I guess it took 5 years, because if you check out
their Wikipedia page you'll see they've just changed their name to be Landmark Worldwide. I don't know the exact date they did it, but they were still Landmark Education last year, during which time I was still oh-so-regularly attending their events. One special event I attended was held by my seminar leader and was all about their "new marketing", and addressed new "ways of being" that they were in the process of rolling out for the whole organization, but from location to location as they could.
A couple of major new "ways of being" discussed were: less pressure being put on participants (worded extremely loosely though, for all the wiggle room they actually want their leaders and staff and "technology" to make use of), and new standards for not "letting" the volunteers overwork themselves as much. To me this is all facade though; much like the name change. I personally call them est/Landmark, because the only thing that's ever really changed, from what I've seen, is the jargon, as they've continued to re-package the same old devices, as something new. All the while pulling the same old tricks. With new names.
Nonetheless, what was especially interesting to me, was the way in which each person's time in the organization, and with some even dating back to the est days, related directly to how much more intensely resistant they were in expressing themselves about those changes.
Like hazing: the more ringer they'd been through, the more they wanted everyone else to have to endure it.
Without calling it manipulation, they are all so keenly aware of how core it is to the organization's practices.
It puts the organization in a bit of a pickle, even if they did really and truly want to improve the organization's behaviors, because they have to keep bringing all those folks with all their different degrees of Stockholm syndrome with them. The est/Landmark that all those folks are loyal to, is the one that has behaved the same old terrible way all this time, and to change that is to devalue the terrible price each of them has already paid. In my opinion (and humility's got nothing to do with it), the only way that the organization can actually change is via their complete self-immolation (which I'm a proponent of, but that's outside of it being my honest opinion). I just don't think an evolution is at all viable for them. Again, even if it really did want to become a non-manipulative, genuine, altruistic/for profit operation. (Is there even such a thing? ~Rhetorical.~)