Cycling is not wanting for characters, and one of the more entertaining is John Burke, CEO of Trek, who is our dorky little world’s answer to the high-powered “Walk with me, talk with me” corporate archetype:
Unfortunately, like much of the bike industry, Trek is having its share of financial trouble, but Burke wants you to understand that’s not what’s important:
“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.”
Spoken like a guy whose company ain’t making any money!
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.”
As for Trek’s impact on the the world, if you want to know what that has been you’ll have to wait for the coffee table book:
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.”
I wonder if the book will celebrate the Y-Foil or pretend it never existed:
Both scenarios seem equally likely.
Same thing goes for that guy who won-but-didn’t-win the Tour de France seven times.
As for the thing in the headline about Burke hating smartphones, this was apparently born of one of those weird private meetings CEOs have where they summon some brain genius to lecture them about something, after which Burke concluded smartphones were responsible for all the ills of society–which, to be fair, is almost certainly true:
“Now I’m kind of slithering under the table as I blew this guy off,” Burke told me in his typically blunt fashion. But he had a question for Davidson: he asked where mental health in America stood today, on a scale of 100, relative to 1984. Davidson’s answer: 23, down from 100 in 1984. “It’s in the toilet. Unbelievable.” The culprit, Davidson said, was the phone.
Out of respect for Burke I’m going to leave the line about him slithering under the table as he blew a guy off alone. I mean we’ve all been there, right? Still, I do find it odd that the CEO of a company that makes bicycles says something like this…
Consider the Masters golf tournament, Burke said, one of the last major public events where phones are banned from the grounds. “What’s everybody doing? They have a smile on their face. Nobody’s trying to take a picture of somebody else. No selfies. They’re talking to each other.” He estimated the happiness level is three times what it is at a comparable phone-permitted event. “It’s the greatest experiment in the world.”
…yet doesn’t make the connection between smartphone overdependence and bikes like his own company’s $14,999.99 Supercaliber:
Which is equipped with all the latest electronic components from SRAM, including their Flight Attendant suspension system (which I tried back in 2021):
Care to guess which now-ubiquitous happiness-eroding device you’ll need to tune all this stuff? Hint: it ain’t a multitool, and you’re not allowed to use it at the Masters Tournament:
Though in his defense, once it is tuned the algorithm will take it from there:
All of this does lead me to wonder if perhaps Burke secretly understands that the reason people watching the Masters Tournament are so happy has less to do with the fact that they don’t have access to their smartphones and more to do with the following two factors:
- They are recreating
- They are wealthy
The platitude about money not buying happiness notwithstanding, when you’re engaged in recreation and you’ve got money in the bank you’re generally in a pretty good mood. Next time you’re out for a ride on a beautiful day take a life satisfaction poll of of people on bikes that cost $15,000 and above. Not only do I suspect the numbers will be better than average, but I bet more than a few of them were at the Masters.
Plus, you might even make a new friend, and friends are important:
On trade and geopolitics, Burke was equally unsparing. Trek manufactures globally and has navigated years of tariff disruptions, but it framed America’s current isolation as something deeper than a supply chain headache. “To accomplish things in life, you need to have friends. To accomplish things as a country, you need to have friends. And we’ve pissed off just about everybody.” He ticked through the list: Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia. “I can’t tell you why we’re pissed off at Canada,” he said. “I genuinely cannot tell you.”
Wait.
Seriously?
You can’t tell why we’re pissed off at Canada!?!
It’s called CLOYING SMUGNESS, Burke!
[Note to Canadians: You don’t need to bother with the patch. If you’ve got a North American accent and you have time to travel across Europe everyone knows there’s a 97% chance you’re Canadian.]
Jeez, read the room!
Hey, I do my best not to assume everyone with a maple leaf patch on their backpack is cloyingly smug. After all, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover. Instead you should judge it by the first few words of every paragraph:
Burke said he reads 52 books a year, almost exclusively nonfiction. His reading system, refined over the past four years, is rigorous. He reads the first sentence of every paragraph. If it grabs him, he reads the rest. If it doesn’t, he moves on. “I’ve never read a bad sentence to start a paragraph which turns into a good paragraph,” he said. “Doesn’t happen.” (While this might imply that he’s a skimmer or speed reader, this method suggests that he starts roughly 100 books a year, and only finished around 50.)
What is wrong with me that I’ve always been content with simply reading, and never felt the need to implement a rigorous system in order to do so, much less refine it over a period of years?
Probably a lot, though it mostly sounds like a way to make both reading and riding equally un-fun:
When he finishes a book, he goes back through his underlines and enters only the lessons he wants to carry for the rest of his life into a personal spreadsheet — now more than 1,100 entries deep. The system was inspired by Jim Collins, who visited Trek in 2018 and suggested writing down one lesson per book. Burke took it further. The impetus was a bike ride with his wife, during which she asked him to summarize the lessons from one of his favorite books, Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game. His answer, he recalled, was “lame. Really bad retention.” He went home, reread the book, underlined it, and built the spreadsheet.
That sounds like the worst bookclub ever.