LRN Reviews

Please note: Many of the effusively positive, strangely jargon-heavy posts on this site are made under duress from the CEO. I know because I once had to do one. I'll explain... Imagine for a second you're working at a private organization (that many other Glassdoor posts accurately describe as 'cult-like') with an all-powerful CEO/Owner. Everyone is scared of him. He 'disappears' people he doesn’t like from the organization all the time. When he's nearby, it's sort of like Darth Vader is standing behind you. That is actually what his presence feels like. However, he's obsessed with his public persona. Although people flee in droves (8 months is the average attrition rate for people working in the main office at LRN), he's figured out that when you control the official Soviet state messaging, produce tons of PR to dilute all the negative reports, and dismiss the comments of all dissenters because 'a revolution is not for everyone' ...then you can cover up what it's really like behind the iron curtain and get people to continue to emigrate. This is LRN, Comrade. High-five! Now imagine, that one day the scary CEO pulls you aside, looms over you and says: "All these people are posting bad things about the company on the website. Tonight I need you to ‘volunteer’ to go and post a review sharing all the good things about the real company!" (Implicit in this voluntary activity: The CEO will be checking it and viewing what you wrote as a loyalty test). Ahem: "This work was strictly voluntary, but any [person] who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half."] So imagine this happened - what would you do? What we all do. We keep our jobs. This exact scenario has happened to so many people. Please take that into account. Because it happens. A lot. This post is my real review. Other extra awesome bonus features of working at LRN: > The endlessly referenced 'mission' of the company (to make businesses more ethical), which may be a factor for why you want to work here, is totally inaccurate and misleading. The real mission is to be a PR agency for the CEO. This wouldn't be problematic if you were working for a Kardashian and knew what you were hired to do. In this case it is soul-crushing because the CEO you are championing is worse than a misplaced focal point for your ethics PR efforts; once you work closely with him you realize he's actually the opposite of who should be the face of this movement. He has what's known as the "Dark Triad" of personality characteristics. So, if you care about business being more ethical, ironically by working here you may come to feel like you're undermining that end goal. Example: imagine if you worked at an organization that claimed it's committed to making sure people get enough vitamin D. But instead of just distributing vitamin D, you spend all your time booking this CEO guy for articles and at speaking events so he can talk about how he's some nutrition messiah who's figured out the world needs more vitamin D. After speaking, he hands out some t-shirts with his picture on it and some 'proprietary' LRN pills, supposed to boost vitamin D. (Note: These pills have not been proven to contain any vitamin D.) That’s sorta what it’s like. Ask yourself, how many years of your life are you willing to commit to that? > The interview process feels like a bait n' switch where whenever you ask what you will be doing, you will be repeatedly told 'there are no titles at LRN' - then you will be hired for a very discrete, prescribed role which is actually a demotion. (Yay!) >You will be underpaid. The not-so-secret business advantage about "not having any titles" is that no titles means no salary bands and no way to benchmark yourself against the industry for what, say, an IT manager should make. No titles also means no such thing as a promotion - even when your role or responsibilities considerably expand. The CEO reflexively low-balls everyone on salary. Ironically, most of the money gets routed back to the CEO, like when he funnels company money towards buying hundreds of thousands of copies of his own book to artificially boost its sales numbers. (Remember, this is the guy you will be spending most of your time promoting as the face of the corporate ethics movement). > All decisions bottleneck at the CEO because he's a micro-manager (or as he normally says "I'm just micro-interested"). The organization is not flat – as it claims to be. Which reminds me of this: "No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all [people] are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?" > On at least a monthly basis you will be berated publicly by the CEO for not working hard enough for 'the mission'. Not for any particular reason. Just because you were nearby and he decided to 'interact' with you. He has 2 modes of one-on-one interaction: jokey bullying vs. scary intimidation whilst citing your inadequacy and reminding you how disappointing you are. (This is not surprising, as there is almost always an overlap between Corporate_narcissism and workplace bullying) > If you are an optimistic person committed to social good, after working here you'll probably leave a much more skeptical and jaded person about organizations in general. That's what happens when you take a pay cut to work on a meaningful social issue and then discover it's a big snow job.

The thing you need to realize about this company is that the culture is 100% a manifestation of the CEO’s personality, operational ineptitude, and unstated narcissistic agenda. The company is privately owned by the CEO and he installed a weak board. He is pretty much all-powerful (the Executive Committee is just a shadow governance body that acts as the ‘hand of the king’ to provide the illusion he is not acting autocratically). You may have read the CEOs book or seen a speech and found it inspiring. We all did. The important thing to realize is that the CEO has two different faces. With a crowd, he can be gracious, humble, reflective and open to other perspectives. In large public speaking settings he seems to match the company philosophy; and seems to be reasonable and fair. You are likely to encounter his 'public face' in any group conversation where there are more than 8 listeners, outside customers, or if he’s talking to someone of influence who he needs to ingratiate himself to. However, if you work at LRN – sooner or later you encounter *the real* CEO in a smaller meeting. The real CEO is autocratic, abrasive, inflexible, retaliatory, stingy, bereft of empathy for employee well-being, and operates off of a coercive ‘my way or the highway’ type management style cloaked in whatever principles are convenient to justify his ends. He perpetually gives lip-service to his big ‘HOW’ ideas, but his default personal style and psychological tendencies are in direct conflict with those ideas… and the default psychological tendencies (manipulative and cultish) always win. If he was to write a business book that *really* reflected how he operates, it would be called “Leverage: Get More from Your Employees via Coercion Repackaged as Principle.” Also, do not buy the repeated internal refrain about ‘LRN is on a journey’. Whenever serious problems are brought up, the CEO responds ‘LRN is on a journey, we’re frank about the fact that we’re not there yet’. However, that metaphor is way of failing to take accountability. Once recast in narrative terms, *every* person and organization is on a journey. What matters is if the real issues are truly addressed or are they just given lip-service or toothless internal initiatives to airbrush concerns. LRN is good at making a convincing show at contrition, and will prop up reform initiatives that are just real enough to seem like they’re working on it, but the truth is – all the biggest roadblocks stem from the CEO. His managerial mandates create the operational low-ceiling that suffocates the business and keeps LRN from truly flourishing. Ultimately, the real ‘journey’ that LRN is on, is endlessly circling the CEO’s neurosis. There is always movement, but never progress; the organization cannot escape the event horizon of his pathology … it just orbits around and around in a frantic circle of attrition and reinvention.