Werner Erhard
Werner Hans Erhard is an American author and lecturer who founded Erhard Seminars Training, a course of personal and social transformation, which was offered from 1971 to 1984. In 1985, Erhard replaced est with a newly designed and updated program called the Forum. Since 1991, the Forum has been kept up to date and offered by Landmark Education.
In 1977, Erhard, with the support of Dana Meadows, John Denver, Robert W. Fuller, and others, founded The Hunger Project, an NGO accredited by the United Nations in which more than four million people have participated with the goal of establishing "the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come".
In 1991, Erhard retired from business and sold his existing intellectual property to his employees, who then adopted the name Landmark Education, renamed Landmark Worldwide in 2013.
In the 1990s, Erhard lectured, taught programs, and consulted in the Soviet Union and then the Russian Republic, Japan, and Northern Ireland.
In 2004, Erhard partnered with Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Michael C. Jensen in writing, lecturing, and teaching classes on integrity, leadership, and performance. Erhard's ideas have had an impact in academia and management and an influence on the culture at large.
Personal life
John Paul Rosenberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 5, 1935. His father was a small-restaurant owner who left Judaism for a Baptist mission and then joined his wife in the Episcopalian denomination where she taught Sunday school. They agreed that their son should choose his religion when he was old enough. He chose to be baptized in the Episcopal Church, served for eight years as an acolyte and has remained an Episcopalian.Rosenberg attended Norristown High School in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where he received the English award in his senior year. He graduated in June 1953, along with his future wife Patricia Fry, whom he married on September 26, 1953; they had four children.
In 1960, Rosenberg deserted his wife and their children in Philadelphia. Rosenberg and June Bryde assumed false identities and traveled to Indianapolis. He chose the name "Werner Hans Erhard" from Esquire magazine articles he had read about West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard and physicist Werner Heisenberg. Bryde changed her name to Ellen Virginia Erhard. The Erhards moved to St. Louis, where Werner took a job as a car salesman.
Patricia Rosenberg and their four children initially relied on welfare and help from family and friends. After five years without contact, Patricia Rosenberg divorced Erhard for desertion and remarried.
In October 1972, a year after creating Erhard Seminars Training, Erhard contacted his first wife and family, arranged to provide support and college education for the children, and repaid Patricia's parents for their financial support. Between 1973 and 1975, members of his extended family took the est training, and Patricia and two of his siblings took jobs in the est organization.
Career
''Parents'' Magazine Cultural Institute
From the early mid-1950s until 1960, Rosenberg worked in various automobile dealerships, with a stint managing a medium-duty industrial equipment firm. In 1961, Erhard began selling correspondence courses in the Midwest. He then moved to Spokane, Washington, where he worked at Encyclopædia Britannica's "Great Books" program as an area training manager. In January 1962, he began working at Parents Magazine Cultural Institute, a division of W. R. Grace & Co. In the summer of 1962, he became territorial manager for California, Nevada, and Arizona, and moved to San Francisco, and in the spring of 1963 moved to Los Angeles. In January 1964, Parents transferred him to Arlington, Virginia as the southeast division manager, but after a dispute with the company's president, he returned to his previous position as west coast division manager in San Francisco. Over the next few years, Erhard brought on as Parents staff many people who later became important in est, including Elaine Cronin, Gonneke Spits, and Laurel Scheaf.Influences
Erhard acknowledges many influences on his development, including a variety of experiences. He did not have much formal education and was self-educated. He became interested in physics in high school and later developed friendships with Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, from whom he gained knowledge of theoretical physics. Erhard also credits being tutored by philosophers Michel Foucault, Humberto Maturana, Karl Popper, and Hilary Putnam.During his time in St. Louis in the 1960s, Erhard read two books that had a marked effect on him: Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics. When a member of his staff at Parents Magazine introduced him to the ideas of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, both key figures in the Human Potential Movement, he became more interested in personal fulfillment than sales success.
After moving to Sausalito, he attended seminars by Alan Watts, a Western interpreter of Zen Buddhism, who introduced him to the distinction between mind and self; Erhard subsequently became close friends with Watts. Erhard also studied in Japan with Zen rōshi Yamada Mumon. In Bartley's biography, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man, the Founding of est, Bartley quotes Erhard as acknowledging Zen as an essential contribution that "created the space for" est.
