Werner Erhard Speaks at Harvard

Werner Erhard speaks to Kennedy School students on his latest work: “Why We Do What We Do: A New Model Providing Actionable Access to the Source of Performance.”   Find out more at the Werner Erhard & est Training website

Top 10 CPL Videos of 2010: Harvard University Kennedy School of Leadership

Top 10 CPL Videos of 2010: Harvard University Kennedy School of Leadership

The Harvard University Center for Public Leadership announced their top ten videos of  2010.  With 21,763 views, Werner Erhard speaks to Kennedy School students was their second most viewed video of the year.  The Center for Public Leadership posts their videos, including archived footage from a decade of leadership events, speeches, and interviews—on their YouTube channel.

The Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership is committed to advancing the frontiers of knowledge about leadership through teaching and research and deepening the pool of leaders for the common good through cocurricular activities that include skill-building workshops, fellowships, and classes in leadership for social change.

Werner Erhard Photograph

In November 2010 Werner Erhard delivered presentations in Mumbai and New Delhi on the topic of Mastery and led a course on Leadership to business executives in Panchgani India under the sponsorship of MW Corporation.  View the full slide show

Werner Erhard – India, November 2010

In November 2010 “An Evening with Werner Erhard: On Mastery” was presented to over two thousand people in New Delhi and in Mumbai.  As the blogger Prashanth Udupa, wrote, “When Werner came on to the stage, the audience gave him a standing ovation – for about 90 seconds. The sound from the applause was almost deafening. Werner graciously took in all the applause and set out to create for us the topic of his talk – Mastery in life.”

Also in November, in Panchgani India, Werner Erhard led the high level course, “Leadership: An Ontological Model” for many of India’s leading executives. Presented by the IC Centre for Governance, under the sponsorship of MW Corp (a billion dollar textile and energy company), the course was designed to “give access to the ways of being, thinking, planning, and action required to be a leader and to exercise leadership effectively.  It is specifically designed to provide participants with the tools needed to achieve significant breakthroughs in their professional and personal lives – in any environment, no matter what the circumstances.”  The co-faculty for the course were Michael C. Jensen, Steve Zaffron, and Kari Granger.

Read more at www.wernererhard.com

Current Work of Werner Erhard

Werner Erhard has recently been at work on writing a New Paradigm of Individual, Group and Organizational Performance in collaboration with Professor Michael C. Jensen Ph.D.  The following text is the abstract found at Social Sciences Research Network:

The current model of performance, while having produced many improvements in performance during its 100 year reign, has been essentially exhausted leaving in its wake little more than a labyrinth of explanations for human performance. Given that models are constrained and shaped by the paradigm from within which they are generated, a truly new model of performance would require a new paradigm of performance.

Our new model of performance (a part of our new paradigm of performance), rather than adding more explanations for why people do what they do and why they don’t do what they don’t do, provides actionable access to the source of performance. This actionable access to the source of performance opens up a new realm of opportunity for study and research, and for new and more effective interventions, applications, and practices for improving individual, group, and organizational performance.

You can read more about Werner Erhard’s current work at the Werner Erhard Website and at Werner Erhard‘s author page at SSRN

Peter Gabriel

Coming to adulthood in the ’70s “Me Decade”, Peter Gabriel was on board as various ’60s psychological self-therapies went mainstream, notably EST (Erhard Seminars Training), of which he still remains an enthusiast.

“Anyone with an open mind wanting to explore the world was drawn to that movement. There were fairly scary adventures that could change lives. Last year I met Werner Erhard [born John Paul Rosenberg, the former salesman who created the EST course]; many people feel negatively about him, but I enjoyed him enormously. The whole system he set up felt like a hard-sell American organization but if you didn’t have a year to spend in an ashram yet still wanted to shake up your life a bit, you could go for a couple of weekends and get severely challenged.

“It taught me all sorts of things, of which one was to be responsible for your life and who you are—don’t blame others, don’t be a victim. I’d been doing that. The analogy is of a boat in dangerous water: would you rather be in the hold bitching about the captain or standing at the helm with the power to change direction? you can only get to that position if you’re prepared to take responsibility. It’s very logical but very hard sometimes—I can’t always stay in that place but I know life works better when you’re there.

“The other thing is to be authentic about who you are, how you feel, and what’s going on…It’s about being real. We spend so much of our lives not actually being who we are but who we imagine we ought to be.”

From an Interview with Peter Gabriel in MOJO, April 2010

Conservative Thinkers Think Again

Conservative Thinkers Think Again
by Patricia Cohen, Sunday, 20 July 2008 New York Times,Week in Review

Almost anything can happen in an election year, but among conservatives, almost everyone seems to agree that no matter who captures the White House in November ’08, the movement that has ruled the Republican Party since the 1960’s and mostly dominated American politics since 1980 has lost its way. Across the spectrum of the right, writers and thinkers have turned their relentless analysis inward, a kind of political EST seminar aimed at self-transformation.

The Age of Miracles

from “The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife”
Marianne Williamson, Hay House Inc. Publishers, January 31, 2008

“According to Werner Erhard, founder of the est organization, we can live our lives either acting out of circumstances or acting out of a vision. And when it comes to midlife, we can forge a new vision, a new conversation, to take us beyond the limited thought-forms that have defined its parameters for generations. The circumstances are fixed, but our experience of them is not. Every situation is experienced within the context of the conversation surrounding it, both in our heads and in our culture.”

New Conversations That Lead to New Possibilities

Werner Erhard is a teacher, consultant, and the creator of one of the most influential technologies of the last 30 years, the technology of transformation. This technology has been the basis for two widely popular and effective educational programs, The est Training and The Landmark Forum, as well as a successful corporate consulting business and several other enterprises and organizations. In 1983, Werner accepted the request of the newly formed Mastery Foundation to consult in the creation of a transformational program for those who minister and serve others. Since then, he has continued to donate his expertise and services to the Mastery Foundation, at times developing new program material and leading courses.

See: http://www.masteryfoundation.org/peace/ireland/blockanderhard/

est in the Media

In a current piece titled, “The Quest for Non – Adversarial Politics” journalist Howard Schumann addresses the criticism that Barack Obama has received from the media. He uses est as an example of how the media can twist something positive into something negative and focus only on bits of what they hear rather than looking at the results. Schumann says, “In the 1970s, a self-help program called est (Erhard Seminars Training) assisted hundreds of thousands of people to gain control of their lives. The media however could only focus on snippets of what they heard about the methods of the program and completely ignored the results.  What was driving the media in those days is similar to what is going on today, the fear of being conned. We are so used to being conned every day by television advertising, unscrupulous promotions, and deceptive politicians that when something authentic comes along, we are afraid to take the risk that it might be real. That is a prescription for being stuck, not for making the changes in our society that are required.”  Read his article here.