Beyond the swoosh: Leading with purpose at Nike and beyond

Gabriel: Welcome to another episode of Brand Enabled, a really exciting conversation that Holly and I had with Lisel Welden, who’s a marketing leader who shaped brand strategies at Nike for almost a decade. She was at Lyft in the early days and Stitch Fix.

In this episode, she shares with us her insights on building marketing teams that truly both serve the consumers and the business. From Black History Month campaigns that united multiple Nike businesses and BUs for the first time in the company’s history, to navigating the balance between how do you do data-driven decisions and human insight.

Lisel’s just an amazing brand leader with a lot of amazing lessons around leadership and a lot of practical wisdom for any marketing or brand leader who’s looking to create meaningful impact.

Why don’t we jump straight in because you spent 10 years at Nike and you have some pretty strong opinions about what’s kind of gone wrong in the last few years.

Lisel: It’s been an interesting ride for the brand over the last couple of years. I think that Nike has a great history of being able to reinvent itself, I would say, if you look at the track record of the company. They’re not afraid to challenge themselves, change what they look at, change their approach.

I think also for Nike, one of the things they always wanted to do was make sure that the kind of perception of them being a bold brand always carried through. So I remember just after I was hired, I ended up talking to the HR guy that ran the program and he said, “One of the things we like about you, Lisel, is that you’re not afraid to take risks.”

Gabriel: So what’s the biggest risk that you took with that permission granted? As you think about the time, what’s one of the stories for you where you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to put this to the test.”

Lisel: Ah, you’re going to put this to the test. You know, it’s kind of funny. It’s a funny question to ask because when you work at a company where risk is embedded and they kind of challenge you to do new things all the time, they don’t really feel that risky. Do you know what I mean? So it’s funny. People ask questions like that or ask, “What was your biggest failure at Nike?” or something like that. And those things never feel that way because the culture is so different at the company.

There’s no, “You launched this program, and it didn’t work, and now you’re fired.” Like that’s not how the company would run. They want to look at it and say, ”Okay, why didn’t it work? Was it the wrong time? Not the right consumer? Did we not build it right? What do we think about the idea though?” “Oh, it was a great idea. It just didn’t work out. Okay, let’s tinker. Let’s fix. Let’s see if we can do something using that same ethos in a better way.”

Gabriel: So let me ask the question in a different way. What’s one thing that you did while you were at Nike that if you were to talk about it with someone from a culture that wasn’t as risk-taking, would see that as, “Really, you did that? At my company, that would be seen as a big risk.” Or does even asking that not make sense? Because like, “I can’t remember because that was just every day.”

Lisel: I think in terms of projects I did that I can’t imagine other places doing, I would have to say it’s a Black History Month project that I did while I was at Nike. So this started in about 2010, and I was a member of the Black Employee Network. And as a part of Black History Month, what Nike had historically done was they would make about 500 pairs of a signature shoe and give it to different charities, and charities could auction it off and raise a lot of money for their charity. As you know, sneaker culture is a big deal. They can put those things on eBay or other places, and organizations can raise tens of thousands of dollars. And that’s what they would do.

Myself and a few others – I came in and led a group that thought differently about it – we thought that there’s more that Nike could do here. Why don’t we do what Nike does in support of Black History Month?” And so we came in and we revamped this whole program. And we did what Nike does. We got a collection of product together, we sold it into retail, we put the marketing wrapper around it, told stories, did events in the marketplace, and then gave all the proceeds away to charity.

Now, what made this a particularly unique program at Nike was, as with every new idea, we were not on a great timeframe. So we were pedal to the metal, up late at night, talking to factories. I remember our product designer, we had to send him to Asia at some point. Like on a whim talk to his boss, “No, he’s got to go to Asia to go deal with some stuff at the factory”. That kind of stuff to do it. But we got permission to do this.

This is on top of our regular day jobs. This was not anybody’s real job. And the other thing that we did that was truly remarkable in this was it was the first time in the history of the company that all of the business units at Nike worked together on anything.

So what we did was we had Nike basketball (which was its own business), Nike sportswear (which is the lifestyle product that Nike sells as its own business), we had Converse (it’s a sub-brand of Nike), and Brand Jordan all coming together to celebrate this moment. Now at the time, we thought it was the most natural thing to do. The company had never done this. There were no muscles or processes in place or guardrails around, “How do we work together as all these brands and still be all these brands inside of its own campaign?” And so we were making that happen as we went along.

And if anybody’s worked at a big company, you can kind of understand where the challenge kind of sits with that. With different brands having their own point of view of how they show up, and how they design product, and how they do all these different things. And some of these brands are kind of competitive to each other too. Nike basketball and Brand Jordan look at each other as kind of like, “Yeah, we’re on the same team, but we’re sort of competitors too.” So now you’re also trying to get these guys to play in a sandbox together where, in their minds, they really shouldn’t be playing in the same sandbox.

