The CEO of Trek Bicycle reads 52 books a year, hates smartphones, and thinks Milton Friedman was wrong |
The CEO of Trek Bicycle reads 52 books a year, hates smartphones, and thinks Milton Friedman was wrong
John Burke has run Trek Bicycle for nearly three decades, long enough to have lived through bike booms and busts, a pandemic that briefly made his company one of the hottest businesses in the world, and a post-COVID hangover that has left internal sales dashboards “all red” for more than a year and a half. He’s also read enough books — about 52 a year, every year, meticulously cataloged in a personal spreadsheet of 1,100 lifetime lessons — to have strong opinions about nearly everything.
One of the strongest: a company’s legacy is measured by its impact on the world, not its financial returns.
“Making a profit is the lifeblood of a business,” he told me in Las Vegas, backstage at the Great Place to Work For All Summit. “But the success of the business is not just measured in how much money you make — it’s in the impact that you make.”
Burke said he couldn’t speak for other companies, since he’s “been playing for the same team for 42 years,” but when he looks out at corporate America, he said, “there’s been a decay in the purpose of companies over the last 25 years.” And then he got historically minded. “If you go back, an economist once said that making a profit is the only responsibility of a company … and that’s not Trek.”
(The actual quote was published in a New York Times op-ed in 1970 as the great University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman wrote: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”)
Just consider, Burke said, what Trek has done for women’s cycling.
The women’s cycling moment
In 2018, he recalled, someone walked into his office and told him how women’s professional cycling teams were actually treated: flown in the night before races, competing on secondhand bikes, earning almost nothing. Burke vowed to add a full-scale women’s team from that day onward.
From that day onward, Burke said, Trek treated its women athletes the same as its men — same bikes, same resources, same investment. The team won nearly everything for three years running. And then, Burke said, something bigger happened: every other major team in professional cycling followed suit. “No Trek, no change in women’s cycling,” he said flatly. “Milton Friedman wouldn’t have approved that decision. If he was on the board, he would not have approved it.”
It’s the kind of story Burke returns to when people ask what Trek’s 50th anniversary is really about. The company is marking the occasion with a coffee-table book cataloging 50 ways it has changed the world and a 43-minute documentary premiering June 18 at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, with author Jim Collins in attendance. “What I’m most proud of at Trek is how we’ve changed the world, not what the financial results have been. When I’m gone, I don’t think anyone’s gonna make note of that.”
Riding through the bust
Trek’s current headwinds are real. After a COVID-era demand explosion that strained........