The lesson is: if you focus on profits instead of building great products, you will fail (unless you have vendor lock-in like defense industry and the DOD, or Microsoft and enterprise). Nike brought in a bean-counter to run the company and he severely damaged it.
I know from close friends at Nike that they are relieved Donahoe is gone and they can get back to being a "high performance sports footwear company", but they have a big hole to dig out of. On and Hoka have been eating their lunch. Nike has always had smaller specialized brands to contend with: Brooks, Asics, Saucony, Salomon (trail running, which Nike dropped but is now getting back into), etc., but none of them exploded the way that On and Hoka did when Nike pulled back from retail.
I know from close friends at Nike that they are relieved Donahoe is gone and they can get back to being a "high performance sports footwear company", but they have a big hole to dig out of. On and Hoka have been eating their lunch. Nike has always had smaller specialized brands to contend with: Brooks, Asics, Saucony, Salomon (trail running, which Nike dropped but is now getting back into), etc., but none of them exploded the way that On and Hoka did when Nike pulled back from retail.