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Landmark Worldwide
Company typePrivate LLC
Industryself-help, self-improvement, personal development, management consulting, continuing education
FoundedJanuary 1991
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California
Key peopleHarry Rosenberg: Director; CEO

Mick Leavitt: President
Joe DiMaggio – Director, Research, Design & Development

Nancy Zapolski: Vice President, Program Delivery Division
ProductsThe Landmark Forum, associated coursework
RevenueDecreaseUSD$77 million (2009)
Number of employees525+ employees;
800 trained leaders, some of whom volunteer their time;
SubsidiariesThe Vanto Group (formerly Landmark Education Business Development or LEBD, from 1993 to 2007)
Landmark Education International, Inc.
Tekniko Licensing Corporation
Rancord Company, Ltd.
WebsiteLandmark's homepage

Landmark Worldwide (formerly Landmark Education), or simply Landmark, is a limited liability company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It offers programs in personal development.

The company started with the purchase of intellectual property based upon Werner Erhard's est training seminars. Landmark has developed and delivered over 40 personal development programs. Its subsidiary, the Vanto Group, also markets and delivers training and consulting to organizations.

Landmark's programs have been categorized by some scholars and others as religious or quasi-religious in nature. Landmark and many of the company's customers deny such characterizations, while some researchers question that categorization as well.

History

Landmark Worldwide LLC was founded in January 1991 by several of the presenters of a training program known as "The Forum". Landmark purchased the intellectual property rights to The Forum from Werner Erhard and Associates and used that as the basis for its foundation course named "The Landmark Forum", which has been further updated over the years. It has since developed around 55 additional training courses and seminar programs throughout 20 different countries around the world.

The corporation was originally registered as Transnational Education and changed its name to Landmark Education Corporation in May 1991. In June 2003 it was re-structured as Landmark Education LLC, and in July 2013 renamed Landmark Worldwide LLC.

According to Landmark, Werner Erhard (creator of the controversial est training which ran from 1971 to 1984 and from which the forum was derived) consults from time to time with its "Research and Design team". Terry Giles, Chairman of the Board, is credited with resolving a long-standing rift among the descendants of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Corporation

Landmark Worldwide LLC operates as an employee-owned for-profit private company. According to Landmark's website, its employees own all the stock of the corporation, with no individual holding more than 3%. The company states that it operates in such a way as to invest its surpluses into making its programs, initiatives, and services more widely available. In addition, its subsidiary, the Vanto Group, focuses on marketing and delivering training and consultation services to corporate clients and other organizations.

Business consulting

Vanto Group, Inc., founded in 1993 as "Landmark Education Business Development" (LEBD), a wholly owned subsidiary of Landmark Worldwide Enterprises, Inc., uses the techniques of Landmark to provide consulting services to various companies. The University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business carried out a case study in 1998 into the work of LEBD with BHP New Zealand Steel. The report concluded that the set of interventions in the organization produced a 50% improvement in safety, a 15% to 20% reduction in key benchmark costs, a 50% increase in return on capital, and a 20% increase in raw steel production. LEBD became the Vanto Group in 2007.

Companies such as Panda Express and Lululemon Athletica pay for and encourage employees to take part in The Landmark Forum.

Licensing intellectual property

Tekniko, Inc., formerly owned by Werner Erhard, was the successor organization to Transformational Technologies, which was incorporated in 1984 by Erhard and management consultant James Selman. Tekniko Licencing Corporation, a California corporation owned by Terry M. Giles, later acquired this technology. In 2001 Landmark Education formed Tekniko Licensing Corporation, a Nevada corporation, which purchased Tekniko Technology from Giles' company.

Since that time, the Vanto Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Landmark Worldwide, has used Tekniko to license the "Tekniko methodology and intellectual property to a wide variety of corporations".

Course content

Course size varies between 75 and 250 people. Rules are set up at the beginning of the program, such as strongly encouraging participants not to miss any part of the program. Attendees are also urged to be “coachable” and not just be observers during the course. The program is arranged as a discussion where the course leader presents certain ideas and the course participants engage in voluntary sharing with the course leader to discuss how those ideas apply to their own life. Various ideas are presented, asserted and discussed during the course. For example, the course maintains that there is a big difference between what actually happened in a person’s life and the meaning or interpretation they made up about it, and that human behavior is governed by a need to look good.

Another tenet of the course is that people pursue an "imaginary 'someday' of satisfaction", and that people create meaning for themselves since "there is none inherent in the world". The course also maintains that people have persistent complaints that give rise to unproductive fixed ways of being, but that people can “transform”, by a creative act of bringing forth new ways of being, rather than trying to change themselves in comparison to the past. Course participants are encouraged to call people they know during the course, with whom they feel they have unresolved tensions, and either be in communication with the other person or be responsible for their own behavior.

