Nike (NKE) Stock Upheaval Defines CEO John Donahoe’s Tenure
In early 2021, Nike Inc. released one of its most successful sneakers of all time. The Panda Dunk, a black-and-white revival of its low-top basketball shoe from the ’80s, was an immediate hit. Those who scored a pair often resold them on StockX and other marketplaces for as much as $300, triple their retail price. At Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, where the shoe’s official name is the less ursine and more technical Nike Dunk Low Retro, executives monitored the product flow with precision, restocking the shoes just often enough to keep them circulating but still scarce, a well-worn Nike tactic.
But the demand was irresistible. Soon Nike was pumping out new Panda models, eventually turning them into a fixture in the company’s lineup. Revenue skyrocketed as everyone from teenagers to office workers added a pair to their wardrobe. “The consumer told us they wanted lifestyle product, and we delivered,” Nike Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe told investors when the company posted record sales of $50 billion last year.
At first sneakerheads loved them. But within a few years, Pandas were relentlessly mocked. Complex magazine wrote that they’d become “a cultural signifier that someone is new into sneakers or just doesn’t care about them all that much.” Reps for the sneaker convention Got Sole asked attendees at its 2023 gatherings their pick for the worst sneaker of all time. “Panda Dunks,” said one attendee on a video later posted on TikTok, summarizing the collective sentiment. “They are now becoming overrated, and we need to cancel them.”
Under Donahoe, a veteran technology executive and consultant who arrived at Nike knowing little about sneakers and everything about server-side infrastructure and cloud storage elasticity, the company’s most successful shoes have been some of its oldest. His first two years were a triumph, as he deftly navigated the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and sales improved by about 25%. Donahoe flooded the market with sneakers shoppers couldn’t get enough of. Nike released more Dunks, Air Force 1s and Air Jordan 1s—models all developed around 40 years ago—in hundreds of colors, with new drops almost daily. These were lifestyle lines meant as streetwear, not to be worn on fields or courts by the athletes who’ve driven Nike’s business since its inception. Watching revenue pour in, Donahoe was hooked.
When Nike’s board of directors picked Donahoe to lead the company in 2020, it marked an era-defining moment. He was only the second outsider CEO in Nike’s 48-year corporate history. The first, William Perez, the former head of household chemicals maker S.C. Johnson & Sons Inc., who joined Nike in 2004, barely lasted a year because of disagreements with Phil Knight, the brand’s legendary co-founder. Donahoe had learned the ways of ruthless cost-cutting at consulting firm Bain & Co. in Boston before going to San Jose to turn around e-commerce giant eBay Inc. Knight wanted to bring Donahoe’s Silicon Valley sensibilities to Oregon to modernize Nike’s e-commerce capabilities and shift more business to its own stores and online shop.
Donahoe was a dramatic departure from Mark Parker, his predecessor and the company’s current executive chairman, a revered sneaker designer who’d risen through Nike’s ranks for decades. “He finishes my thoughts before I even know I’m having them sometimes,” Knight once told the Portland Business Journal. Under Parker, a soft-spoken, cerebral man who seemed more comfortable spending hours testing sneaker cushioning in a research and development lab than delivering a speech, Nike produced some of its biggest advances, including the Flyknit manufacturing technology and HyperAdapt 1.0 self-lacing shoes.
Like Apple Inc., Nike was masterful at making product breakthroughs and engineering cultural movements along with them. Nike hired Donahoe to transform its selling machinery for the modern age, cutting out middlemen so it could get better margins from each sale. He led a corporate culling on a global scale, ending relationships with more than half of his retail partners, terminating hundreds of agreements and downsizing sales teams in markets around the world. As Nike directed customers to its own stores and websites, it halted the flow of sneakers to retailers including Amazon, Zappos, Dillard’s and Urban Outfitters, and even curtailed goods at its closest partner in the US, Foot Locker.
Donahoe’s strategy seemed to be working, until it didn’t. That recently abandoned shelf space was quickly filled by all of Nike’s top competitors: Adidas, New Balance, Puma, even Ugg. A flurry of running shoe brands, many of them upstarts such as Brooks, Hoka, On and Salomon, suddenly found themselves with more exposure, and they ate away at Nike’s market share in one of its most important categories. Meanwhile, at the company’s headquarters, the pace of product development slowed as Donahoe took fewer risks on performance-oriented shoe lines across sports. By mid-2023, it was becoming apparent that Dunks and the other reliable lifestyle winners were losing their allure, and Nike had nothing to replace them.
