bully boys rule - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

3.0
5 May 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Cengage has all the advantages of a large company; fairly good benefits, lots of lateral movement opportunities, a chance to learn about higher ed publishing.

Cons

Cengage brought in people to help pull it out of bankruptcy - and they did. Michael Hansen and his team came in and ruthlessly reorganized a company that was in sore need of housecleaning. You need people with a clear vision and a wide streak of ruthlessness to be able to do that quickly and efficiently. The problem is those ruthless people are still there and now because they have already reorganized the company multiple times their way of managing in the new direction is bullying. It has created a fearful, toxic environment.

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Cengage Response
11y
Yesterday I attended a talk by Greg Brandeau, the former President of Maker Media and formerly CTO at Pixar/Walt Disney Studios. He was speaking to our product team. What was interesting to me was his view that innovative companies face constant change. That’s the environment I’d describe at Cengage. It’s positive in the sense that we’re continually iterating and adapting to changes, with increasingly more and better data available to drive our decisions. My management team and I joined Cengage to transform it in the best EdTech company in the industry. That is what we are doing, with the help and support of our more than 5000 employees. On that journey, transparency in our decision-making is very important to me. This allows every single employee to make a decision whether this is the right environment for them. And we fully respect that it is not the right environment for everyone. It sounds like you have found a new, outside opportunity that may be a better fit for you. You are still of course welcome to e-mail me directly with feedback. I wish you the best of luck. I posted above originally on May 13, but it wasn't all showing, so tried to repost above. Thanks

Explore other reviews about Cengage

3.0
4 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Company has some interesting approaches to the market and in the past they seemed value employees. There are some good employees there and there was, in the past, visionary leadership, but the people with the vision and leadership skills left the company a few years ago.

Cons

The company actively de-values employees. They had a project they called "Project Horizon" where they told all employees they needed to cut costs, so the company was going to have multiple layoffs over 3-5 years - but nobody was allowed to know when, where, or why - - just one day large swaths of people would be gone. That hung over everyone's heads - for years, and is indicative of how Cengage values employees - it doesn't. Everything is about trying to secure new funding and prepare for an IPO, so they stopped investing significantly in the products about 3 years ago and that's about when they stopped acting like they cared about employee wellness as well.

9
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