The evening session that follows closely on the three consecutive days of the course completes the Landmark Forum. During this final session, the participants share information about their results, and bring guests to learn about the Forum.

Community projects

Some other Landmark courses encourage or require participants to create a community project. In the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, participants are required to undertake a project that benefits the larger community or society as a whole.

In the Team, Management, and Leadership Program, participants create four team-based community projects.

Reviews and criticism

The New York Times reporter Henry Alford summarized his review of The Landmark Forum by saying "Two months after the Forum, I'd rate my success at 84 percent. I'm more prone to telling loved ones and colleagues, in person and without glibness, that I love or admire them. But I still operate from a base position that people are a lot of effort." Time reporter Nathan Thornburgh, in his review of The Landmark Forum, said "At its heart, the course was a withering series of scripted reality checks meant to show us how we have created nearly everything we see as a problem …I benefited tremendously from the uncomfortable mirror the course had put in front of me."

The Irish Mail on Sunday says the effects of The Landmark Forum "...can be startling. People find themselves reconciled with parents, exes and friends. They have conversations they have wanted to have with their families for years; they meet people or get promoted in work." Alternately, Some employees of businesses utilizing Landmark's services have criticized Landmark as overzealous in encouraging people to participate in its courses.

Landmark makes extensive use of web-published and word-of-mouth testimonials from customers to portray its effectiveness, and supplements these with studies, surveys, and opinions.

Mayfair’s Amber Allison describers Landmark’s instructors as “enthusiastic and inspiring.” Her review says that after doing The Landmark Forum, “Work worries, relationship dramas all seem more manageable”, and that she “let go of almost three decades of hurt, anger and feelings of betrayal” towards her father.

Disputed religious character

Some scholars have categorized Landmark and its predecessor organizations as new age, self religion or a new religious movement. Other observers have noted relationships between the training programs and religion or a spiritual experience, including a lack of religious elements in the programs and the compatibility of the programs with existing religions. Others, such as Chryssides, classify Landmark as either quasi-religious or secular with some elements of religion. Various governments have also classed Landmark and its previous iterations as new religion and some have classified it as dangerous (although various scholars have disputed this characterization). or commented on characteristics shared with such groups without labeling it as a cult. Landmark has denied that it is a religion, cult or sect.

Journalists Amelia Hill with The Observer and Karin Badt from The Huffington Post have witnessed the Landmark Forum and concluded that, in their view, it is not religious or a cult. Hill wrote, "It is ... simple common sense delivered in an environment of startling intensity." Badt noted the organisation's emphasis on "'spreading the word' of the Landmark forum as a sign of the participants' 'integrity'" in recounting her personal experience of an introductory "Landmark Forum" course; "at the end of the day, I found the Forum innocuous. No cult, no radical religion: an inspiring, entertaining introduction of good solid techniques of self-reflection, with an appropriate emphasis on action and transformation (not change)".

Litigation

Main article: Landmark Education litigation

In 2006, Landmark initiated actions against websites such as Google and the Internet Archive to remove material it deemed to violate the company's copyrights and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of participants in its courses.

Following a series of investigative articles in the national daily Dagens Nyheter and programs on the private TV channel TV4, Landmark closed its offices in Sweden as of June 2004. Subsequent to a site visit of the French office of Landmark that noted the activities of volunteers, labor inspectors made a report of undeclared employment, and that office closed the next month.

