It’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand the direction this company is taking.
Reorgs seem to mean moving employees into roles beneath the roles they were previously promoted in to, while insisting it isn’t a demotion. At the same time, bonus structures have been reduced or made so difficult to achieve that incentives no longer feel particularly motivating or achievable.
Experienced leaders are being let go, outside hires and former colleagues of the new leadership is being brought in, and long-tenured employees with decades of institutional knowledge continue to leave. That kind of talent and experience isn’t easily replaced.
Perhaps most concerning is the shift away from what has historically mattered in this industry: customer relationships. Publishing is relationship-driven. Those relationships take years to build, and constant employee turnover comes at a cost.
Customers are also questioning product and platform decisions that we cannot answer for because it just doesn't make sense.
At some point, you have to ask: if experienced employees are leaving, customers are frustrated, incentives are disappearing and successful people are either being let go or demoted, what are you doing here?
You will find it increasingly difficult to retain good employees if you stop rewarding them for their success, whether that recognition comes through compensation, bonuses, advancement, or simply allowing people to remain in positions they worked hard to earn. You cannot continually remove the incentive to succeed and expect people to stay.
The culture that once earned this company recognition as one of the best places to work is being dismantled by these decisions. That should concern everyone.
12 replies (most recent on top)
@g4 because King NK knows best. According to him it’s easy to wrap this all up for the textbooks reps to sell. My bad “solutions reps”.
@g4 exactly what they did to Gale. And the left people who don’t know what they are doing. My guess is that Gale is down several million.
Note regarding Visible Body, for the purpose of accuracy:
None of the developers/engineers/editors/artists were removed. Only sales, marketing, support, and executives were laid off.
Of course, that means Cengage doesn't have a clue how to sell the Visible Body product, due to loss of that institutional knowledge.
It feels like they were just ki-ling the competition, and now they're trying to figure out how to make money off of something they don't understand.
@fg Visible Body was effectively gutted long before the Dallas sales meeting. By that point, the team was already operating with a skeleton crew. If there have been additional cuts since then, it's difficult to see how they would be considered a significant reduction given how little was left.
At this point, speculation only gets us so far. The real story will be told when the numbers are finally released.
That's what many employees are waiting for: transparency. Not another town hall, not another initiative, and not another carefully crafted message. Just the numbers.
Revenue. Growth. Retention. Performance.
How long can MH and NK continue to control the narrative before the actual results speak for themselves?
Until the numbers are released, everything else is noise.
Let's see the numbers.
And if history is any indication, I wouldn't be surprised if there is yet another reason to delay releasing them for as long as possible.
@en how long will this company last until it's bankrupt or unsalvageable?
@ef already doing layoffs in visible body. I saw people posting it on linkedin.
@a6 My experience in Gale product/technology is that it peaked as an excellent place to work prior to 2008, and experienced a slow cultural decline leading up to 2020 WFH
@as I wonder if that’s why they keep buying decent businesses and then running them into the ground. Why buy InfoSec, Visible Body and whatever that Steven Spielberg VR thing was if you don’t have a plan to commercialize them?
@ak it’s always been an immature mommy culture for 20+ years. People a-s kissing for promotions into positions they never should’ve been in to get out of the cr-ppy textbook rep position. Which is why it’s where it is today. No vision. No leadership. Just a Slack and SF micromanaging culture that they somehow view as actual productivity when in reality most of the info in SF is fake data to play their d-mb game and stay off the radar. They then roll that inflated data up to the PE. Makes you wonder why the PE isn’t asking why we never hit the forecast they are given.
MH's leadership strategy appears to follow a pattern that many companies fall into when growth stalls: create a constant stream of new initiatives to signal activity and transformation.
Since the company emerged from bankruptcy, it seems that every 18 months there is a new "game-changing" initiative. We saw it with Cengage Unlimited. We saw it with Horizon. We have seen it repeatedly throughout his tenure.
This resembles what management experts call initiative churn or organizational change fatigue: leaders continually launch new programs before previous ones have had enough time to demonstrate measurable results. The organization becomes focused on the next announcement rather than long-term execution.
From a governance perspective, the strategy is effective. Boards are often reluctant to replace a CEO in the middle of a major transformation initiative because doing so creates uncertainty and disruption. As a result, each new initiative can reset the evaluation clock.
The Cengage Unlimited launch is a perfect example. By the board's own account, they heard about the concept and liked the direction, but were surprised by how quickly it was implemented. Rather than allowing time for extensive review and discussion, the initiative moved almost immediately into execution.
The pattern appears to be:
Announce a transformational initiative.
Convince stakeholders that results need time.
Extend leadership runway while implementation occurs.
Before results can be fully evaluated, launch the next transformation initiative.
This is closely related to Kotter's Change Management Theory, where leaders create urgency around change. The difference is that successful change management requires sustained execution and measurable outcomes, not simply a succession of new initiatives.
At some point, the question stops being "What's the next initiative?" and becomes "What results did the last initiative actually produce?"
After years of continuous transformation efforts, shareholders, employees, and customers should be able to point to clear evidence that the strategy is creating lasting value. If every challenge is answered with another reorganization, another initiative, or another vision statement, people eventually begin to wonder whether the goal is transformation or simply maintaining the appearance of transformation.
The Board is fully complicit in this whole mess and the board needs to step up and remove MH.
I think OP, in referencing the culture that once was, is describing the pre-MH days rather than just the Glassdoor ratings. For a few years the MH crew were able to ride on the established customer relations, the quality products, and the popular brands. Those key ingredients to success, if not recognized as crucial and not attended tor properly, will disintegrate. And that’s what is happening right before our eyes.
"The culture that once earned this company recognition as one of the best places to work"
This was never true, though. Ever. That silly Glassdoor distinction was bought and paid for and carefully (and artificially) managed for years.