And so all of that we were working through while on a crazy timeline to make product and marketing campaigns and getting retailers to adopt it. On top of it, at the time, Nike was really scared of it. They were really afraid of it. And I remember it had to get run all the way up to the CEO of the company. Because we were all just a bunch of like brand managers running around the organization going, “Let’s do this. Come on, everybody, let’s do this.” You know? And we got a lot of permission and support to do it.

The CEO was nervous about it at first. But when they kind of understood a little bit more about what we were doing, the storytelling that we were putting around it, the charitable give-back component that we wanted to have in place, and really have the product and what we were selling embedded as a service to the community, then they got a little bit more comfortable with it. The program worked really well and it continues to run.

If you look in the NBA right now, you’ll see Nike’s athletes wearing their Black History Month product, you will see them wearing the Black History Month t-shirts and things, and warmups on the sideline with the logo that we created for this program years and years ago.

Whatever you do in marketing, you’ve got to align your strategy behind what’s important for the business, okay? So if the business cares about revenue, you’ve got to align your strategy behind, what are the tactics that we’re going to do to drive revenue? If it’s about profit, what are we going to do to drive profit? And I think as marketers, we have to be really diligent about understanding what the different pieces that we do actually drive.

Content drives something different than awareness-driving campaigns do. And so as you’re going through, you’re clear on what it is that we’re trying to move, and that justifies why we’re doing this type of execution. I am a little bit… in terms of our marketing metrics, awareness, consideration, all that stuff we usually talk about… I think it’s important for marketers to know the difference between driving the business and marketing effectiveness. Because the two things are not always the same thing.

You’ve got to know within your company what the appetite is for the marketing effectiveness story. Do they care about awareness and consideration or not? You know. I’ve worked, especially in consulting, with some companies that care about that a lot and others that are like, “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know why this helps us. I don’t know why we’re looking at it.”

Lyft was a little bit like that, to be honest. They were tracking the marketing effectiveness, but at the end of the day, the president of the company would look at us and say, “Yeah, we got all these impressions. Yeah, our consideration and our awareness is up, but what does that give me as a business? Like, why do I care?”

Gabriel: Yeah, I can’t say that. I can’t say that to the bank.

Lisel: Yeah. Why do I care about that at all, right? And so it becomes really important to align what you’re doing very tightly to those objectives that matter. Going back to the “knowing how you’re going to measure it on the other side” and tell the story of the success of what you’re doing becomes really, really important.

So I’ll give you an example of something we did at Lyft. We’re getting into our second billboard campaign at Lyft and we’d sort of, we had seen some good signals after our first billboard at campaign – which I would say was okay, but organizationally and structurally, it didn’t come together as well as we wanted to. But we did see increases in app downloads in some of the markets that we ran our billboards. So we know that there’s some warm feelings here. So we go out and we do our second campaign. Much better campaign – we blow the doors off of it. Like it’s one of those… like it all launches on like Monday, you know, we’ve all been there as marketers and you get like over billions of impressions. We’re in Times Square, right? We’re doing all this stuff. And the CEO looks at me, he goes, “So we’ve got all these impressions, but what do I get for it?“ And so it’s running and we’re getting some good signals. And then what we get for it really shows up later.

Gabriel: There is an aspect of when you see a brand everywhere you go, “Okay, this is… Wow, they’re serious and they have a presence.”

Holly: So Lisel, some of the things that I think you’ve helped us think about in a different way that was so compelling is this idea of a marketer being so much closer to the business and the operational story and needs of the business. What do you do to coach and build teams who get that? And how do we actually embed that knowledge in people?

I can tell you the last company I worked for does wave division multiplexing, and in six years, I never understood what the bejesus that is. I mean, you know, there are cases where people come in and it’s pretty obvious like, “This is Lululemon.” Not complicated. But I think marketers often can mistake a true understanding of the brand for a true understanding of the business. And you are really passionate about that. Would you tell us, how do you bring that education forward and make it matter?

Lisel: Okay, so some of the things we do… and I’ve worked primarily in D2C companies. So I’ve done a little bit of work with B2B, so I’m going to caveat some of this and say I know that it’s different.

Holly: Good point. It is a different motion.

Lisel: It’s a little bit different depending on where you’re sitting.

