Pros
One of the best things about Nike is that the company Maxims can be used in your everyday life. It might seem strange, but it's true. I've worked for very few companies that actually place their corporate values dead center in the middle of the action. Also, unlike some companies, every Maxim is considered equally important. Some companies highlight one or two values as key and the rest as exposition. At Nike, that's not how it works. And, the Maxims are such that you can take them anywhere and find success. On the whole, employees really do try to live out the company values. This creates an engaging and lively work environment. If you're a team player, like team sports, and are very social, Nike is a great place to work. The entire organization, from hiring and job evaluation practices, all the way through project assignments and resource management, rotates around the team concept. Project stakeholders are numerous and diverse, often stretching across the organization. Team building, team thinking, and team identity are de rigueur at Nike. The people on your team are not only coworkers but also friends (and even teammates on extracurricular basketball, soccer, flag football, or volleyball teams). Just as a your teammates in college became an essential part of your life in school, so your teammates at Nike will become an essential part of your daily life. The benefits package the company offers employees is one of the best around. The Beaverton campus has two state-of-the-art workout and fitness buildings, offering every form of exercise and athletic recreation imaginable. There are two pubs and five restaurants, two convenience stores, and an employee store on campus. Company buildings are surrounded by running tracks, trails, soccer pitches, parks, football fields, beach volleyball courts, and more. The health, dental and vision plans provided are exhaustive. During the summer, WHQ even offers half-day Fridays as an incentive for employees to find the optimal work/life balance. And, they even have intramural sports team. And, if you have children, they provide two separate preschool facilities. In short, the only reason you would ever need to leave work is to grab a few hours of sleep.
Cons
One of the drawbacks to a company culture so rooted in the team mentality is that nothing gets done without a meeting. Any decision, no matter how mundane, cannot be acted upon without at least one meeting. When you make everyone a stakeholder, it becomes very difficult to move quickly or to simply get anything done without a lot of leg work. Most managers spend their day at the office in meetings and their evenings at home working on everything else. Not only does this slow things down, it can create roadblocks where stakeholders (or those who feel they should be stakeholders) hold decisions or projects hostage. This leads to the greatest "Con" about working at Nike. If you're no good at politics, then you won't go far in the company. Every stakeholder (and every person who thinks they are or wants to be) must be appeased to get anything done. If you move to quick, toes can be stepped on and you can find yourself on the outside-looking-in on your own project, as those with more company connections, better political skills, or more social savy push you out. This is the dark side of team-centric organizations. On a sports team there are hard numbers and clear ways of measuring impact, performance, and success. In the company cultural setting, these are more fuzzy and harder to define. Thusly, it comes down to perception. Be prepared to work more on company politics and your social reputation than on actual projects. Remember all those amazing benefits? Well, they come with a price. Nike pays significantly less than other companies of comparable size and wealth for the same jobs. It's not uncommon for HR or recruiting staff to inflate salary ranges by including all those great benefits in a quote or offer. The reason is simple. Nike believes that simply having the chance to work them should be reward enough. In some cases, I've seen as much as $10,000 difference in salaries. When this is combined with a work/life balance that is non-existent (because coworkers are expected to be friends in their personal life and all those meetings make for typically ten hour days), the convenience of all the great benefits offered in place loses much of its charm.