In December the company slashed its revenue forecast and Donahoe shifted into Bain mode, admitting on a conference call with analysts that “we know we must be faster, increasing the pace of innovation.” He unveiled a plan to cut $2 billion in costs, which included getting rid of 2% of the workforce. In interviews with more than 50 current and former Nike corporate employees—including many executives and senior managers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still work for Nike or elsewhere in the industry and worry about career repercussions—the moves were characterized as sapping their remaining faith in Donahoe’s regime. “He’s lost the community at Nike,” says Travis Gonzolez, Nike’s former director of client relationship and communication, who was laid off by the company in May. (Donahoe declined to speak to Bloomberg Businessweek. When reached for additional comment, a representative for Nike said it was unable to make executives available for interviews due to the company’s quiet period ahead of quarterly earnings on Oct. 1, and referred to statements from prior conference calls with analysts.)
Nike employees weren’t the only ones with misgivings. On June 28, the day after the company’s latest earnings report, Nike had its worst day in the stock market since going public in 1980. Despite its superstar athletes, championships and world records, the iconic company not only had lost its swagger, it had also ceded ground in markets it wasn’t well positioned to take back. Even GQ questioned Nike’s coolness. “Nike is a mess and is deflated, as is any confidence we may have had,” Sam Poser, an analyst at Williams Trading LLC, wrote in an unusually personal and direct note to clients. “The Nike talent today does not, in our view, hold a candle to the talent at Nike seven years ago.”
If McKinsey & Co. is the eldest, A-student sibling of consulting firms, Bain is its younger, frat-boy brother. “ ‘Work hard, play hard’ is a commonly used phrase that reflects culture at Bain,” goes one employee’s recruitment pitch on the firm’s website. “Your performance is measured by how much value you create.” In 1999, Donahoe, a rising star at Bain who, having an early command of e-commerce, had run its West Coast office and started its venture capital division, was named CEO. Former Bain boss Tom Tierney once described him as having “an uncanny ability to connect with everyone from receptionists to chief executives.” Donahoe, a 6-foot-5 former college athlete with a Stanford MBA and an affinity for efficiency, was the firm’s obvious leader.
Sometime during his Bain years, Donahoe met Knight, then Nike’s CEO, and the two hit it off. At that point, Nike, recovering from its ’90s sweatshop scandals, had successfully dominated practically every sports category with its breakthrough products and parade of celebrity endorsers. Almost four decades into leading the company he founded, Knight adopted Donahoe as a trusted adviser, a person with knowledge of the matter says. Nike became a client, and Bain consultants have wandered the halls there ever since. (Bain did not respond to a request for comment.)
In 2005—the year after Knight stepped down and before Parker became Nike’s new CEO—Donahoe went to eBay, eventually replacing fellow Bain alum Meg Whitman as CEO. At eBay, Donahoe had a penchant for acquisitions, making dozens. His $2.4 billion purchase of GSI Commerce Inc., which developed and ran shopping sites for brick-and-mortar retailers, would prove prescient, helping eBay avoid the fate of many of its dot-com-era peers. Donahoe stayed head-down and drama-free. He resided in Portola Valley, California, a tranquil Palo Alto suburb with winding roads, redwood-studded trails and no shortage of other tech executives, including the co-founders of LinkedIn, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. He mingled on the conference circuit and developed close friendships with other tech bosses including Intuit Inc.’s Brad Smith and Adobe Inc.’s Shantanu Narayen, who became CEOs around the same time he did. And he joined the board of Nike.
Apple CEO Tim Cook also became one of his valuable confidants, counseling him when eBay came under pressure from corporate raider Carl Icahn in 2014. Icahn wanted the company to spin off its payments business, PayPal. Cook, who was dealing with his own activist headaches at Apple, advised Donahoe on navigating around Icahn as well as members of the so-called PayPal Mafia—including Elon Musk—who sided with the activists. But Donahoe eventually capitulated and left eBay following the spinoff. He kept busy with his board roles, which also included PayPal and Intel Corp., and later rejoined the CEO ranks with a less glamorous job at enterprise cloud computing company ServiceNow Inc.