The first thing I like to tell people is you’ve got to recognize what drives the business. And what I mean by this is what kinds of functions. So if you’ve ever worked for a media company, I worked for Bleacher Report for a while, you recognize how important the sales organization is to you, right? To your business. Because what they do is they bring in the advertisers who generate the revenue. They are hugely important, okay? But it’s different if you work at Nike. Nike’s all about their brand, and so that’s what is the engine behind it. If you work at Google, the engineers and the new innovation that they pump out is the key to the success of the business.

So first and foremost, no matter where you are, figure out what are the functions that really drive the business. Because what you’ve got to do is recognize, at that moment you’re probably sitting in support of what those functions do. And everything you do is going to come back to, do you make their lives easier? Or in the case of like a Google with engineering and technology, are you helping to introduce that technology to people in the best way? In the case of a media company, are you making it easier for them to actually sell in what they sell in to advertisers to come and pay and be a part of this? So you’ve got to have that in the back of your mind – this is what moves my business and we’ve got to make sure that these critical functions are taken care of.

Once you have that buy-in, once you get that credibility inside your organization, yeah, go off. Do your TV spots, do your content experiments, and play around and find other ways that you can support the growth of the business. I think most companies work in that way. Once you prove, once you show that you can deliver success for the organization in the way that matters for the organization, you get a lot more leeway to do a lot of other things.

I always think, no matter what level you’re coming into a company but especially at a leadership level, it’s really important to bring that to mind. And Gabe, you had asked me what I thought went wrong with Nike at the beginning. I think that’s part of it. They’ve recently transitioned to a new CEO who is a long-time Nike guy. And the person they had before, was there for four years, sounds like he was a very nice guy, but he has a very different sort of background. He came in with a very strong point of view on how the business needed to evolve, walked away from too many of the things that the business was successful in, couldn’t prove success in the areas that were critical for Nike to prove success.

Gabriel: He came from a tech background, right?

Lisel: Yeah, he did.

Gabriel: So on paper it looked like the right strategy. Okay, we need to be digital first, we need to be involved more in tech. It kind of made sense on paper. What are some of the things then that you think he lost sight of?

Lisel: Well, I think this goes back to what drives the business, right? Like everybody wants to be a tech company these days. And in a lot of ways, every company is. But there are they’re tech companies that are Google and there are tech companies that are not really tech companies. Nike is one of those.

Nike is a retailer. First and foremost, that’s what they are. They’re not a tech company. They can use technology very well to execute what their vision is and the business they try to be in, but they’re not actually a tech company. So that’s where I think things start to go wrong. He tried to build it into something that resembled a lot more of a tech company without understanding enough of the bare bones of what works.

So if you follow them along and see kind of what happened, it was this pull towards DTC, bringing all the consumers to the Nike channels. Which in theory sounds right, except they’re a big, huge, massive company, right? They make billions and billions of dollars a year – 40 plus billion dollars a year in revenue. If you reduce your distribution channels, where’s that revenue going to come from? Because that’s one of the tenets of retail. If you want to grow your business, you usually have to grow the distribution channels that you’re in.

So right away you see a problem. He’s talking about increasing revenue by reducing the amount of distribution channels we’re in. Which kind of flies in the face of what is successful retail. And you saw that. And just in doing that move, it also shows that he maybe didn’t quite understand the switching costs for consumers in a retail business like Nike’s, where they sell sneakers and socks and t-shirts.

In tech, switching costs can be high, right? To switch from an Apple phone to a Pixel phone is a little bit of cost for a consumer. You’ve got to get a new plan, and download all your stuff, and spend like three days or a week or longer transferring it. I just got a new computer, I didn’t even switch brands, it took me like two weeks to get it set up.

So when you’re in the tech business, there can be a high switching cost from one brand to another. But in the world of sneakers and apparel, it’s…

Gabriel: Right. Apple can decide to control its distribution more if it wants. And it’s probably a bad example because Apple does have wide distribution, because it knows it needs to be with all the wireless. But the point being, it can create more of its own DTC business.

Lisel: It can. And so Nike pulled out of a lot of stores, shrunk their retail footprint. Switching costs are not very high. Consumers will walk into those stores and be like, “Oh, there’s no Nike running shoes I can buy. Okay, I’ll buy this other one from Adidas then since I’m here.” Right? Switching cost is really low. And then they left space in the marketplace for competitors to come in. You can track the growth of brands like Hoka and On to this strategy for Nike.

Gabriel: Really?

Lisel: They basically left the door open for all those brands to take that space and then chip away at Nike’s market share in those.

Gabriel: Which is interesting, because if you were talking to someone from P&G and Unilever, the battle is always first and foremost for shelf space.

Lisel: Absolutely.

Gabriel: It’s like, how can we work with groceries and retailers to… you know, we’ve got one brand extension and we need to convince the retailer why they should be adding that brand and replacing someone else.

