Almost simultaneously, Nike, Adidas and Under Armour announced changes in their top management shortly after we published our last issue, underlining the rapid transformation that the highly concentrated athletic footwear market is undergoing.
At Nike, Mark Parker will be stepping down early next year as chairman, president and chief executive, having held all three positions since 2016. The Swoosh’s board of directors announced that John Donahoe, who has been a director of the company since 2014, is to become the new president and CEO on Jan. 13.
Donahoe, who is 59 years old, was for 23 years the president and chief executive of Bain & Company, the big consultancy in Boston. Credited with a good knowledge of the use of big data, he also spent 10 years with eBay, most of them as president and CEO. He was briefly chairman of the Business Council US and is currently president and CEO of ServiceNow, a provider of B2B cloud computing headquartered in Santa Clara, California. He has served on the board of PayPal since 2015.
The 64-year-old Parker is set to become Nike’s executive chairman, continuing to work with the senior management. The company is reportedly giving Parker a bonus of up to $10 million to help smooth the transition, as it had done with his predecessor, William Perez.
Parker has done an excellent job leading the world’s biggest sporting goods company since he became its CEO in 2006, pushing up its annual turnover from $16.3 billion up to $39.1 billion. He has triggered a long series of double-digit increases in sales and profits by focusing on the Nike brand and developing its “direct offense” initiative with sophisticated direct-to-consumer operations. Focusing on the Nike brand and keeping its little sister, Converse, Nike has divested under his management Cole-Haan and is now doing the same with its action sports brand, Hurley (see the news brief in this issue).
It is not clear whether Parker’s exit may be related to recent scandals on gender equality and doping. As we have already reported, Nike shut its Oregon Project for distance running on Oct. 10, shortly after its head coach, Alberto Salazar, received a four-year suspension from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). Salazar was investigated for having tested the threshold of detectability for a banned topical testosterone. Parker was kept abreast of the results by e-mail. Nike’s press release on the change in top management makes no mention of the incident.
Speaking on the American news channel CNBC, Parker noted that Donohoe had been involved in Nike’s digital transformation. He called the change “part of our strategic planning process.” “This is not something that happens in a matter of weeks,” he continued, “so it’s really unrelated to Oregon Project or any other issue. This is about me and the board really wanting to build on the momentum we’ve got.”
Meanwhile, at Under Armour, Kevin Plank, will be stepping down as CEO, the post he has held since founding the company in 1996. He is passing the baton on Jan. 1 to Patrik Frisk, the current 56-year-old president and chief operating officer.
Frisk, who joined UA in July 2017, has been leading a major transformation of the business. He will continue to report to the 47-year-old Plank, who still owns 15 percent of the shares and indirectly has control. Kevin will remain on board as executive chairman and brand chief, and in his new position, Frisk will have more freedom to do the things that need to be done for the brand to regain its momentum. He has told the media that he will move the company “from defense to offense.”
New action is expected at UA under Frisk’s top management in important areas such as product, marketing and international development, particularly in Asia. Before serving briefly as CEO of the Aldo Group, a big international chain for franchised shoe shops, Frisk spent more than a decade at VF Corporation, serving as coalition president of Outdoor Americas for The North Face and Timberland, president of Timberland, president of Outdoor & Action Sports for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and vice president and general manager of The North Face.
Frisk has been in the apparel business for more than 30 years. Prior to joining VF, where he learnt the mechanisms of a well-oiled international operation, the Swedish-born manager ran his own retail business in Scandinavia and held senior positions at Peak Performance and W.L. Gore & Associates.
Shortly before the announcement of these two major changes, the Adidas Group said that Eric Liedtke had informed the supervisory board that he will be relinquishing his seat on the executive board at the end of this year to “pursue new projects and ventures.” To replace him, the supervisory board has appointed Brian Grevy, placing him in charge of global brands. He will also help prepare a new business plan for the group, which is set to start from 2021.
Liedtke, an American citizen who is now 52, has spent 24 years with Adidas. He was hired in 1994 as global line manager for cross training in Portland, Oregon. He has since ascended through various senior management positions at Adidas America and within the group. After joining the executive board in 2014, he helped develop the business plan for 2016-20, called “Creating the New.” He also launched Adidas’ successful partnership with Parley for the Oceans, which strives to clear the oceans of plastic waste.
Along with Roland Auschel, the seasoned global sales director of the Adidas Group, Liedtke had been touted as a possible successor to its outgoing CEO, Herbert Hainer, before Kasper Rørsted, a forceful outsider, was picked to fill the role at the beginning of 2016. Before commenting on Adidas’ latest results earlier this week, Rørsted praised Liedtke for his marketing expertise, his “unrivaled passion for our brands” and his commitment to sustainability.
There is a Scandinavian connection here. Grevy, 48, is Danish, as is Rørsted, and Bjørn Gulden, current president and CEO of Puma, is Norwegian. Grevy is at present the CEO and chief marketing officer of Gant, the big Swedish lifestyle brand. He started his professional career at Reebok, spending two years as key accounts manager for the Nordics and then working for Adidas Danmark in 1998. He spent the subsequent 11 years at Adidas, climbing the ranks to general manager of the company’s Nordics group and then running its largest business unit, Training, between 2014 and 2016. He is also a former semi-professional handball player.