At the time, Nike was thriving under Parker. But in 2018, at the onset of the #MeToo era, staff complained of a toxic boys-club culture. Employees circulated a survey about the work environment that eventually landed on Parker’s desk, leading Nike to investigate allegations of inappropriate behavior, including sexual assault and harassment claims against some supervisors. Parker, who wasn’t specifically implicated, held an all-hands meeting at headquarters to address the issue. “I apologize to the people on our team who were excluded, and I apologize if some of those same people felt they had no one to turn to,” Parker told employees. Several executives, including Trevor Edwards, Nike’s brand president and Parker’s expected successor, resigned.
For years, Parker had tried to boost sales on Nike.com and get products to market faster. But it had become evident that Nike would need someone with deeper expertise if it wanted to expand its business 28% and reach its sky-high annual revenue goal of $50 billion. The board decided to search for a new leader, since its top internal candidate was gone. Donahoe, with his tech bona fides and a decades-long relationship with Knight, came highly recommended by his peers on the board—especially lead independent director Cook, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Knight and Parker called and asked Donahoe if he would consider the job. Parker said he was especially “delighted” with Donahoe’s “expertise in digital commerce, technology, global strategy and leadership.”
In January 2020, Parker hosted an event in Beaverton to welcome Nike’s next CEO. Corporate employees and store workers were buzzing about their new boss, an outsider who could supercharge the company’s sneaker designs and marketing with his digital prowess. As Donahoe neared the end of his “100-day listening tour,” Covid sent the world into lockdown. In a companywide video, he said he heard the call from employees for Nike to become more streamlined. For all its well-oiled operations, the company had a tangled organizational chart, with fiefdoms overseen by hundreds of vice presidents and senior directors. As he and his team developed strategies for various business units, they also planned their first layoffs for later that year, to build a “flatter, nimbler company,” according to a statement the company gave to the press following a leaked memo to employees.
Five months into the job, Donahoe unveiled his digital transformation plan, which was built on Parker’s original vision. “Consumer Direct Acceleration” would be an investment in the back-end technology that Nike’s e-commerce operations relied on, strengthening its supply chain and pivoting further away from its wholesale partners in favor of its own stores, website and apps. “We’re transforming Nike faster to define the marketplace of the future,” Donahoe told investors. “Now is the time to act.”
In Portland, about a 20-minute drive from Nike’s campus, is a streetwear boutique that’s now part of Donahoe’s lean sneaker distribution ecosystem. The Darkside Initiative is one of the handful of elite so-called Tier Zero stores that Nike entrusts with its most exclusive, limited-edition merchandise. The industrial-chic shop offers a tightly curated selection of sneakers and clothes from Tokyo’s Neighborhood, New York’s Engineered Garments and other culty brands, along with Nike’s Air Safaris, Zoom Vomero 5s and LD-1000s.
In mid-2020, Donahoe began choosing which other retailers would make the cut. Nike had always been a kingmaker in sneaker retail, the Swoosh a staple for anyone shopping for kicks. Within the first year of deploying his new strategy, Donahoe had cut loose a suburban mall’s worth of retailers: Belk, Big 5 Sporting Goods, Bob’s Stores, Boscov’s, City Blue, DSW, Dunham’s Sports, Fred Meyer, Macy’s, Olympia Sports, Shoe Show and V.I.M. “Although we are disappointed by Nike’s decision, we are encouraged by the response of other vendors,” Big 5 CEO Steven Miller told his investors.
Those that survived, such as Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. in the US and JD Sports in Europe, returned the favor by giving Nike ample space to showcase its products, including its three hottest sneakers, all from the archive: the Dunks; Air Force 1s, a basketball shoe first sold in 1982; and Jordan 1s, the style worn by Michael Jordan in 1985. Donahoe also doubled down on these partners, integrating both brands’ loyalty programs to allow customers to shop exclusive Nike products straight from the Dick’s and JD Sports websites.
But other retailers that had long relied on the sneaker giant suffered. Nike had made up 7% of DSW’s sales. Foot Locker Inc. CEO Richard Johnson struggled to solve his Nike dilemma. The two companies had worked together for half a century, and each was the other’s biggest partner. Johnson suddenly had to contend with a drastic reduction in the number of new Nike products. Not only did the shoemaker want to prioritize its own network of about 1,000 shops, but Donahoe also didn’t think Foot Locker was presenting Nike’s sneakers well enough, according to a person familiar with the matter.