Lisel: This just started to create a lot of problems for Nike. They were relying on the algorithm to tell them what their volumes were going to be for sales, but that didn’t quite work. And you saw inventory levels quarter after quarter rising and rising and rising. Because the algorithm’s not predicting it well enough. Because the algorithm can’t play with cool, right? Which is the space that Nike likes to exist in, and people don’t want to buy something just because a lot of people bought it a week ago. They want something cool, and different, and interesting, and unique, and stylish, and says their thing, and da da da, and trend matters and all these things that an algorithm can’t pick up.

Gabriel: But that’s also where the distribution strategy was really important, because when you’ve got a huge distribution network, you can unload some of that excess product or inventory to the distribution network.

Lisel: And then you have, where every retailer goes when you have too much inventory, now you’re on sale. Now you’re on sale and everything’s on sale. And all of a sudden said premium product – Nike thinks of itself as a premium brand – has a lot of stuff on sale and that doesn’t look premium at all. And now you’re messing with margin and now the wheels are starting to come off the bus, right?

So it’s just a matter of, do you understand what drives this business? The third thing on the pulling out of the wholesale, it puts you on a futures business as well. The retailers buy the product six months ahead of time. So you can predict your business really well that way.

Holly: Good point.

Gabriel: Forecasting.

Lisel: And so it creates all these problems. He was probably a very nice guy, but there are dynamics that drive this business that you’ve got to really understand. And then he messed with the brand on the other side too. And so he messed with probably the biggest asset the company has.

There’s a difference between being data-supported and data-driven. So what that means is you can take in a lot of data and information like an algorithm might. You can take in a lot of information, but somebody still has to make a decision. Because the data won’t necessarily always tell you the right thing to do, but it can certainly give you a lot of input into the decision that you have to make.

As long as you are saying, “I’m reading this data, I’m looking at it, and I’m going to follow kind of where the data is leading me or not.”, you at least are doing it with a conviction of knowing where it is you might want to go.

I remember I had this conversation with my CEO at Bleacher Report because we had all these metrics we were chasing towards while we were there across different functions. You can also get into that space where we had… one group was supposed to drive to one metric, but if they made that metric, it actually caused another metric to go down, which was the goal of another group. So now you’re like, “Okay, now we’re doing things to cancel each other out. So this doesn’t feel like it’s the…” But this is what the data was telling you to do.

And I looked at him and I said, “We have all these metrics and if we hit all of these metrics, what have we done?” And he’s like, “What?” I’m like, “What have we accomplished if we hit all these metrics?” And he’s like, “Right.” You don’t know, right? And it was a true moment for him in realizing, “Wait a minute, we’re just chasing to numbers, and we don’t know what these numbers are for or what they do, and if they’re even really the right things to think about to drive our business.

So that’s what I mean by being data-supported versus data-driven. If you’re always just following the data, the data may not lead you to the place you need to go. So use the data to inform the decision.

Gabriel: I think that also gets to a conversation about insights as well, right? Where you start to lean on so much data that you forget what it means sometimes to be a marketer and actually get out into the field and talk to customers and see how they behave.

Lisel: Back in the days of Lyft, we were looking at people who chose to ride with Lyft and Uber, who both had the app on their phone. We could see through just… FYI, if you want to know how much we know, everybody knows about us… we knew that there were people who had the Lyft and Uber app on their phones and were riding with both services.

So we wanted to know why they might choose Lyft on one occasion and why they might choose Uber on another. And so I was meeting with one of our people from our engineering team and talking to this guy and he’s like, “I’ve looked at all the data and I just don’t see a pattern here. I just don’t see why they’re switching back and forth and what’s driving their decision.” And I looked at him and I said, “Well, we could ask them.” And he looked at me like I had four heads. I’m like, “There are people on the other side of these numbers. If you want to understand why they’re making a decision, we could actually just ask them. You could put together a survey and actually ask them the very question you’re looking for the answer to.” You could survey them, you could focus group. There’s all kinds of things you can do. We know who they are. We have their email addresses. We could just ask them.

It never dawned on him to actually talk to people. And I think as marketers, we always have to remember… yes, we’re trying to drive our business and I just gave that whole thing a second ago… but there are real people, like real actual people on the other side of these numbers. It’s actually real people that are clicking on your ads or looking at your TV spots, actual real people. And there is a time and a moment where you can talk to them and gain real insight that way. The guy actually ends up taking my advice and goes away and does his survey and comes back, and it was like a whole new panacea had been opened to him.

Gabriel: Do you remember the why?

