Landmark Worldwide

Landmark Worldwide (known as Landmark Education before 2013), or simply Landmark, is an American employee-owned for-profit company that offers personal development programs, with most well-known being the Landmark Forum. It is one of several large-group awareness training programs. Several sociologists and scholars of religion have classified Landmark as a "new religious movement" (NRM), while others have called it a "self-religion", a "corporate religion", and a "religio-spiritual corporation". Landmark has sometimes been described as a cult. Some religious experts dispute this claim, pointing out that Landmark does not meet some characteristics of cults, including being a religious organization, or having a central leader. Landmark has been criticized for the stress it puts on participants while it tries to convert them to a new worldview and for its recruitment tactics: Landmark does not use advertising, but instead pressures participants during courses to recruit relatives and friends as new customers. As part of the Human Potential Movement, which was centered in San Francisco, Werner Erhard created and ran the est (Erhard Seminars Training) system from 1971 to 1984, which promoted the idea that individuals are empowered when they take personal responsibility for all events in their lives, both good and bad. In 1985, Erhard modified est to be gentler and more business-oriented, and renamed it as the Landmark Forum. In 1991, he sold the company and its concepts to some of his employees, who incorporated it as Landmark Education Corporation, which was restructured into Landmark Education LLC in 2003, and then renamed Landmark Worldwide LLC in 2013. Its subsidiary, the Vanto Group, markets and delivers training and consulting to organizations.