At the time Donahoe announced his plan, Nike products accounted for roughly 75% of Foot Locker’s total purchases. That dropped to 70% in 2021, then below 60% in 2022. Foot Locker sales slumped as the pullback accelerated, so Johnson filled the void with New Balances, Pumas, Reeboks and Timberlands. Heck, why not more Crocs? “Ultimately, our team is working hard to make sure that we grow all brands, right?” Johnson said on his final conference call before his retirement in 2022.
As Foot Locker tried to adapt, Donahoe’s own stores and website had never seen such traffic. Nike’s direct-to-consumer sales shot up by almost $9 billion in Donahoe’s first three full years. The marketer famous for expensive, culture-moving, anthemic TV and print campaigns shifted millions from its global advertising budget to clicky automated web ads that would drive shoppers to its online store, according to a former marketing executive. Returning to the office after being stuck at home, people traded in their pre-pandemic fashion for comfy, stylish sneakers. And Nike, now free of most middlemen, was taking home a bigger cut of sales—its gross margin rose more than 2 percentage points. Meanwhile, the resale market took off as professional resellers vaulted sneakers into a new kind of asset class, flipping limited releases on secondary markets. Virtually everything Nike dropped on its app sold out instantly. From 2020 to 2022, global revenue grew almost 25%.
Donahoe, riding high, hosted “Just Do It Day” in the fall of 2022. It was a carnivalesque celebration of the company’s 50th anniversary, complete with concerts and an awards show that had rapper Drake as emcee. As part of the festivities, Knight, now in his 80s and semi-retired as Nike’s chairman emeritus, sat onstage with Donahoe for a rare public appearance. Knight is an almost mythical figure at HQ, and his sporadic speeches can elicit tears from his most zealous followers. This time, it was his star CEO who was there to worship. Donahoe got on his knees, raised his arms and bowed repeatedly as if to say, “I’m not worthy”—though it appeared, at least in that moment, that he was.
Even as the head of the world’s largest sneaker company, Donahoe has never claimed to know a whole lot about sneakers. During an all-staff meeting in March 2022 to discuss a shoe release, he embarrassingly referred to Nike’s proprietary ZoomX foam—developed a decade ago from materials traditionally used in the aerospace industry and critical to the company’s running shoes—as the “Zoom 10,” according to an employee in attendance.
When he was hired, the board figured that even if Donahoe was a sneaker neophyte, Parker could help him see past his blind spots, according to people familiar with management’s thinking. The former CEO-turned-executive chairman would remain intimately involved in Nike’s business, holding weekly calls with Donahoe to discuss strategy, texting directly with the top design employees and even sending designers sketches in the middle of the night. Executives would still bring Parker in to get input on product designs before shoes were rolled out.
Yet as Nike leaned on its non-sports goods, its product development division wasn’t producing enough breakthroughs, taking a back seat as the shoemaker contended with pandemic-related crises. Factories in Vietnam shuttered for three months straight, halting the production of a quarter of the world’s sneakers. Over the years, Nike has been responsible for game-changing technology, such as its Air cushioning system, Alphafly marathon runners and ISPA eco-friendly methods and materials. Flyknit’s lightweight fibers have been integrated into many of Nike’s product lines, and its Dri-FIT fabric is used in virtually every type of clothing. One of the few new products Donahoe could point to was the Air Max Dn, with a footwear cushioning system built off its Air technology.
Nike insiders attribute some of that slowdown to a brain drain across departments that occurred soon after Donahoe’s appointment—a result of both layoffs and an exodus of the old regime. Two of Nike’s top brass, Elliott Hill, the president of consumer and marketplace, and Eric Sprunk, the chief operating officer—respected executives, according to many former employees—quit shortly after Donahoe started. The secret Department of Nike Archives, which painstakingly chronicles and presents Nike’s history for employees to use as inspiration, lost its director and only historian. For those sneaker designers underwhelmed with their new boss, it had never been easier to jump to a competitor—Adidas, Hoka, Mizuno, On and Under Armour had all opened hubs in Portland to attract talent, either from Nike or fresh out of the specialized sports product programs at the University of Oregon. Nike was losing some of its top footwear designers.
Donahoe would later blame the lack of progress on remote work, explaining that the office was critical to fostering innovation. (Nike had instituted a three-day policy in May 2022, which expanded to four days in January 2024.) That was news to the employees at the LeBron James Innovation Center, Nike’s R&D hub at headquarters. As far as they knew, the industrial designers, biomechanical engineers and sports medicine doctors had been working in the complex constantly since it opened mid-pandemic. How else could they use the equipment and machinery? Some muttered about Donahoe’s own office perks, like free personal use of the company’s private jets, valued at $293,000, and the weights he allegedly took home from the gym and never returned.
