There’s a fascinating backstory to the revival of the Adidas brand. It comes down to Bjorn Gulden, a former professional soccer player and the brand’s new CEO of one year. He has a clearheaded conception of what it means to manage a company. More than anything else, it’s about trusting the talent on the home team and getting rid of the preposterous apparatus that has invaded business life over the past 25 years.
He had previously been running the company Puma. When Adidas hired him, he faced a serious problem with morale (the Kanye brand blew up) and found the company stuck in incredible bureaucracy that had nothing to do with the bottom line. Plus a sinking valuation. He was determined to clear out all the underbrush based on two principles: transparency and accessibility.
He announced his personal cell phone number to the entire staff and said he would welcome personal phone calls. He received them all day for many weeks and found himself listening in on the reality on the ground for the employees. He also shared detailed financial information about the company with employees who had long been kept in the dark, as most people are in today’s world.
His first great action was to fire all consultancies. These are the preposterous companies that leech onto failing companies and purport to give them the methods and inspiration to improve. They invariably charge six figures, multiple times; waste everyone’s time with evil investigations and audits; and then bring in idiotic schemes for tracking progress.
More often than not, the consultancies tagged to do something unnecessary have some connection to the manager who greenlighted the operation, some hidden quid pro quo in operation there, as in friends of friends. In other words, it’s usually a polite racket. The whisperers in the office know what’s going on, but the upper tier of managers don’t.
One of the many schemes that became popular over 20 years was called key performance indicators, or KPIs. You see, it’s important that bad ideas market themselves with a new and unfamiliar acronym that loser managers can tout as some form of scientific management. There are many of these, and the first consultancy to invent a new one wins this scam.
In this particular one, every employee is asked to fill out a sheet with RREs, or roles, responsibilities, and expectations. It’s like a worksheet you would give a child. Actual adults are given these, from which the managers pound out KPIs, which are supposed to be objective measures of performance. The whole thing becomes a massive machine of nonsense, but it kills time and confers a patina of competence on the managerial class.
“He also largely scrapped an evaluation system involving hundreds of so-called KPIs—key performance indicators by which managers are judged—which he said smothered executives with pointless box-ticking exercises,” the Journal reported.
One of the most evil of these management tactics is called the 360. This allows everyone to rat on their unit boss and trash talk. It all goes to that person’s superior, who can then cull through them and deliver a report. It causes fake niceness to spread everywhere and discourages managers from demanding more of their employees.
They’re used for one purpose only: to entrench higher-level managers in their positions and allow them to build a moat around themselves while preventing competitors from rising in the firm. They also create a Stalinist style of surveillance.
Still, they caught on among the “best practices.” There’s a rule of thumb in the corporate world. If anything is called a “best practice,” you can be sure it’s a worst practice and destructive of both profitability and human dignity.
You might wonder how in the world all this nonsense took over the corporate world. The answer comes down to artificially cheap credit offered by the banking system via the Federal Reserve after 2000. Every major corporation leveraged up dramatically and was in a position to expand by throwing money and personnel at every problem, regardless of rationality.
It was during this entire period that DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion; ESG, which stands for environmental, social, and governance; and HR measures essentially replaced competence, rationality, and human decency in the workplace. Suddenly, everything became an HR crisis in need of solving. It turned everyone into rats, because idle hands always do the devil’s work. The companies bloated up in ways that were completely unsustainable but massively flush with scads of high-paid workers who have no skill, talent, or experience at all. None of them were accountable.
If you work for a company like this, you know exactly what I mean.
Fortunately, some of this is beginning to change, but we’re only at the beginning. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he fired 3 out of 5 employees and made the service better than ever. He also discovered that the company was a very long way from profitability, so he turned it into a viral venue for delivering every form of media and news, making its censorship-free platform a pillar of free speech that the entire world depends on today.
At Adidas, a major factor has been to drive off loser employees who imagine themselves to be big shots but actually only gum up the work. This is incredibly common at all companies. Thus does the Journal report: “Several senior figures have left, including the heads of sales and branding, with Gulden adding the latter role to his job description so that he could give snap approvals for new projects or designs. The head of digital also recently departed, as did the president of Adidas North America.”
Ah yes, branding! Like what happened to Bud Light!
What’s happened to Adidas’s stock price? After a major slump, it has started to recover healthily.
I’m here focusing on one company, but there are thousands at stake here. There needs to be a major housecleaning at every U.S. company and especially at nonprofits, which are, more often than not, disasters in terms of productivity, accountability, and finance. Donors have no idea, but there are tremendous inefficiencies everywhere in plain sight if they bother to look.
Just consider what has happened to universities! The bureaucracies are gigantic, and the wrong people are ascending to high ranks of leadership while the professors and students all get the short end of the stick. The problems you see at Harvard or the old Twitter or Adidas exist everywhere in heavily bureaucratized U.S. corporations.
Another great example of efficiency and productivity is The Epoch Times. With every social media company closed to them in terms of promotion and advertising, The Epoch Times has managed to become a global powerhouse of information, research, and opinion. How? It comes down to extremely hard work, a lean management structure, and a dogged focus on mission. As a result, this one company is eating the lunch of many players in old corporate media.
Now let’s consider government, the problems of which far exceed every other sector. In the United States, the government is packed full of millions of people who do nothing, achieve nothing, and make life miserable for everyone else. Reform must be a top priority. Any elected leader worth his or her salt must target the bureaucracies and gut them completely. It’s the only way we’re going to get back freedom and reasonable limits on power.
U.S. capitalism has found itself in a terrible bind. It has been taken over by “woke” ideology, crazed bureaucrats, insane amounts of expensive litigation, and waste everywhere. Any good manager who wants these companies to have a future needs to clean house just like Mr. Gulden and Mr. Musk have done. First step: Fire all the consultants!