See also

References

  1. (January 7, 2002). "Landmark Education Celebrates 11 Years of Business and Growth". LandmarkEducation.com. Retrieved on October 22, 2008.
  2. ^ LandmarkWorldwide.com. Landmark Fact Sheet. Retrieved on October 22, 2008.
  3. The Landmark Seminar Leader Program. LandmarkWorldwide.com. Retrieved on July 16, 2013.
  4. (January 16, 1991). Articles of Incorporation, dike.de. Retrieved on October 22, 2008.
    Quote: "This letter serves as the consent by Landmark Education Corporation for the use of the name "Landmark Education International, Inc." by our wholly-owned subsidiary, currently known as Werner Erhard and Associates International, Inc."
  5. Pressman, Steven (1993). Outrageous Betrayal: The dark journey of Werner Erhard from est to exile. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-09296-2, p. 254. (Out of print).
  6. LP/LLC information. California Secretary of State. Filed February 26, 2003. Retrieved on October 23, 2008.
  7. Corporation information. California Secretary of State. Filed June 22, 1987. Retrieved on October 23, 2008.
  8. See:
    • Farber, Sharon Klayman (2012). Hungry for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties. Lanham, Maryland: Jason Aronson/Rowman & Littlefield. p. 131. ISBN 9780765708588. One of them began as est, or Erhard Seminars Training, the most successful and most controversial of the encounter groups of the seventies, and the progenitor of hundreds of others that have been marketed to the public and the business community.;
    • Richardson, James T. (1998). "est (THE FORUM)". In Swatos, Jr., William H. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira. pp. 167–169. ISBN 0761989560..
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    • Lockwood, Renee (2011). "Religiosity Rejected: Exploring the Religio-Spiritual Dimensions of Landmark Education". International Journal for the Study of New Religions. 2 (2). Sheffield, England: Equinox: 225–254. doi:10.1558/ijsnr.v2i2.225. ISSN 2041-9511.;
    • Grigoriadis, Vanessa (9 July 2001). "Pay Money, Be Happy". New York Magazine. New York, New York. Retrieved 6 September 2014.;
    • Eisner, Donald A. (2000). The Death of Psychotherapy: From Freud to Alien Abductions. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. p. 60. ISBN 0275964132.;
    • Ramstedt, Martin (2007). "New Age and Business: Corporations as Cultic Milieus?". In Kemp, Daren; Lewis, James R. (eds.). Handbook of the New Age. Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion. Vol. 1. Leiden: BRILL. p. 196. ISBN 9789004153554.;
    • Atkin, Douglas (2004). "What Is Required of a Belief System?". The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers Into True Believers. New York: Penguin/Portfolio. p. 101. ISBN 9781591840275.;
    • Saliba, John A. (2003). Understanding New Religious Movements. Walnut Creek, California: Rowman Altamira. p. 88. ISBN 9780759103559..
  10. Faltermayer, Charlotte; Richard Woodbury (March 16, 1998). The Best of Est?. Time. Retrieved on October 22, 2008.
  11. Dewan, Shaila (May 3, 2010). "Hired to Bring Order, Kings' Adviser Brings Peace". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 2010-11-02. Terry M. Giles ... the self-improvement techniques of EST. (Werner Erhard, the creator of EST, is a client.)
  12. Dow Jones & Co., Inc. (2010). "Landmark Education Corporation". The Business Journals. American City Business Journals, Inc. Retrieved 2010-11-02. Landmark Education Corporation - Company Executives - Terry Giles - Chairman of the Board
  13. (February 1, 2008). "Landmark Education Business Development, LEBD, Changes Name to Vanto Group". Reuters. Retrieved on October 22, 2008.
  14. Logan, David C. (1998). "Transforming the Network of Conversations in BHP New Zealand Steel: Landmark Education Business Development's New Paradigm for Organizational Change", University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business, L984-01.
  15. "General Tso, Meet Steven Covey". Business Week. 2010-11-18. Retrieved 2011-03-14.
  16. "Lululemon's Cult of Selling". Fast Company. 2009-04-01. Retrieved 2011-03-14.
  17. Norman Bodek (1985). ReVision: The Journal of Consciousness and Change, Vol 7, No. 2, Winter 1984 / Spring 1985
  18. Case Financial Inc · DEFM14A. SEC filings on secinfo.com. Filed May 3, 2000. Retrieved on October 23, 2008.
    Quote: "Mr. Giles is the owner of Tekniko Licensing Corporation, which licenses intellectual properties owned by Tekniko to businesses throughout the world."
  19. Pacific Biometrics, filings. Form SB-2. Retrieved on October 23, 2008.
  20. Landmark Education information.
  21. ^ Badt, Karen (March 5, 2008). "Karin Badt: Inside The Landmark Forum". The Huffington Post. Retrieved on October 22, 2008.
  22. ^ Hill, Amelia (2008-03-05). "I thought I'd be brainwashed. But how wrong could I be…". The Guardian. London: www.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 2009-12-09.
  23. ^ McCrone, John (2008-11-22). "A Landmark Change". The Press. The Press (New Zealand).
  24. ^ Stassen, Wilma (September 2008). "Inside a Landmark Forum Weekend" Health 24
