether or not they’d still have a job next year.”
Seems like a simple concept. But when you put a Bain person in charge of a company you’re going to get capitalism at its worst. I have colleagues here at Nike who are fantastic people that shouldn’t need to constantly stress about job security. Yet they do. For good reason too. Since 2017 we’ve seen some of Nike’s best and most tenured employees unceremoniously shown the exit door. Not difficult to understand why the most capable survivors of those layoffs decided to leave on their own terms before it’s their turn to be tossed aside.
We’ve had a staggering number of re-orgs (layoffs) in the last decade, at least by historic Nike standards.
The problem with layoffs is effective employees leave and bad employees float up like a tu-d.
It feels like no one knows what’s going on because almost no one left knows what’s going on or how to do their job
The brand name is worth a premium due to carefully managed inventory levels.
You’ll know the company is in trouble once we start cashing in on that reputation; watch for intentionally excessive inventory & sales.
TLDR: Dysfunctional with entrenched clueless & parasitic leadership but not broke. Somehow
The brand sells itself. The theatrics inside the berm are just a microcosmic example of how much capitalism can suck.
Nike somehow makes buckets of money in spite of itself