Watching Nike’s leadership discuss “winning” while the stock collapses from roughly $177 to $38 is like watching the captain of the Titanic accept an award for improving access to ocean views.
These people inherited the Swoosh, one of the most recognizable and valuable symbols in human history and somehow turned it into a case study in executive arrogance, strategic confusion and highly compensated mediocrity. It is genuinely impressive. Most people could not damage a brand this powerful without actively trying.
But accountability at Nike apparently works differently depending on your salary. When employees struggle, they are “low performers” who must be eliminated. When executives erase billions in shareholder value, weaken the marketplace and lose ground to smaller competitors, they receive bonuses, consultants and another opportunity to reorganize everyone beneath them.
Then comes the corporate theater: “Win Now.” “Sport Offense.” “Consumer-led.” “Future growth.” A seemingly endless vocabulary designed to disguise the inconvenient fact that the people constantly lecturing everyone about excellence have delivered one of the least excellent performances in Nike’s history.
The employees who actually designed, engineered, developed and delivered the product were treated as expenses. The executives who repeatedly misread the market were treated as visionaries. Now the share price provides the performance review leadership was apparently too important to receive.
From $177 to $38.
Just do it? They just did it, to themselves.
Nike does not suffer from a shortage of talent. It suffers from a surplus of executives who confuse authority with intelligence, meetings with progress and surviving their own failures with leadership.
The Swoosh deserves better. Employees deserved better. Shareholders deserved better.
But please, tell us again how eliminating more working people will finally correct the decisions made by the untouchable geniuses at the top.