Bjørn Gulden took over as CEO of Adidas last year. Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images
Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden has given his cell phone number to 60,000 of his employees.
Gulden said he did this in an effort to be more transparent.
“Some people think I’m crazy,” Gulden told the Wall Street Journal.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by an editor.
Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden shared his cell phone number with 60,000 employees at a town hall meeting to increase transparency at the company, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Adidas was going through a difficult period when Gulden, a former professional footballer, took the helm in January 2023.
The company had recently parted ways with rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, and had to do so in the last quarter of 2022 Operating loss of 724 million euros accept.
Kanye West und Gulden.
New York Daily New/Getty Images and TF-Images/Getty Images
“Some people think I’m crazy”
The first step Gulden took to get the company back on track was to try to address some of the transparency concerns that had also been raised by employees.
After giving out his phone number, Gulden said that for a while he was contacted about 200 times a week by employees asking him to make changes at the company.
“Some people think I’m crazy,” the Norwegian told the magazine, before adding that he thinks it’s important for leaders to be open.
Gulden previously spent nine years at Puma, where he was credited with leading an impressive sales turnaround that he now aims to replicate at Adidas.
After a year in which the company fell into disarray as a result of Ye’s anti-Semitic comments controversy was involved Sales declined and the Employees were dissatisfiedGulden said he knew it would be a challenge to turn the company around.
“There was a culture of finding reasons not to do things,” he said, adding that this was holding the company back.
The company is now on track to return to profitability this year
Similar to Puma, Gulden acted quickly at Adidas, first cutting off consultants who, according to the report, made decisions that industry experts would never make.
Gulden’s other changes included reintroducing sports such as cricket, which have loyal customers in large if specific markets such as India, streamlining communications at the top of the company so that he received more direct reports from department heads, and eliminating a cumbersome evaluation practice .
He said the company is now on track to return to profitability this year.
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Its main competitor, Nike, was number one in the industry for decades, but weaker sales caused the company’s share price to fall last year.
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Adidas did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment, which was made outside of normal working hours.
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