Lisel: I think it came down to things like wait time. Nothing that marketing could really impact. Yeah, it was about wait time and there were a couple of things. There are certain scenarios that people prefer to ride Uber rather than Lyft. So there was some insight that we could play with, but it was much more operational. It wasn’t about messaging or anything like that. It was more of, “Okay, organization, here’s some things we need to address.”

Holly: Well, and that right there is a really powerful answer because you would have been throwing good money after bad as trying to ask marketing to solve what is either an operational problem, or perhaps a product problem, or an experience problem. And oftentimes… guys, you’ve seen us all… marketing gets asked to solve problems that are not a marketing problem.

Lisel: Yeah.

Holly: Sometimes marketing can solve it and many times it can’t. And so that deeper dig is crucial. They would have spent money where they wouldn’t have gotten it back.

Lisel: It’s crucial. And I think sometimes companies are uncomfortable doing that. It’s easier to say, if we just do more marketing to our current customers or new customers, we’re going to get them all in. But if you’re not willing to ask the tough questions and really get into it, I think it gets hard. I’ve always admired companies that… if there’s a metric they’re going to rally around… companies that I feel like rally around NPS tend to do a better job because it’s a more holistic way to measure your business, right? It’s NPS of everything and you can dig into it, right?

Holly: At Landor, we used to call that esteem. You can have full knowledge of a brand, you can feel brand is highly relevant to you, it’s highly differentiated – check, check, check. However, if I don’t esteem the brand, if there isn’t positive energy moving with that brand, I will make another choice. Is that kind of what you’re getting to?

Lisel: Yeah, basically. You can dig into all the different reasons why somebody does or does not choose you and be really, really thoughtful as a business on what it is you need to impact to improve.

Now, one of the things I’ve seen kind of go wrong for people is they hold certain functions precious inside their organization, and they don’t want to address it. I bumped into an apparel company that they sort of never want to say anything bad to the guy who is the creative director for the apparel and they also have a retention problem. As a marketer, if I hear retention problem, I go to the product. Why after buying our stuff are they not coming back again? If we’re not willing to ask the question of the product, we’re not really truly interested in solving it. We’re trying to get marketing to solve a problem that might not be marketing’s problem to solve. Here’s some money marketing, run some more email campaigns and all this other side of stuff.

At the end of the day, if you’re going to put your head in the sand and not really be willing to ask the question that may solve the problem, the problem doesn’t get solved. As it would happen in this company, I’ve been hearing from them for four years about their retention problem.

Sometimes organizations are precious about their tech work, their engineering work. At Stitch Fix they were super precious about the algorithm and the algorithm’s team and that whole infrastructure that was built. But at the same time, the best stylists in the company were ones when you ask them, “Why are you such a good stylist? How do you get such good satisfaction ratings for the consumer?”, they would say, “Because we know how to get around the algorithm.” Okay, so if we’re not willing to really look at it and say, “Well, why doesn’t the algorithm work better?”, “Why do we have to have the stylist if the algorithm’s so great?”, and “Why is their excellence driven by their ability to get around it?”, then you’re not really looking to answer the question.

Gabriel: We can have a long debate about the merits of NPS and it’s actual connection to sales, but that’s because of my business school professor – shout out to Neil Morgan, who’s a huge skeptic of it – and the other day, as well, some post actually showing how it’s uncorrelated… but that’s for another episode. I think the biggest benefit of NPS, because it’s been so widespread, is this idea that it can be a unifying metric that cross-functional leaders can all then ladder up to.

Lisel: Yeah.

Gabriel: Which then forces some collaboration and forces functions to work with each other. A great example of this coming into play was at Comcast when, years ago, they came out with the Xfinity brand and the Future of Awesome campaign. I mean, spent millions and millions on that Future of Awesome campaign, yet when you picked up the phone and called customer service, your experience at Comcast was everything but the future of awesome. And it was NPS that created the sense of alignment.

They knew they needed to fix the experience as well. And so the different executives were all then compensated on NPS. The VP of Ops, who was in charge of the call centers, essentially started working with the VP of Brand. They started to look at the NPS data and started to see that the biggest reason for lower NPS scores were because of questions related to the bill. Like, “I don’t understand my bill. Why am I being charged for this?” And so that then led to a six-month project that was cross-functional where you had the brand team embedded within finance and IT, where they started to look at the bill and started to, “Okay, how do we create a clearer bill so that we get less of these calls?”

Lisel: Yeah.

Gabriel: And lo and behold, they went and did that and improved the NPS score. So just a little kind of tangible example of the importance of having alignment around a metric.

Lisel: Yeah, I think so. I know in our world today, there’s a lot of metric-driven strategy and organization. One of the things I always hold onto as a leader of a group is that your metrics tell you if you’ve accomplished your goal. The metrics themselves aren’t the goal.

