Pros
Some really terrific, bright employees here. The rank and file employees here are the best part of LRN. A really fantastic group of smart, humble, hard-working, and thoughtful people who lean in every day. The NY/LA offices are aesthetically pleasing and in a good location. Here’s a handy decision tree for you… + + “You should consider accepting a job at LRN IF the following four factors apply:” + + #1. If your starting salary is acceptable. LRN is open about the fact that it pays under market. Knowing you'll never get a *significant* raise - even if your responsibilities *drastically* expand, you need to be happy with your day 1 starting salary. #2. If you are not looking to be able to demonstrate career advancement at this stage in your professional life - and are comfortable having an extended ‘plateau period’ on your resume where you don’t receive a promotion (even if your responsibilities drastically expand). #3. If you will be working remotely in your role. If not remotely, if you are *not* working in the primary office where the CEO works (he creates an oppressive cloud of unease wherever he goes). #4. If you have a high tolerance for hypocrisy and can shrug off periodic loyalty tests. ...if the conditions listed above are true, then a role at LRN might be a good option for you! Caveat: if your role involves you working closely with the CEO... Do not take the job! It's not worth it. He is manic, has zero empathy or boundaries and thinks nothing of expecting 24/7 (really, 10pm on a saturday) support from employees - offering nothing in the way of rewards or even genuine appreciation. This is a guy who has gone through so many secretaries that he had to change the secretaries' email to 'assistant_to_the_Ceo' to mask the revolving door of people quitting because he was so unpleasant to work for. Seriously. If the job involves working closely with him – I’d strongly counsel you not to take it. + + A note about the reviews on Glassdoor:+ + So you’ve made it to Glassdoor. You may have noticed a trend where reviews are either negative or gushingly positive. You might be confused about which to believe. While I was at LRN, the CEO initiated active campaigns to get employees to post on Glassdoor to dilute the tide of negative posts (which should be a red flag given LRN’s focus on culture, transparency and behavior). The glowing reviews? In my case, mid-campaign he pulled me aside personally and told me to go “be inspired” and “post a review tonight on Glassdoor sharing the real LRN”. Of course, the subtext is explicit: he expected me to post something that night, he would be reading it later and attributing it to me, and the effusive positivity of my post would a loyalty test demonstrating my commitment to LRN and its “mission”. I know of other posts made under similar guidance/duress. Need another example? Check out the ‘reviews’ of his HOW book on Amazon. 2/3rds of the reviews come from LRN employees – who were similarly ‘strongly encouraged’ to write 5 star reviews (despite the fact that doing so violates Amazon’s review guidelines). Get used to this shady approach to PR & reputation management because that’s how LRN creates buzz. And spoiler alert: this is what the term ‘inspiration’ will become skewed to signify once you work at LRN. Look, you’ve come this far… If you are planning on joining LRN and spending 2+ years here, you owe yourself the due diligence to find out if these things people are saying on Glassdoor are true. SO: use your LinkedIn network and find a *former* employee of LRN and reach out and ask them. Current employees are often too scared of retaliation to be honest with a stranger. People have been fired (from the LA office at least) when the story got out that they were too candid (not even vindictive, just frank) in interviews. Find someone who used to work here - and get the real story.
Cons
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.
