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CD's Take - Situations & Solutions
Every organization faces challenges. Every leader faces decisions. And every problem leaves clues.
On CD's Take: Situations & Solutions, leadership practitioner and doctoral researcher CD Rogers-Wright takes a closer look at real situations shaping organizations, teams, and institutions, and breaks down what's really happening beneath the surface.
Each episode covers one situation, one honest breakdown, and offers a fix leaders can actually use. Whether the topic is organizational change, workplace culture, crisis response, burnout, innovation, or leadership accountability — the question is always the same: what's really going on here, and what's the fix?
Created for Fellow Fixers everywhere, this podcast helps leaders move beyond assumptions, identify what’s broken, and take meaningful action.
Because hope is not a strategy. Accountability matters. And there's always a fix.
Contact: cdeerw71@gmail.com
CD's Take - Situations & Solutions
Nike: Learning to Just Do It Right Again
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Episode 4: Nike: Learning to Just Do It Right Again
What happens when one of the most successful brands in the world forgets what made it successful in the first place?
In this episode, CD examines Nike's leadership crisis—and the comeback story every leader needs to hear.
From 2020 to 2024, Nike made a series of decisions that looked logical on paper but quietly eroded the culture, creativity, and identity that built the brand. When revenue declined and market share slipped, Nike didn't hire another transformation expert.
They brought back Elliott Hill—a 32-year Nike veteran whose first question wasn't:
"How do we grow faster?"
It was:
"What have we stopped being?"
Because this isn't really a story about sneakers or retail strategy.
It's a story about mission drift, leadership fit, organizational culture, and what it actually takes to lead a comeback.
In This Episode
You'll learn:
- Why optimizing for a metric can quietly undermine your mission
- How to recognize when you have the wrong leader for the moment
- How bureaucracy suffocates culture—and how to stop it
- Four leadership principles for leading a real organizational comeback
Key Moments
- The Consumer Direct Acceleration strategy—and where it went wrong
- The stories of Allyson Felix and Simone Biles: what metric-over-mission looks like in real life
- Elliott Hill's return and the question that changed everything
- The Fix: Purpose, Culture, Listening, and Rebuilding What Matters
Here's the Fix
- Start with purpose, not performance
- Culture before results
- Listen before you lead
- Rebuild what matters
CD brings more than 25 years of leadership experience across Fortune 500 organizations and the U.S. federal government, combining real-world insights with doctoral research in organization and management.
If your organization is in its own messy middle, CD would love that conversation.
Nike didn't need a new strategy. It needed to remember itself.
Fellow Fixers, if this episode resonates, share it with a leader who needs to hear it.
Because hope is not a strategy. Accountability matters. And there's always a fix.
cdeerw71@gmail.com
CD Rogers-Wright
cdeerw71@gmail.com