Congratulations to Nike Innovation, which has finally solved one of corporate America’s most stubborn problems: how to eliminate the inconvenience of experience, achievement, and institutional knowledge from promotion decisions.
For years, employees apparently misunderstood how advancement worked. They believed that spending 10, 15, or even more years building innovation capabilities, delivering difficult programs, transferring knowledge, and earning organizational credibility might prepare them for senior leadership.
Adorable.
When new leadership arrived from Running, the organization discovered a much more efficient talent strategy: bring trusted people along, place them above established innovators, and let everyone else reverse-engineer the qualifications afterward.
One particularly inspired decision involved elevating someone from development directly into a Principal Innovator position—above people who had spent years actually building the team’s innovation expertise. Employees naturally wondered what documented innovation record justified such an extraordinary appointment.
But asking for evidence misses the genius of the system. Why assess accomplishments when sponsorship is faster? Why develop internal talent when leadership already knows whom it likes? Why define the standards for becoming a Principal Innovator when ambiguity makes almost any decision possible?
“Principal” once suggested a sustained record of original thinking, organizational influence, and innovation leadership. Apparently, it can now mean being selected by the right people at the right moment.
Even better, leadership seems to have confused abrasiveness with authority. Territorial behavior becomes “ownership.” Undermining colleagues becomes “driving accountability.” Raising one’s voice becomes “passion.” Throwing coworkers under the bus becomes “executive presence.” When the favored employee behaves badly, the organization does not see a cultural problem—it discovers another leadership competency.
Meanwhile, longtime contributors receive the traditional Nike reward: a speech about embracing change, an invitation to keep delivering, and the privilege of watching someone else inherit the recognition.
This is not merely favoritism. Favoritism sounds accidental and embarrassingly unsophisticated. This was apparently a strategic operating model: concentrate opportunity around the incoming leadership network, protect the appointment from meaningful scrutiny, and wait for disappointed employees to leave so their departures can be described as transformation.
Nike constantly tells consumers that there is no finish line. Inside Innovation, however, there appears to be one—and leadership can move it whenever the wrong employee gets close.
The saddest part is not that deserving people were passed over. Corporate politics are hardly innovative. The saddest part is watching an organization built to challenge convention reproduce the most conventional failure imaginable: leaders rewarding familiarity over merit while congratulating themselves for being bold.
Nike Innovation does not lack talented innovators. It lacks leaders secure enough to recognize talent they did not personally bring into the room.
But perhaps we should applaud the experiment. It takes remarkable discipline to spend decades building an innovation culture and then dismantle its credibility in a single leadership transition.
Just don’t call it meritocracy.
That product failed testing.