But in 2023, while the lifestyle sneakers were flying off the shelves, there was no need to rush out new products. “Our brand momentum is strong, our innovation pipeline is unmatched, and our strategy is working,” Donahoe said at the time. Yet within six months, Nike’s winning streak would end. Chief Financial Officer Matthew Friend told investors that Nike expected consumer demand to drop, blaming the global economy and weaker sales in Europe and China—where Nike faced boycotts over its stance on labor in Xinjiang and rising consumer nationalism was pushing shoppers to local labels.
Nike employees had respected Donahoe’s business acumen from his time at eBay; it was his Bain-ness they feared. In December their concerns were realized. Donahoe wanted Nike to save $2 billion in costs, and Friend laid on the corporatespeak on a conference call with Wall Street investors and analysts. He presented a plan that included everything from simplifying the company’s product assortment to “increasing automation and speed from data and technology.” Translation: A bunch of you are about to get laid off.
This was a rallying cry for the actual walking, talking Bain consultants—usually easy to spot through the glass-walled offices in Beaverton, often dressed in suits and midi dresses instead of the campus uniform of hoodies and sneakers. The firm has been advising Nike’s senior leaders on and off for 20 years, ever since Knight and Donahoe met. In February, the CEO sent a companywide memo to inform employees about the impending cuts. The savings would be redeployed to help fund the Jordan Brand’s global expansion, growth of the company’s womenswear business and its running lines, under siege from those upstarts Hoka and On. “This is a painful reality and not one that I take lightly,” Donahoe told the company in the memo. “We are not currently performing at our best, and I ultimately hold myself and my leadership team accountable.”
The layoffs affected departments across the organization—data analysts, 3D modelers, marketing directors, supply chain vice presidents, sustainability experts and even staff at a subsidiary brand, Converse. As workers packed up their desks, a video of Donahoe from his Silicon Valley days went viral among staff. Like many business leaders, he’d done countless conference panels over the years. This one was with a venture capital firm discussing leadership, talent building and company culture. The topic of firings came up, and Donahoe, sipping a can of LaCroix, shared his philosophy: “I have fired so many people in my career. And when I say fired, remember, I grew up at Bain. For every 10 people we hired, we managed half out within two years. We managed 75% out within five. … So I learned there, and you can’t be afraid of that conversation.” He explained how he’d role-play with the head of human resources and make sure the person being fired didn’t get to discuss it with him. “I’m going to let you process the grief and emotion with someone else, not with me, because I can’t afford the emotional energy—the emotional drain.”
Many Nike employees found Donahoe’s statements boorish at best and cruel at worst, and hoped for some guidance from Knight, who remains Nike’s largest individual shareholder and effectively controls the board. During past layoffs, Knight—who still has a table permanently reserved for him in the Nike cafeteria—would surface with words to rally the team, like a football coach at halftime. But nothing. In an all-hands virtual meeting to address the initial layoffs, employees let Donahoe hear what they had to say in the chat room. One called for his salary—he made $29 million in total compensation that year—to be cut. Another said they hoped Knight was watching what was happening to the company he built. (He actually was on the call, according to a person familiar with the matter.)
Among those laid off were more than 30 software engineering directors and managers from the global tech division. When Donahoe was initially named CEO, no one was more thrilled than that group, say people who worked there. But under Donahoe it had devolved into a mess: a steady stream of engineers quitting, outsourcing some work to third parties, all under a chief digital information officer allegedly accepting bribes and doing “backdoor dealings” with vendors, according to a former employee’s lawsuit filed in Oregon against Nike earlier this year. (The case is still in litigation.) After the digital head resigned, staff had to wait nine months for Donahoe to name a replacement. “Everybody expected to have a great tech leader” in Donahoe, says a former executive who left amid the drama. “He just never showed up.”
In March, one of Donahoe’s closest retail partners saw demand for Nike’s sneakers deteriorate. JD Sports CEO Régis Schultz, a French businessman who’d just presented a five-year strategy to enter new markets, warned his investors that consumer interest in Dunks and Air Force 1s was waning and said he needed something new to replace them. Alternative options were plentiful, he said, but they weren’t coming from Beaverton. “I think we are seeing all the small brands, if I may, coming with a lot of innovation,” Schultz said in an earnings call. “I think Nike has been—and they recognize it—slow.”
