Welcome to Nike Innovation, where we fearlessly reimagine everything except leadership, accountability, and how people are treated.
Here, “innovation” means arranging the same executives into exciting new organizational charts and announcing the results in a presentation titled The Future of Innovation.
The process is revolutionary:
Talented people generate the ideas.
Talented people do the work.
Management adds “strategic guidance.”
Leadership presents the outcome.
The people who created it are reorganized, deprioritized, or shown the door.
That’s the famous Nike carrot-and-stick model.
The carrot: You get to tell people you work at Nike Innovation—the magical place where the future of sport is supposedly invented.
The stick: You eventually realize the most carefully engineered product is management’s protection of management.
Failure is pushed downward.
Credit is pulled upward.
Accountability disappears somewhere in the middle.
But don’t worry: after treating the people doing the work as disposable, leadership will schedule an all-hands meeting about courage, belonging, vulnerability, and putting athletes at the center.
Because nothing says “innovation culture” like frightened employees listening to protected executives explain the importance of taking risks.
Nike Innovation doesn’t have a shortage of brilliant people or powerful ideas. It has a system that consumes both while congratulating itself for being visionary.
The employees innovate.
Management appropriates.
The PowerPoint celebrates.
And when the people responsible for the work are finally exhausted or eliminated, leadership can proudly announce another transformation.
Nike Innovation: If we rename the dysfunction often enough, eventually someone might mistake it for progress.