The advice for the three well-known brands is the same: return to their origins, their culture, their strengths. However, they lost their way by prioritizing commercial decisions. All three cases.
The advice from experts for all three companies seems to be the same: new leaders need to get these companies back to what made them great. It seems like a sensible recommendation, but it’s also incredibly difficult to achieve.
Generally, most large companies do not have a precise understanding of what makes them great. Whether they call it their superpowers, right to win, or core competencies, most leaders lack a concise and accurate understanding of their organization’s unique capabilities .
Defining strengths
Leaders will say they know their organizations’ strengths, but they struggle when asked to write them down on a list. Too many rely on company folklore, advertising slogans, or nostalgia. And without a clear view of their own strengths, companies start to stray for what seem like good business reasons. That makes returning to greatness that much harder.
Each of these three companies is particularly great at something. Boeing excels at reliable execution. Starbucks builds deep relationships. And Nike wins through innovation.
But over the past decade, these companies have tried to be good at something else. To boost profits, Boeing tried to rely on partner relationships. To drive traffic, Starbucks went overboard with innovation. And to improve performance, Nike focused on execution. The results speak for themselves.
Boeing: Outsourcing degraded execution
Boeing’s strengths lie in reliability and execution. These are broken down into a number of more specific capabilities that other companies don’t have. Boeing isn’t the most agile or customer-focused organization, but it is very reliable. It measures twice and cuts once, or at least it used to.
More than a decade ago, the company decided to make changes that had more to do with financial engineering than aerospace. It outsourced swaths of its production needs to an ecosystem of outside suppliers. The idea was that Boeing could spin off the least profitable parts of its operations and then work with those entities as partners. It was a well-worn, Wall Street-approved playbook for cutting costs and boosting profits.
Of course, managing relationships with a vast network of partners is not something Boeing is good at. The move directly undermined its main strength: tight internal control over every aspect of manufacturing. Years later, Boeing suffered two fatal accidents and multiple high-profile mechanical mishaps. The company’s reputation (and its stock price) plummeted.
Starbucks: Innovation eroded relationships
Starbucks isn’t built on coffee, it’s built on the care between its baristas and customers. Starbucks offers people a “third place” to spend time outside of home and work. That dynamic fell apart during the pandemic when quarantine kept everyone at home. Starbucks’ response to returning to in-person was to try to drive more traffic to its stores and focus on product innovation.
The result was an ever-expanding menu with innovative products such as coffee infused with olive oil. By some estimates, customers now have 170,000 ways to customize their drinks. But this drive for innovation has undermined its core strengths: stores are noisier, wait times are longer, and overworked baristas don’t have time to connect with customers.
Nike: Performance stifled innovation
Nike is one of the most creative companies on the planet. The company comes up with amazing new products for the world’s best athletes, and then shares those innovations with customers. Its marketing and merchandising campaigns make us sit up and take notice.
But innovation is messy and far from efficient. So CEO John Donahoe , who came from eBay, set out to improve margins and ramp up execution. Instead of coming up with new breakthroughs, Nike turned to selling versions of its most famous sneakers, like the Air Jordan 1 and the Dunk. As uninspiring versions of old classics saturated the market, Nike lost its cool factor and ceded market share to upstart brands like Hoka.
Discover the priority
Boeing, Starbucks, and Nike are all great companies run by very smart people. And the intentions behind these moves were the right ones. Boeing needed to cut costs. Starbucks needed to find ways to drive traffic. And Nike needed to improve its execution.
But these challenges should have been solved by leveraging the company’s strengths rather than detracting from them. A big part of being great is knowing what you can’t do well as well as what you can.
Without that understanding, leaders can be seduced by generic advice from outside consultants. Or worse, try to apply the same playbook that worked at their last company. That’s like blindly trying to cure a stomach ache with the neighbor’s medicine cabinet. The pills you find probably aren’t going to be the right ones. They might even make you worse.
Renaissance over reinvention
Times change and companies need to evolve. But the success of returning to greatness is almost always based on reviving company cultures rather than reinventing them. Every company has its good days and its bad days. Success comes from having your best days every day.
Satya Nadella didn’t make Microsoft great again by making it more like Google. He made it more like Microsoft, a company whose excellence lies in cultivating strong customer relationships in B2B technology environments. He recognized that a company’s greatness lies in what it does better than others.
Similarly, the new CEOs of Boeing, Nike, and Starbucks need to first acknowledge what they don’t know and keep asking questions until they truly understand what makes their companies great and how they went astray. It’s an encouraging sign, for example, that Starbucks’ new CEO, Brian Niccol , announced the suspension of financial forecasts for 2025 to give him time to assess the business. And Kelly Ortberg , Boeing’s new CEO, decided to live in Seattle, where the planes are built, rather than Chicago, where the company’s headquarters have moved.
Boeing will likely have to bring much of its production back into the fold, while Nike will likely have to kick-start its innovation engine. Those kinds of changes will undoubtedly hurt the bottom line in the short term. Investors may not want to hear that, but its greatness didn’t come easy in the first place, and neither will it be to get it back.
