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.