  25. ^ Odasso, Diane (2008-06-05). "My Landmark Experience". The Huffington Post. www.huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved 2009-12-09.
  26. "Velo and Vintage on Second Saturday". Sacramento Press. 2010-05-06. Retrieved 2011-03-14.
  27. 31/entertainment/24990821_1_breast-cancer-survivors-breast-cancer-survivors-duck-breast "Cherish the mammary: Restaurants raise funds for breast cancer survivors". Philadelphia Daily News. 2008-07-31. Retrieved 2011-03-14. {{cite news}}: Check |url= value (help)
  28. "Some of Detroit's Major Miracle Makers". Time Magazine, Detroit Blog. 2010-09-21. Retrieved 2011-09-20.
  29. "Cyclists gear up for challenging event". San Diego Union-Tribune. 2008-04-19. Retrieved 2011-03-14.
  30. Mauro, Lucia (2001-10-26). "Middle Eastern arts on tap". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2011-10-14.
  31. "Helping professionals take up community welfare projects". Chennai, India: Hindu Times. 2010-09-13. Retrieved 2011-10-14.
  32. "Charity walk to boost anti-suicide initiatives". Bay of Plenty Times. 2011-08-20. Retrieved 2011-10-14.
  33. "Local couple finds true love is closer than you think". The Daily Courier. 2011-02-13. Retrieved 2011-10-29.
  34. Alford, Henry (2010-11-26). "You're O.K., but I'm Not. Let's Share". New York Times. Retrieved 2011-03-14.
  35. "Change We Can (Almost) Believe In". TIME Magazine. 2011-03-07. Retrieved 2011-03-14.
  36. "Landmark Forum: One Weekend to fix your LIFE?". Irish Mail on Sunday. 2012-02-18.
  37. Graham Rayman, "Suit Against Sperm-Bank Firm Claims Sexual Harassment and Cult-Like Behavior", Village Voice, 20 May 2008
  38. "Brief Quotes". LandmarkEducation.com. Retrieved on October 23, 2008.
  39. Allinson, Amber (April 2014). "Mind Over Matter". The Mayfair Magazine (U.K.).
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    • Barker, Eileen (1996). "New Religions and Mental Health". In Bhugra, Dinesh (ed.). Psychiatry and Religion: Context, Consensus and Controversies. London and New York: Routledge. p. 126. ISBN 0415089557.;
    • Beckford, James A. (2003). Social Theory and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 156. ISBN 0-521-77431-4.;
    • Lockwood, Renee (2011). "Religiosity Rejected: Exploring the Religio-Spiritual Dimensions of Landmark Education". International Journal for the Study of New Religions. 2 (2). Sheffield, England: Equinox: 225–254. doi:10.1558/ijsnr.v2i2.225. ISSN 2041-9511.;
    • Beckford, James A. (2004). "New Religious Movements and Globalization". In Lucas, Phillip Charles; Robbins, Thomas (eds.). New Religious Movements in the 21st Century. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. p. 256. ISBN 0-415-96576-4.;
    • Clarke, Peter B. (2012). "New Religious Movements". In Taliaferro, Charles; Harrison, Victoria S.; Goetz, Stewart (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Theism. London: Routledge. p. 123. ISBN 978-0-415-88164-7.;
    • Heelas, Paul (1991). "Western Europe: Self Religions". In Sutherland, S.R.; Clarke, P.B. (eds.). The Study of Religion: Traditional and New Religions. London: Routledge. pp. 165–166, 171. ISBN 0-415-06432-5.;
    • Ramstedt, Martin (2007). "New Age and Business". In Kemp, Daren; Lewis, James R. (eds.). Handbook of the New Age. Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion. Leiden: Brill. pp. 196–197. ISBN 978-90-04-15355-4..
  41. See:
  42. See:
  43. See:
  44. See:
  45. See:
    • Chryssides, George (1999). Exploring New Religions. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 229, 687.;
    • Schneider (1995). "Der Pädagogische Bereich als Operationsfeld für Psychokulte". 20 Jahre Elterninitiative. e.V.. University of Tubingen, Theologische Abteilung: 189–190. ISBN 3-927890-23-5. ISSN 0720–3772. {{cite journal}}: Check |issn= value (help);
    • Sharot, Stephen (2011). Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press. p. 182. ISBN 9780814334010..
  46. Goldwag, Arthur (2009). Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies. New York: Vintage/Random House. pp. 29–30. ISBN 9780307390677.
  47. Puttick, Elizabeth (2004). "Landmark Forum (est)". In Partridge, Christopher Hugh (ed.). Encyclopedia of New Religions. Oxford: Lion. pp. 406–407. ISBN 978-0-74-595073-0.
  48. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Landmark Education. Retrieved on September 1, 2013.
  49. See:
  50. Tidskriften Analys & Kritik - Irrationalismen
  51. See:
    • Marie Lemonniera, "Chez les gourous en cravate", Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 May 2005, accessed 7 December 2008; French text: "L’'Inspection du Travail débarque dans les locaux de Landmark, constate l'’exploitation des bénévoles et dresse des procès-verbaux pour travail non déclaré." English translation: "Labor inspectors turned up at the offices of Landmark, noted the exploitation of volunteers and drew up a report of undeclared employment."
    • (May 26, 2004). "Landmark Education - Droit de Répons - France 3" (French). landmarkeducation.fr. Retrieved on October 23, 2008.

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