Shrink It, Pink It, Jordan It
The comparison everyone keeps making is the same mistake with a different name.
I got tagged in a mind-boggling LinkedIn post this week.
It happens. Someone sees a hot take or some wild numbers, and wants to know what a person who's spent their career in this business thinks about it. I appreciate the tag. I appreciate that people think I have something worth hearing.
But I had to sit with this one for a minute before I responded.
As Daniel-Yaw Miller put it, “there are three truths in this world: death, taxes and people having a hot take on the so-called downfall of Nike.” He’s not wrong. The post I was tagged in — the idea that Nike might go private this year — is probably the hottest of all the hot takes I've seen come across my feed in recent memory. But everyone’s got a right to an opinion. That’s the whole point of the internet. If anything, I'm thankful for every wildly hot take because they usually drive people here to find the truth.
Selfishly, I love the out-of-left-field takes. Even the ones that don’t hold up. If nothing else, they’re entertaining. And I think sometimes the people who’ve lived inside this business for years or decades, and perhaps even the enthusiasts, forget how to think outside the sneaker box. If you've worked at Nike long enough, you start to see the world through Swoosh-colored glasses. You can’t help it. It shapes how you see everything. And on the other side, if you’ve only ever looked at Nike through a portfolio lens, the current moment can read like the beginning of the end for a giant.
The truth is somewhere in the foggy middle. That’s my favorite place to be.