Erhard attended the Dale Carnegie Course in 1967. He was sufficiently impressed by it to make his staff attend the course, and began to think about developing a course of his own. Over the following years, he investigated a wide range of movements, including Encounter, Transactional Analysis, Enlightenment Intensive, Subud and Scientology.
In 1970, Erhard became involved in Mind Dynamics and began teaching his own version of Mind Dynamics classes in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The directors of Mind Dynamics eventually invited him into their partnership, but Erhard rejected the offer, saying he would rather develop his own seminar program—est, the first program of which he conducted in October 1971. John Hanley, who later founded Lifespring, was also involved at this time. In their 1992 book Perspectives on the New Age, James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton write that Mind Dynamics, est, and LifeSpring have "striking" similarities, as all used "authoritarian trainers who enforce numerous rules," require applause from participants, and deemphasize reason in favor of emotion. The authors also describe graduates recruiting heavily on behalf of the companies, thereby eliminating marketing expenses.
In the early 1980s, shortly before the est training was phased out, Erhard was introduced to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger. He consulted with the Heideggerian scholars Hubert Dreyfus and Michael E. Zimmerman, who noted commonalities between est training and elements of Heidegger's thought.
est (1971–1984)
Starting in 1971, est, short for Erhard Seminars Training and Latin for "it is", offered in-depth personal and professional development workshops, the initial program of which was called "The est Training". The est Training's purpose was to transform the way one sees and makes sense of life so that the situations one had been trying to change or tolerating clear up in the process of living itself. The point was to leave participants free to be, while increasing their effectiveness and the quality of their lives. The est Training was experiential and transformational in nature.The workshops were offered until 1984, when the est training was replaced by the Forum. As of 1984, 700,000 people had completed the est training. American ethicist, philosopher, and historian Jonathan D. Moreno has described the est training as "the most important cultural event after the human potential movement itself seemed exhausted" and a form of "Socratic interrogation". Erhard challenged participants to be themselves and live in the present instead of playing a role imposed on them by their past, and to move beyond their current points of view into a perspective from which they could observe their own positionality. The author Robert Hargrove said "you're going to notice that things do begin to clear up, just in the process of life itself".
The first est course was held in San Francisco, California, in October 1971. By the mid-1970s Erhard had trained 10 others to lead est courses. Between 1972 and 1974 est centers opened in Los Angeles, Aspen, Honolulu, and New York City.
Werner Erhard Foundation (1973–1991)
In the early 1970s, the est Foundation became the Werner Erhard Foundation, with the aim of "providing financial and organizational support to individuals and groups engaged in charitable and educational pursuits—research, communication, education, and scholarly endeavors in the fields of individual and social transformation and human well-being." The Foundation supported projects launched by people committed to altering what is possible for humanity, such as The Hunger Project, The Mastery Foundation, The Holiday Project, and the Youth at Risk Program, programs that continue to be active. It also organized presentations by scholars and humanitarians such as the Dalai Lama and Buckminster Fuller and hosted an annual conference in theoretical physics, a science in which Erhard was especially interested. The annual conference was designed to give physicists an opportunity to work with their colleagues on what they were developing before they published, and was attended by such physicists as Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and Leonard Susskind.The Hunger Project
In 1977, with the support of John Denver, Dana Meadows, and former Oberlin College president Robert W. Fuller, among others, Erhard founded The Hunger Project, a nonprofit NGO that holds consultative status with UNESCO. The project's origin can be seen in Erhard’s 1977 source document The End of Starvation: Creating an Idea Whose Time Has Come.The Hunger Project was established as an international charitable organization with the aim of generating worldwide commitment to end hunger and starvation within 20 years. It emphasized the power of individuals to generate broad social change. Some critics described it as largely symbolic or as promoting Erhard's ideas rather than providing direct relief.
By 1979, about 750,000 people in dozens of countries had pledged their personal commitment to help end world hunger. By 1984, estimates placed participation at around 2.8 million people, and in 1985 The New York Times reported that the four-millionth person had signed the pledge declaring that the end of hunger "is an idea whose time has come".