Werner Erhard

Werner Hans Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg; September 5, 1935) is an American author and lecturer known for founding est, which operated from 1971 to 1984. He has written, lectured, and taught on self-improvement.

In 1977 Erhard, with the support of John Denver, Robert W. Fuller and others, founded The Hunger Project,"The Hunger Project". ''CSO-Net''. Economic and Social Council. Retrieved 30 Nov. 2015. 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 in 2013 Landmark Worldwide.

Early life

John Paul Rosenberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 5, 1935.Steven M. Tipton, ''Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, p. 176. His father was a small-restaurant owner who left Judaism for a Baptist mission before joining his wife in the Episcopal Church, 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 there for eight years as an acolyte, and has been an Episcopalian ever since.

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.

From the early mid-1950s until 1960, Rosenberg worked in various automobile dealerships (starting at a Ford dealership where he was trained by Lee Iacocca, then Lincoln Mercury, and finally Chevrolet), with a stint managing a nearly defunct medium-duty industrial equipment firm, which became successful under his management.

In 1960, Rosenberg left Patricia and their children in Philadelphia, traveled to Indianapolis with June Bryde, and changed his name to "Werner Hans Erhard"; he chose the name 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 his younger siblings took jobs in the est organization.

Career

''Parents'' Magazine Cultural Institute

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, Erhard 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 to Los Angeles. In January 1964, ''Parents'' transferred him to Arlington, Virginia, as the southeast division manager, but after a dispute with the company 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

While largely self-educated, Erhard was influenced by or worked closely with philosophers, leadership and business academics, physicists, and Zen masters. Philosopher Michael E. Zimmerman said of Erhard, "He had no particular formal training in anything, but he understood things as well as anyone I'd ever seen; and I've been around a lot of smart people in academia." During his time in St. Louis, he read two books that had a marked effect on him: ''Think and Grow Rich'' by Napoleon Hill (1937) and ''Psycho-Cybernetics'' by Maxwell Maltz (1960). 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'' (1978), 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, Erhard 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 de-emphasize reason in favor of emotion. The authors also describe graduates recruiting heavily on behalf of the companies, thereby eliminating marketing expenses.

est (1971–1984)

Starting in 1971, est, short for Erhard Seminars Training and also 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. Erhard led all the early est courses himself, but by the mid-1970s he had trained ten others (doctors, attorneys, and businessmen and -women) to do so. Est centers opened in Los Angeles, Aspen, Honolulu, New York, and many other cities, and est was enthusiastically endorsed by celebrities and people of influence such as leadership and business academic Warren Bennis