Nike leaders keep saying that they are flattening the org to keep things simple, but GT is still a mountain of management.
If most employees still have 2 layers of managers, 2 of directors, 3 of VPs, and 2 of C-suite leaders, what exactly was 'flattened'?
@OP from my perspective with the latest layoffs it was instead flattening the SMEs, LEADs & long-employed. Basically reducing costs by reducing experience, but don't worry, a mid-level engineer with cursor can do all the same work.....
I’m honestly baffled by how much poor management survived the layoffs at Nike. It says a lot when toxicity, favoritism, and internal politics seem to matter more than actual performance of individual contribution. I also don’t understand why there are so many layers of management when the company could save enormous amounts of money by reducing ineffective leadership instead of losing strong contributors.
The layoffs felt poorly executed overall. Some highly intelligent and hardworking people were let go, while weak management and some underperformers stayed. From the outside, it’s hard not to feel that favoritism and nepotism played a major role in who stayed and who left.
I remember all of those directors with nobody reporting into them who'd just take off Fridays and one week a month in the summer. It su-ks that you're still overmanaged, but at least maybe they're making them actually work?
@ev then let them eat cake!
@dn “Enjoy your bread while you can” is a wild thing to say from people whose entire success depended on the bakers they just fired.
we know what we are doing you peasants! shut up and enjoy your bread while you can!
It's 100% clear that Nike GT leadership is just building a structure to best support their job safety. While rest of the industry is reducing management layers, Nike GT is reducing impactful IC roles. The ratio of manager to IC is crazy.
@OP typical corporate double talk.
If Nike was doing things right then 18 months under EH should have come out with next generation of new designs and new strategy as to how to attack and new story line. Cricket~?
Instead from EH all we hear same old recycled corporate restructure narrative, at this time frankly it is getting old.
I was at UA when sh-t was going down and they played the same movie so I have seen it before. Promises and promises until the CEO cannot lie no more and next CEO comes in until he cannot BS no more on and on until the company is done.
Every year they move around the boxes, but it’s mostly the same s h I t h e a d s inside them.
So we’ll keep having layoffs/reorgs until somebody decides to fix that.
The way all these VP’s, SD’s, Directors, Managers etc get created is via empire building.
The most efficient way to justify and build an empire is to create some nonsense program. Win Now, Consumer Digital Acceleration (CDA), Transform Immediately, blah blah blah over the years….
Make up a program name, give the “leadership” title to your buddy, tell HR to give them a massive headcount hiring budget.
That’s occurred over and over throughout the 20 something years I’ve been here.
Then later they prune (mostly employees) or combine… and you end up with sd’s to sd’s, vp’s to vp’s etc, etc.
Because management isn’t going to vote for laying themselves off eh?
Just wondering why it was bloated that way in the first place- making some as ICs and use them to manage still does not change a thing - rather to bloat again
They didn't flatten the org, they pruned the branches. To be fair, they did get rid of a few layers of separate reporting orgs and made them ICs and sprinkled them over the existing engineering orgs
What are you talking about?
We didn't have enough VPs, so we promoted two more this time.