I’ve just bumped into enough times in my career where people chase the metric and it doesn’t work in service of the business. It’s part of why I kind of like NPS because it’s sort of very transparent in how it helps you as an organization, but it’s also very transparent where kind of the holes are. So you can kind of see it for what it is and kind of, to your point, Gabe, take it apart and dig in a little bit deeper and figure out what’s going on. It sort of tells you that something might be going on versus “Here’s the answer.”

Holly: Yeah. It’s like the inflammation marker when you take a blood test.

Lisel: Absolutely. That’s kind of why I like it as a metric, if you’re going to rally people around it. But yeah, I literally sat in a situation where we were talking about the effectiveness of a television campaign and I asked the people who were playing the media why it is that we didn’t go on any video VOD services – “We’re not on Hulu, any on demand. Why didn’t we place the spot there at all?” And they said, “Because we can’t measure that.”

Holly: Just throw out the baby with the bath water.

Lisel: Yeah, because the goal was some metric on the other side. “It doesn’t work with our metric measuring system that we have. So we’re not going to do that.” The goal had become the metric, right? Secondary as to whether or not your consumer is there and if this is the right… like that wasn’t what we were working towards. We’re working towards this metric.

Gabriel: I still think that’s the single biggest danger, as it relates to our profession in general, this notion of saying, “Because we can’t measure it, we’re not going to do it.”

Lisel: There was a pretty famous example at Nike. It was around the time where the company was about a $16 billion company – this was shortly after I joined – and they were talking about the push to $23 billion. And so they thought that they were going to get to $23 billion in about five to seven years. And the president of the company, this guy Charlie Denson was running around a lot and he was talking about this $23 billion number. At all hands meetings, all the stuff.

After about a year or two into the strategy, weird things started to happen. Our retail partners like Foot Locker, we’re doing not great things with them. Making really not up to Nike standard level product and just selling it in. Really letting those retailers kind of push us around a bit in what our marketing campaigns should be. And when they unpacked it and really came down to it, it was about that $23 billion number. It was about these guys saying, “We need to get revenue. And so if we make, not our premium stuff, but our lower-end, kinda don’t put as much love into it kind of product, and sell that. And Foot Locker’s gonna buy a lot of that. So let’s do it.”

And now all of a sudden we have a lot of this sort of lower-end product in the marketplace eroding your brand, right? Like all the things. And the president, to his credit, realized. He’s like, “Oh, I’ve been talking about this $23 billion too much. That’s what’s going on.” And he literally stopped talking about it. He literally stopped talking about the number and started talking about the business goals that we actually had. About we want to increase our market share, or we want to be in more retail stores, we want to serve these new types of consumers. Which were all sorts of strategies that were sitting underneath that chase to $23 billion. And those started to be the things that he talked about. New retail formats. Can we create new retail formats instead of selling cheap product to our retailers? Can we partner with them on new concepts that help both their business and our business?

All those things were strategies that sat underneath the $23 billion. And he just walked away from the $23 billion. And Nike actually hit the number, I think it was a year or two ahead of schedule, right? And so if you have confidence in your plan, you’ll be able to make it to the number objective that you’re chasing.

Holly: That feels very John Wooden for Nike, which is so apropos. That if we focus on wins, we’re going to miss all of the growth and the mechanics and the strategy.

I mean, it’s going back to the way Google thinks. Google wants a moonshot or they want to 10x things, not so that people go spinning and waste resources, but because if you’re trying to iterate and get just a bit better on something, you’ll use your existing playbook. But if you have to make something 10x better, you’ve got to throw out the playbook and start over. And it’s a little bit like that within the sports and athlete mentality as well. If all I’m doing out there on that tennis court is focusing on winning, winning, winning, I’m not playing strategic tennis, I’m not thinking about ball placement and dynamics.

Would you say that that almost was like you guys had to go back to the fundamentals of what makes teams great, what makes coaches great, what makes competitors great?

Lisel: Absolutely. And I remember being there and seeing that shift happen because there was a lot of pressure. Like everybody was sort of feeling the pressure for this $23 billion. And when Charlie stopped talking about it, it all felt like, “Okay, let’s just go back to connecting with consumers.” Let’s just go back to delighting them a little bit. Let’s get out of this like hell we’re sort of in with Foot Locker right now. And get back to doing what drives our business and thinking about creative ways we can expand on the things that work.

I think the other thing that you have to be careful of with the metric thing is that if you do something with the goal of hitting a metric and you don’t get there, everything kind of gets thrown out – “Oh, that was the wrong thing to do.” But that may not always be the case. You always, I think, have to look at it and say, “Okay, we didn’t get there. So what went wrong?” Was it the wrong strategy? Or was it the wrong execution? Or maybe it was both, right? I think when you don’t hit the metric, a lot of times companies just throw the whole thing out and don’t do the analysis.

