Jordan Brand’s Larry Miller on Not Giving Nsync Sneakers for the Super Bowl and 5 Other Takeaways on Leadership From the Black Footwear Forum
Several gems on leadership were shared this past weekend at the 2023 Black Footwear Forum. Some of the most impactful ones were delivered by Jordan Brand chairman Larry Miller.
Miller, a titan in the worlds of sports and footwear, was the longtime president of the Nike-backed Jordan Brand, a company he led starting from its early days. However, the executive generated headlines for something far different in September 2021, when he revealed to Sports Illustrated that he shot Edward White to death in 1965 in West Philadelphia. At the time, White was 18 years old and Miller was just 16.
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In the time since his admission, Miller said he has worked on the healing process. In December 2021, Miller told FN that he would like to express remorse and sorrow directly to the family and confirmed that he has reached out, but kept details of the conversation private out of respect.
With the attendees aware of his much-publicized situation during his youth, Miller joined Jason Mayden — a footwear industry veteran who worked at Nike Inc. for more than 13 years — on stage at the event. Mayden admitted that Miller helped him avoid going down a similar path.
“I was one of the first people to shared that with because you saw a path I was heading down. When I walked into Nike, I was coming from the Southside Chicago and I was doing all the Southside activities,” Mayden said. “Larry pulled me to the side and, whatever it was that I was exuding in my energy, he didn’t look at it as something that was meant to be demeaned or put down. He didn’t speak to me with a judgmental tone. He sat me down like a big bro and said, ‘Hey, here’s my story.'”
This is emblematic of Miller’s approach to leadership, which was detailed in depth during his conversation with Mayden at the 2023 Black Footwear Forum. Below are six takeaways from the conversation, including an admission about pop supergroup *Nsync that got an eruption from the audience.
Being Comfortable With Vulnerability
“With the situation with you, [Jason], I was able to see something real. I was like, ‘OK, I see how I can help this young brother. Let me share some information with him, give him some insights to let him know that I’m speaking from a position of I know what I’m talking about because I lived it, I experienced it.’ To me, when I see you or I see other folks that I think can benefit from some of the insights and some of the experiences that I had, to me, I feel an obligation to share — especially for folks who look like me.”
The Power of Accountability
“Leadership is not about who speaks the loudest. It’s about holding yourself accountable and being accountable to the team, the people that you’re leading. As the leader, part of your responsibility is to take responsibility and take ownership for things that happen to your team. I was always willing to take one for the team. We do this, it doesn’t work, I got it, don’t worry about it. To me, part of being a leader is that accountability, but it’s also taking responsibility for your team and making sure people understand that you’re here to support them and you’ve got their back. At the end of the day, if the leader doesn’t have your back and you don’t feel like the leader has your back, then you’re not going to be able to do your best work if you’re constantly wondering what’s coming up behind you.”
Your Team Needs to Know You Care
“Your team has to feel like you care about them. Not just care about the work or care that they get the job done, although you do care about that. But the reality is they need to feel like you care about them as a person. I always tried to make people feel like and let them know I cared about them, not just how they get the work done but how are you doing? What’s going on with your family? Are you OK? I think people appreciated that.”
How to Build Your Team
“From a leadership perspective, you can’t do it all yourself. You can try, but you can’t. My approach was always try to find the right people, put them with the right goals, the right jobs, give them the guidance and direction they need and then get out of the way and let them do what they do. And let them know that I’m there to support and if you need something or you don’t understand something or you got some questions, I’m here — but you’re responsible for doing this. If I’m going to do it, then I need you. I always believe we’re all part of the same team, and we should all be moving in the same direction. I also believe that if you’re part of a team, if you put the team goals ahead of your individual goals, I think both will get accomplished. But I think if you put your individual goals ahead of the team goal, a lot of times neither gets accomplished.”
Saying ‘Bye, Bye, Bye’ to *Nsync
“One of the things that we did starting Jordan as a separate brand was we identified who our core consumer was. Everything that we did was focused around being authentic to our consumer, and I think from a brand perspective, if brands aren’t authentic then they’re not going to survive. I believe that we targeted the right consumer. The belief was, ‘If we get our guys, we focus on our consumer, get that right, we’ll get everybody else’ because the consumer we focused on leads the industry. When we were getting going, the brand was starting to get a little bit of heat, I was in the office one day and got a call from our Hollywood promo group. That’s the group that supplies product for videos, movies, and they said, ‘We just got a call from *Nsync’ — and apparently *Nsync was hot at the time — ‘And they’re performing halftime at the Super Bowl and they want to wear Jordans.’ I said, ‘Let me think about that.’ I got the team together and we debated back and forth because the product people were saying, ‘This is the Super Bowl and we’re trying to get our brand established. What better vehicle than that?’ And the other team was saying, ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t resonate with our core consumer.’ I had to make a decision and I decided not to do it. They were upset, but to me it was the right thing for the brand. It was about being authentic to who we are and what we represented as a brand. There were a number of decisions like that along the way where we could have taken advantage of something that seemed like a short-term gain, but in reality it would not had a positive effect in the long-term.”
Turning the Air Jordan 1 Into a Franchise
“Going back probably seven or eight years ago, as we were looking for new ways to grow a business, we looked at the [Air Jordan] 1 said, ‘We can actually build a franchise around the shoe. We can take this from being just a shoe and actually build a franchise around it,’ and that was the approach that we took. To do that, we partnered with different people, collaborated with different people, but the whole idea was to create a franchise around AJ1. That business now is a couple billion dollars, just the AJ1. For us, the goal was to take that shoe and build a franchise and do different things around it to help elevate that franchise. Whether it was Travis Scott or whether it was Virgil Abloh, just doing things around the ones that establish that as a franchise shoe.”
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