Jun 8, 2019
Cengage Response
7yThanks for taking the time to share this feedback on your experience with Cengage. I’m sorry to hear that our leadership and environment did not meet your expectations of a world class organization. I’d like to share my perspective on a few of your comments.
Change is a constant in Cengage - I look at it as a differentiation in our success versus our competition. We embrace change and the unknown - because it's the only way we can advance an industry that has been slow to change over it's history. We try to communicate clearly and effectively from the leadership team, through our managers, to all employees - but it's always a challenge at the rate of speed we move to impact our student savings goal.
We do value co-location for our people. If I could have all Cengage employees sit together in one office, I would! And for two main reasons: First, collaboration between teams matters. I believe that the more we can come together to connect and the more closely we collaborate, the better our products will be. Second, I find our people grow from “unintended collisions”, or those encounters where they might bump into a team or colleague working on a project in our open office environment and learn something that they can apply to their own work. That being said, we do not have a stated policy that says employees must come into the office. It is up to manager discretion to decide what they feel is best for their teams / work.
I bring up Amazon quite a bit when talking about our technology organization. Candidly, we have recently seen some of our people leave to pursue opportunities at Amazon, and we are absolutely competing with them (and others in the technology space) for top talent. We have to, otherwise we will not be able to continue to lead positive change through technology in order to deliver the best content possible to the students and educators we serve.
Serving these students and educators often means meeting them where they are. We want our customers to move to our newest technologies when it makes the most sense for them. This does mean, we must maintain legacy platforms, systems, and integrations to meet their needs. We will continue to set the bar higher and improve our technology – that’s one of the many reasons I come to work energized every day.
I value your feedback and candor as a reminder of the work that I have to do for our people AND our learners.
George Moore
Chief Technology Officer