One of the greatest examples, I think – and this is not one I was a part of, I have a couple that I was a part of – in marketing history is Apple and the iPod, right? The thing that came before the iPod is the Newton. Does anybody remember the Newton? No, because it was a huge failure for Apple. It was sort of like a handheld computer sort of situation that Apple was really excited about and they launched it and it flopped. It totally flopped. But if you talk to any of those long-time Apple people, they will tell you that the Newton was the precursor to the iPod. Because the Newton didn’t work and so they were like, “Okay, why is this bombing? We thought this was going to be this big thing.” And they go in and they do the work of figuring out, was it the strategy or was it the execution? And what they realized was that the strategy was actually pretty good. It was the execution that was the problem. So let’s go back and try this thing again. Let’s see if we can take this concept with this new insight that we have from this failure and run the same strategy and come up with something different. And then it’s the iPod and “Oh my god, yeah, that is freaking amazing.” and we all know what that is, right? We don’t know what the Newton is, but we all know what the iPod is.

I think companies that embrace risk, that really sit in a space of innovation, understand that. That sometimes it’s not going to work. And that doesn’t mean that you have to walk away from all of it.

Gabriel: So it’s been such a great conversation. Before we wrap up, I’d love you to just talk a little bit about some of your… What are some of your core leadership principles? You know, aspects of your belief system in your career at work. Whether it’s leading teams or related to how you think as a brand marketer.

Lisel: As marketers, we work in service of others. And so first and foremost, our work must work in service of the consumer. I am a big… you know your consumer, you understand the insight, you understand the value you bring into their life… and those are the things that you center your marketing work around. We talked about moments and how you align a calendar, but ultimately the execution, the asset, whatever you’re creating has to serve what it is that the consumer needs. So that’s on the marketing side. I always bring people back to the consumer.

From a leadership standpoint, I’m big on diversity as a principal, and that’s not just about ethnicity and gender and background, but also ways of thinking and ways of working. I think the best teams are the ones where we have a lot of different skill sets. As a leader, I do it a lot, where I’ll partner people together to work on a project. Largely because either one needs to learn from the other or they have complementary skills that when you put them together they’re going to be really fantastic.

The other thing is, I think we all do better in our jobs when it feels like we’re skiing downhill. You know that feeling when you’re skiing downhill, where like your adrenaline’s pumping, and you’re not falling down, you’re like in control, you’re not about to crash, and it just feels great. And the winds in your hair, and it’s sunny, and it’s bright, and it just feels awesome. I feel like everybody does their job better when they’re in that situation. So when I first come into teams, I try to assess what are the skills and strengths everybody has. And let’s make sure whatever work you’re doing is leveraging your skills more than your weaknesses. Because you’re going to be happier and you’re going to do better work. You’re going to feel like you’re skiing downhill.

And sometimes it’s a mystery to people as to why I do it that way. They end up in roles and they scratch their heads, and then six months later they’re like, “Oh yeah, this is way better than what I was doing before.” For example, when I came to Lyft, there was a guy on my team, Austin, wonderful guy who was doing a number of different things. He was doing entertainment marketing, working with celebrities and movie stars, and all that sort of stuff on partnerships. He was doing some event activations. He was doing some performance marketing initiatives. He was doing a bunch of different things.

And I said to him, “Austin, we’re going to focus you on entertainment marketing. We’re going to split up this partnership thing into entertainment marketing. You’re going to focus on all these fancy people, movie stars, TV shows, all that stuff. You’re going to live in that world. And we’re going to have somebody else come in and do corporate partnerships.” At first he was a little bent out of shape because he thought I had like demoted him, because he felt like he was doing all this stuff and now he’s not doing as much stuff. Now it’s focused in. And I told him, I was like, “You know why you’re going to do this?” And he’s like, “Why?” I’m like, “Because you’re the coolest guy I know.” And he laughed at me. I’m like, “You’re totally the coolest guy I know.” He used to be a drummer in a band and he like wore his hair a certain way. I’m like, “This is the world you need to go and run around in, okay? You’re going to click with these folks, you’re going to get along with them, and all the other things that you want.” He was really eager to be a good strategist and these other things. I’m like, “You can do that within your function.” And he was one of those people who, yeah, he did that, and then six months later, he’s like, “Oh my god, not only do I love this, but I’m learning all the things, and the executions and the work I’m doing is so much better.” Like he was so much happier with this focus and he didn’t even know that was coming.

