Mark King, the head of Adidas America, values innovation and empowering employees. He sees room to improve the company's culture, which already emphasizes these traits. King encourages new ideas through an online training program and projects that gather workers' input. Adidas strives to closely connect with customers through authentic brand experiences. It focuses on its core business of quality athletic products rather than diversifying widely. The company exhibits both unified purpose and diversity to promote innovation.

1. Adidas Culture
Paige Hamburger

2. Article Summary
• The article I picked was from forbes.com It focused mostly
on the new head of Adidas America, Mark King.
• King started out working for large well known sporting
companies such as Callaway Golf and Taylor Made
(President and VP)
• Once King came to Adidas in 2014 he saw that culture was
already predominant in the adidas business world but there
was tweaking that could be done.

3. Summary Continued
• Empowerment and
making a difference is
important to King and
the culture of Adidas.
• This article lays out a
bunch of different
topics we touched
upon in class

4. Concepts
• Overall I am going to be talking about the culture
of adidas. More specifically I will compare the
values adidas has and see how that matches up
with what we've seen in class. I am going to be
linking this article to Strong and Kennedy’s
“Strong Culture” and to Peters and Waterman’s
“Excellent Cultures”

5. Strong and Kennedy
(Values)
• As we learned in class, values are the
beliefs that flow throughout the whole
company and the message they are
sending.
• After reading my article I saw that
Adidas really values innovation. King
makes a point to finding new ideas by
utilizing all of the employees.
• A really cool/interesting point I found
was the employees access to Group
Innovation Academy. Basically what
this is is an online program where
employees can go too learn about
innovation and how it works, teaching
them to create an innovative mindset
and bringing that to the workplace.

6. Values Continued
• Once I heard about the innovation academy I got really excited
because I have never heard of a company having that as a
resource. Clearly adidas wants to help their employees reach their
maximum potential.
• Another value that was pretty apparent in the adidas culture was
Empowerment. Adidas and King make it clear that what you do in
the workplace has a bigger impact than one would think. Giving
employees the ackowledgment that what they're doing is making a
larger impact outside of the workplace means a lot.

7. Heroes
• It is clear that Mark King is one of the heroes at Adidas. As a
man who helped improve many successful companies of course
Adidas is going to look up to him.
• Becoming the new head of Adidas is a big deal considering
there are a lot of responsibilities and challenges that the new
head will have to deal with. King has been a great fit for the
company since 2014 and has helped increase their global
marketplace as well as strengthen the American one

8. Heroes
Continues
Another one of Adidas heroes would be their
employees. As it said in my article, the brand just
finished a project using the input from more than 400+
employees. Some other companies that I have looked
at wouldn't even consider taking their employees
suggestions. To go as far as using those suggestions in
a project says a lot about how the company values and
sees its employees

9. Rites and Rituals
• My article didn’t really tap into this. It didn’t mention anything really
that had to do with the rewarding of employees which brings me to
my next point explaining the cultural network

10. Cultural Network
• Adidas definelty has a classic approach to their
business style.
• With that being said, I believe that although the
company has a hiarchial manner, they still value
what the employees have to say. With innovation
being such a large part of Adidas, it only makes
sense that they value what their employees have
to say by giving them voice within the company.

11. Themes
• A few themes resonated with me while comparing Adidas to
Peters and Waterman’s Excellent Organizations.
• The first theme is: close relations to the customer
• When I saw this theme the first thing that came to mind was the
new campaign Adidas is running. The article talks about how
King has this idea to make the Ad campaign something people
can relate to. As stated in the article “King wants to create real
life experiences. Experiences that aren’t just buying
experiences, but brand experiences.” To achieve this, King is
implementing many ways for the brand to connect and be
geared towards the customer instead of the retailer.

12. Themes Continued
• The second theme that I compared was: Stick to the knitting.
This theme says that “Excellent organizations stay focused on
what they do best and avoid radical diversification.”
• Adidas knows that they're good at selling quality product,
keeping a good name for themselves and connecting with their
customers. Everything the company does is surrounded by
those ideas. In the article King says that to be the best globally
you have to be the best in America first. To me, this meant that
adidas is not trying to bite off more than they can chew. They
want to the best of the best and that starts off by being the best
in the originating country.
•

13. Themes Continued
• Another theme I want to touch on is: Simultaneous loose-tight properties
• The definition for this theme is “excellent organizations exhibit both unity
of purpose and the diversity necessary for innovation”
• This one particular quote from Mark King really stuck out to me, “Great
companies have great cultures.” King is aware that to be the best you
need to continue to have diversity and innovation. He speaks a lot about
the fact that he wants his employees to be innovative and create new
ideas.
• The fact that the company has the Innovation Academy says a lot to me
about the companies views on diversity.

14. Concepts
• I think a lot of the concepts
about culture we've learned in
class apply to adidas. I do
think that another article would
have helped me get the full
gist of the company but i
believe that a lot of Peters and
Waterman’s Excellent
Organizations apply to adidas.

15. Questions
• Innovation wise- What is the process of
submitting new ideas to higher up leaders?
• In what way does adidas help their employees
bring to life the ideas that get chosen?
• From a lower level employees standpoint- does
there feel like there’s a social or respect level
gap between the lower and higher up
employees?

16. Questions Continued
• Since this wasn't mentioned in my article, I would like to know
how the company rewards employees for impressive, over
achieving work?
• I would also like to know a little bit about their hiring process and
how they know if a person is going to be a good fit for the
company?

17. Future Ideas
• I would like to continue to research adidas and
find out more about how the company is ran.
Since adidas is such a well known brand nation/
worldwide I would like to see how the company
progresses each year in terms of customer
engagement and employee satisfaction. Not
only are the customers important but the
employees are just as important as well and I
would like to continue to track how adidas shows
that.

18. Works Cited
Phelps, S. (2015, April 15). Culture Is King: Three Ways
Adidas Is Striving to Build a Culture of Extraordinary.
Retrieved October 05, 2016, from http://www.forbes.com/
sites/stanphelps/2015/04/15/culture-is-king-three-ways-
adidas-is-striving-to-build-a-culture-of-extraordinary/
#18f23f5841a9