Genuinely curious to know if Nike is more effective after all the layoffs In 2020. Wasn’t the point to reduce cost and “simplify”? Quarterly results would indicate otherwise. Easy to blame the external environment on current results but shouldn’t CDA have set the organization up to mitigate the risks? Has anyone taken a deep look at labor costs YoY? I imagine they are at an all time high and yet the company is more inefficient than ever and moral is at an all time low. And .. the head of HR is still at the helm?
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CDA was the end result of the company spending millions on a team of 22-year old grads from Harvard (read: any and all management consulting firms especially the top 4) with no real world work experience to tell 60 year old men how to run their business
All the "acceleration" did was slow cr-p down. Can't get any real work done any more because every team is all over the place and over half aren't productive.
Like any layoffs, I think the people planning it did some stuff thinking it would make changes but reality is... the real change is probably happening now. CDO was a disaster, CDA in my opinion, added disruption when I don't know if disruption was needed.
However, for my organization... we were awful after CDO. CDA wiped out all the phonies who aligned themselves with the winners in CDO. At least all those folks are gone, however... CDA brought in significant morale issues since what they did in our organization was hire all externals. This then created issues between the new leadership/guard team and the old folks who cut their teeth for the past decade.
Fast forward to late 2021, most of those new leaders left, which brought in new, again, leaders which in my opinion, were more suited for the issues in our organization. Overall - I'm feeling like we're slowly trending in the right direction... however, we took our sweeta** time to finally address the issues.
My opinion may change in the next year but at least I like this new leadership (my org), they actually keep to what they say and follow through, surprisingly aggressively. I can't say much about the surrounding organizations, I know attrition was high there too.
CDA has definitely impacted results. The strategy change that also slashed 3PW has had a major impact on revenues and profitability with no recovery in sight. Direct will never recover that revenue not matter how much they prop up their double digit growth internally as a measure of success. Promoting people without experience to critical roles has had a negative impact to team,culture and results. Reducing the talent base by walking all veterans has left the offense adrift in many areas. Saying the consumer demand has shifted to icons when the product pipeline is giving them no other interesting options…. Just a sampling of issues with CDA. These very intentional changes to the offense brought through CDA and the leaders that concocted the strategy are having and will have the most damaging long term impact on the business. Supply chain is secondary as that is a market wide issue for all brands. The ELT needs to finally be held accountable for this debacle.
I think you’re conflating cause and effect. CDA was meant to realign Nike’s strategy while also getting rid of extraneous resources. It accomplished both.
Attributing CDA to current company results is at best speculation because most of the factors impacting those current results are external. Supply chain disruption has nothing to do with CDA. The current state of the Chinese consumer has nothing to do with CDA. High rates of inflation have nothing to do with CDA. And nobody ever promised or said that CDA would forever shield Nike from external market factors.
Is Nike better off now than before CDA? No. But attributing that directly and primarily to CDA itself is stretching logic a good bit. I’d be willing to reconsider that notion if someone could point me to some direct & tangible evidence that CDA - more than external factors - has impacted Nike’s financial performance.