The following month, Donahoe flew to Paris to change that narrative. Nike was kicking off its three-year product development blitz with a glitzy release ahead of the Olympic Games. The company constructed towering statues of six of its sponsored athletes in front of the Palais Brongniart, the former home of the Paris stock exchange, and enlisted Serena Williams and Eliud Kipchoge to talk to the press. On display was Nike’s new Pegasus Premium, equipped with the first-ever “sculpted” version of its Zoom Air cushioning system. It was a preview a year ahead of schedule—and a year away from being available to shoppers. “We’re resetting the innovation pipeline,” Heidi O’Neill, Nike’s president of consumer, product and brand, told Businessweek at the event. “And doing it with as much speed and force as possible.”
But in June, before the Olympics even began, Nike delivered quarterly results that sent its stock plummeting. Sales of its lifestyle sneakers fell for the first time in four years, and prices of Panda Dunks collapsed to below their retail value on the secondary market, according to data from StockX. Executives used the term “newness” 19 times on the call, trying to convince analysts that things were under control, but it was clear their definition of newness also included leaning on the archives. “One element of us bringing newness to the market is actually going into Nike’s vaults, what no one else has,” Friend said. The next day, Nike’s shares sank 20%, wiping out $28 billion in value.
Still, Donahoe spent more on marketing at the Paris Olympics than on any prior Games. Knight even emerged to send a private letter to athletes: “We need you. The world needs you. Now more than ever.” The company held an art exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and saturated the city with ads featuring its top global stars, and Nike athletes were mainstays on podiums. But for consumers, there wasn’t much to buy, aside from a new breakdancing sneaker with textured hand grips. For the other mystery products being developed in Beaverton, they’d have to wait until 2025.
Back in Oregon, Donahoe has been slowly trying to repair those retail relationships to get Nikes back in stores. DSW and Macy’s are once again selling them, and Mary Dillon, Foot Locker’s new CEO, has spoken of a renewed commitment between her and Donahoe. Nike has hosted wholesale partners at summits to showcase what’s in the pipeline and convince them the new goods will be hot sellers. JD Sports’ Schultz has since said the retailer’s feedback is increasingly “taken into account.” In July, Donahoe brought back a retired Nike veteran of 30 years, Tom Peddie, to help rebuild relationships with retailers, according to an internal memo. “We think Nike is doing many of the right things to clean up” the business, says Evercore ISI analyst Michael Binetti. “This is a big machine that will take time.”
But with Wall Street circling, the pressure on Donahoe has never been more intense. Pershing Square Holdings Ltd., the investment firm run by notorious corporate agitator Bill Ackman, disclosed a new $229 million stake in Nike in August, though Ackman hasn’t said whether he’ll press for a shift in leadership. The decision falls to Nike’s board, which is controlled by Knight and his son, Travis. They own nearly all of the outstanding voting shares that determine who gets to govern the business. “I am optimistic in Nike’s future,” the elder Knight said in a statement to the press. “John Donahoe has my unwavering confidence and full support.” But Donahoe’s contract with Nike is up in January, according to a person familiar with the terms, when he’s eligible to retire.
Calls for a change in management are getting louder. In July, former Nike marketing executive Massimo Giunco, who worked under all four CEOs over 21 years in five countries, posted an almost 3,000-word indictment of Donahoe’s tenure on his LinkedIn, dissecting what he called “an epic saga of value destruction” that might take years to undo. “The CEO of Nike doesn’t come from the industry,” he wrote. “At the end, he is a poorly advised, ‘data-driven guy.’ ” Analysts are speculating about who could replace Donahoe. Nike’s two presidents, O’Neill and Craig Williams—currently the president of geographies and marketplace—are considered to be the internal prospects. Hill and Sprunk, the two senior executives who left shortly after Parker stepped away almost five years ago, have also been mentioned. Then there are those cheerleading for the return of Parker himself. As one investor put it: “If they bring him back, everyone will love it.”
Whoever is tasked with leading Nike still has a major rehab job ahead of them. Even in the company’s hometown, it’s evident how far the sneaker behemoth has fallen. On a recent visit to the upscale running chain Fleet Feet in Portland’s hip Slabtown neighborhood, the sneaker wall was dotted with shoes from its competitors, many of them new to the market, each vying for casual runners. Does the store carry any Nikes? “Not at the moment,” says an associate.Read next: College Football Players Learn an Ugly Truth About Getting Paid