Inside the Cult of Nike
wmagazine.com
wmagazine.com
I found it to be a terrible place to work. Highly political, bait-n-switch hiring tactics, constant re-orgs, no project ownership, lots of silver bullets... It had 1 redeeming quality, they paid well. Hated the place and so glad to have moved on.
More specifically they'd buy into the idea that everything would be better if they just did/bought/adopted X. And they did this a lot with everything; technology, processes, organization principles, etc. During my short time there they adopted scrum, then extreme programming, then back to scrum, they switched their development from monoliths to extreme micro-services (one verb/service), they reorganized the teams 3 different times based on different principes... this continued ad nauseam.
I'm not sure that's true. Strong marketing for sure, but I think they're more akin to Apple in this regard.
Where (to use Steve Jobs' comparison) Pepsi's core competency is marketing (they rarely put out "new" products, so revenue is driven almost entirely by marketing), Nike's core competency is probably more apparel (specifically athletic) design - since, essentially, every new thing they release is a new product, and they release a lot of new things.
My impression is that Nike apparel is designed to support the brand, not the athlete.
Either way, I'm not sure that it points to marketing as a core competence over apparel design (though it may point the focus of the design away from the athlete).
From the start until the IPO, Nike was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. It is a fascinating story with lots of backstabbing, desperate moves, improvisation and insanity. It is a company created by, pretty much, manic obsession.
The only defect of this book is that it finishes, you keep wanting more when you're over.
I made the mistake of starting it late in the day on Saturday. Chewed up my entire weekend between reading it and not being able to put it down until way too late at night. I also found the portions when he talks about his dealing with the Japanese companies fascinating.