Meanwhile, the person who had taken the other half of the partnerships, the corporate partnerships, like you couldn’t imagine anybody else doing that role. And she was a completely different person, right? Very buttoned up, suit and tie, and like, you know, running around with T-Mobile and Starbucks and talking to those folks and very corporate. Like in the best possible way, right? So it was perfect.

And so I do that a lot with teams. Let’s make sure you’re aligned with your strengths and the things you’re going to be good at. I want the folks that work for me to own their work. It’s really important. I don’t need any more accolades. I’m good. Right? So you guys need to, you guys need to own your work – that’s both the positive and the negative. My job is to kind of help steer you right or left, but it’s all yours. So you write the plans, you write the strategy, you lead your executions, and you get to write the recap at the end and present it back to everybody. For better and for worse.

I’m going to support you along the way, but that’s the key because it ties to the last thing, which is – everything you do should be the best thing you’ve ever done. I said that once to an employee and he was like, “What?” I’m like, “No, no, no, hold on, hold on. I’ll break it down. You look terrified right now.” And I said, “Listen, you should learn from everything that you’re doing. So every time you do an execution, you need to think in your mind, ‘If I was doing this again, what are the things that I would do better?’ And then the next time, apply those learnings.” I’m like, “I’m your boss. I’m going to help you with this. You’re not alone on this journey, but I want you to have that mentality that I’m going to learn from everything I do and I’m going to get better. And so, therefore, everything you do should be the best thing you’ve ever done.”

Gabriel: There’s something you said when we were talking before the recording, which I think takes all of these mantras and I think sums it all up in one line… these were your words… you create success for people and they’ll say yes to anything you ask them for.

Lisel: Yeah, that’s my collaboration approach. I guess I could have put that in there. I was thinking about team leadership. When you’re collaborating across organizations, it can be hard to get people to buy into new ideas or change the way that they’re working. So one of the things that I do believe is if you create success for others, people will always be open and receptive to what it is you’re trying to do. They may not always be able to say yes, but they’re at least gonna hear you out. And if they can say yes, they’re much more likely to do it. And they’re much more likely to walk into spaces that they’re even uncertain about because you’ve built a level of trust together. You’re not here to just pull one over on them.

One of the examples, I think the one that I told you guys before, was about a woman we worked with at Nike.She was in comms and she was relatively young in her career – was probably a comms manager at the time. And for Black History Month we were having a discussion with one of our board directors, John Thompson (legendary basketball coach from Georgetown who was on the board of directors), and as we were putting it together we’re like, “You know what, he’s going to do this like talk in front of the whole campus, in front of the whole company, because we would televise those things to people who are at satellite offices. And we really should have a professional. It shouldn’t be me. Let’s have somebody who knows how to interview people and ask these types of questions. We should get a comms person.”

So this woman, Alana Finley… we said, “Let’s ask Alana to do it. She’d be pretty great. And she’s a woman and John Thompson’s this six-foot-10 man, he’s enormous, and just the visual of her with him, with like a man and a woman on stage. And it’ll be great. It’ll be great.” So we ask her to do it and she says yes. She’s a little nervous about it, but she says yes. Next thing that happens is the chief communications officer at Nike, this gentleman by the name of Nigel, gets wind of the fact that she’s been asked to do this. Because the Black Employee Network’s not on anybody’s like concept map calendar of events that’s happening, right? This is just internal company love stuff. And she tells us that he calls her for a meeting and says, “I hear you’re interviewing Coach Thompson.” And proceeds to talk to her about how to do this well. And then proceeds, leading up to the event, to coach her and mentor her on how to do this well.

Big day comes, everybody piles into the auditorium, and Alana and Coach Thompson are there. And I look into the audience and who do I see sitting front and center, Chief Communications Officer Nigel Powell. He’s sitting there with a bunch of the senior leaders from comms, all there to support her as well. And so she goes through this whole thing. She does a great job. She has great energy on the stage, asks her questions well. Just great all the way around.

And afterwards she comes up to myself and this gentleman, Julian, who was putting this together with me, and says, “This changed my life.” She’s like, “I’m sitting with Nigel and I’m talking to him.” She’s like, “You guys don’t even know this, but I worship coach Thompson. Like I admired him growing up. And now here I am talking to him.” And she looks at us and says, “Anything you ever want from me in the future, just ask. I will do it.”

We created success for her. And I’ve always taken that when I’m thinking about cross-collaborative work, because that’s what you need to do. Everybody needs to walk away from the table feeling like they won and that their efforts not only benefited the people that they’re working with, but benefited themselves as well.

Holly: Nice.

Gabriel: Thank you so much for being on today and being with us and sharing all the knowledge and experience. I think, like we said before, it’s all these things that you just can’t learn in a textbook, it’s just through lived experience.