Andrew Lenarcic on Mike Rinder

I first met Mike Rinder in 1988, ’89. What probably is most aggravating about working with him is he does not work with you. He doesn’t provide direction. He doesn’t provide, like, some guidance as to how to do something. And just kind of says, “Well, it’s over to you, it’s your problem, tough, tough luck. See you next week.”

There’s a project that was started in 1990 and it was to build an L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition. Now, it took almost a year to plan and build the place. So, one week before the grand opening, Mike Rinder finally shows up. He has been supposedly overseeing this whole project for the last year. He never set foot in the place once, never wrote a stitch of copy and never did a workout of anything other than seating arrangements at the opening.

And he claimed that he did all the work. He claimed he oversaw the designers, he oversaw the research that was being done. He claimed that he was the one that got that done, when, I mean, I was there—he did not do a thing.

He was given a cycle to do of—work out a billboard campaign and he turned to me and he said, “I don’t have a clue what to do. This is your problem.” And he had me figure out how to do it. So I put it all together and I gave it to him and he turned around and rewrote it all as if it was coming from him, as if he actually did the work and then presented it to the Board and to other executives as if he did the whole thing. He didn’t do a goddamn thing because he was, I don’t know, busy sleeping or busy doing something else.

That was his style, he’d just keep putting things off, putting things off, putting things off. And then if he had to actually—was forced to do something, he got called on the carpet like, “Where is this thing?” And he goes, “Oh, I have it. I’m making some corrections.” And all he had done was like, you know, fix the comma some place and fix the typo and caught a paragraph change and said, “Okay, other than that, it’s all approved,” then said, “I looked at it, I did some editing and it’s all approved now.” And it was kind of like, wow, this guy is so full of—full of himself that, it just really was part of the difficulty in working with him because—it’s just, he could never be honest and truthful about it.