Werner Erhard has done great work on ‘Integrity’ and I cannot explain it any better than he has written it.  So I am going to use his words (I hope that is ok with you Werner and I thank you for putting this into the world):

“What would your life be like, and what would your performance be, if it were true that:

You have done what you said you would do and you did it on time.

You have done what you know to do, you did it the way it was meant to be done, and you did it on time.

You have done what others would expect you to do, even if you never said you would do it, and you did it on time, or you have informed them that you will not meet their expectations.

And you have informed others of your expectations for them and have made explicit requests to those others.

And whenever you realised that you were not going to do any of the foregoing, or not going to do it on time:

You have said so to everyone who might be impacted, and you did so as soon as you realised that you wouldn’t be doing it, or wouldn’t be doing it on time, and

If you were going to be do it in the future you have said by when you would do it, and

You have dealt with the consequences of not doing it on time, or not doing at all, for all those who are impacted by your not doing it on time, or not doing it at all.

In a sentence, you have done what you said you would do or you have said you are not doing it; you have nothing hidden, you are truthful, forthright, straight and honest.  And you have cleaned up any mess you have caused for those depending on your word.

And almost unimaginable: what if others operated this way with you?”

Read Maz Iqbal’s post

From an Interview with Werner Erhard in Scene Magazine, 1982:

We are developing a prototype that will be used in our centers throughout the world to support people in being able to be effective in their community, rather than simply having a list of complaints and gripes and feeling like there is nothing they can do. A lot of the work is allowing people to get in touch with the fact that they have the power to bring forth in themselves those qualities which will actually make a difference in their community, their family and their work.

How do you approach problem solving in a community?

One of the things that I have learned is that it’s very difficult to get to the actual causes of the problems in a community And let me say parenthetically, I’m making a distinction here between the explanation we give for things and the actual causes of them. At any rate, it is difficult to get to the actual causes when they are obscured by a simple lack of integrity by the people “in community ”

What do you mean, lack of integrity?

We discovered that when people don’t stand behind their word, things stop working. And you can’t even discover why they stop working because the source is obscured by a basic lack of integrity Here’s how I think it works: You go to the doctor and the doctor comes up with a tentative diagnosis that you have disease X. He tells you to take these pills three times a day Most of the time you remember twice a day sometimes only once a day and occasionally not at all. You go back to the doctor with the same complaints. The doctor now rules out disease X because he knows that he gave you the pills and he thinks you took them. He now has to conclude that you have disease Y and he gives you medication for that which, of course, doesn’t work. It just keeps getting more and more en-mired. The same thing holds true for community.

What does that mean to the individual?

The people in the community start to have the sense that they are really only going through the motions, that they can’t really make any difference; and then their choices become insignificant. There are all those little choices we all have to make every day like whether to be concerned about the interests of our neighborhood, whether to walk over the trash in the street or pick it up.

Read the rest of this entry  at the Werner Erhard Biography Website

From Industry Week,  June 15, 1987

By Perry Pascarella

Werner Erhard has developed an organization to help managers create breakthroughs in performance. Is he establishing just another fad? Or will he help create the magnitude of change that many organizations desperately need? Sample his line of thinking and see what you think.

The net looks only one foot high. The service court seems as large as an airfield – I can’t miss it. My racket swings over and “through” the ball to drive a serve that pulls my opponent wide to his forehand side and I strike again in no time to smash his return out the open back corner. A great feeling!

I try to remember the action—reconstruct, analyze, and explain it. But I know that won’t ensure I’ll repeat it. And then there are times when that opposite court looks tiny, the net looms ten feet high, and the ball is a pea traveling at Mach 1.

The court, the net, and the ball are all real. Yet the way they occur for me changes dramatically from a good day to a bad day. While reality doesn’t change, the way it occurs for me does. Could I control that shift in my experience so I could consistently play well? Could I really make that shift happen?

We try to improve our performance by analyzing and evaluating action, producing a prescription for what should be done, and then training ourselves to do a little better. But if we want a dramatic breakthrough in performance, it seems we need a totally different approach.

In his work to develop an approach to performance that will predictably produce breakthroughs, Werner Erhard says, “If you seriously examine any action, you find there are always two sides of it: the side from which you can explain it and the side from which you can produce it. After a recent two-day rise in the stock market, for example, I read an article that masterfully described that rise, analyzed it, and explained it. However, even though I now fully understand what happened, I am not going to bet my life savings on my ability to predict the next one.

“In individual and organizational performance, most of us attempt to produce action by working in the after-the-fact realm of description, analysis, explanation, and prescription. Rarely do we consider that producing an action requires a whole different way of looking at it. If you want to have a dramatic impact on performance, you need access to the source of action.”

A spectator can describe what I’m doing on the tennis court. He is living in the realm of evaluation and explanation – but I’m playing in the world of action. While there is a relationship between his description and what is occurring on the court, the two are clearly not the same.

We seldom think about this sort of distinction, but “failing to make this simple distinction can lead to being satisfied with an explanation about action and may hide from our view the source of action,” says Werner Erhard.

Read the rest of this entry at the Werner Erhard Biography Website

‘Me generation’ – a thing of the past

San Francisco  – 1980

There’s been a shift in the rules for successful living, according to Werner Erhard.

Speaking to a crowd of some 8,500 at San Francisco’s Cow Palace in January 1980, the founder of “est” told them to look at the world from a “you AND me” perspective, instead of a “you OR me” standpoint.

Departing from philosophies emphasized by self-centered “self-help” publications, Erhard said, “We need a whole new set of rules to live successfully in a ‘you and me’ world.  We are still trying to make it with ‘you or me’ rules.”

He said, “In the past, the way I had a glass of water was to hold on to it.  Now, the way to assure you have a glass of water is to assure everyone has one.”

The new type of thinking, which Erhard says people have no training for, could breed what might be called failure.  Erhard warns that this is not truly failure.  People can expect to “fail,” he said, but failure in the context that “the world works for everyone” is an opportunity for a breakthrough.

Erhard says, “Each person’s life is shaped by a basic principle” which “thereafter unconsciously determines the shape and scope of their lives.”  People, he says, need to develop the basic principle, “The world can work for everyone.” He emphasizes that the individual does make a difference in the world.

When they adopt these attitudes, he says, they will see a shift in the way they experience life.

He said he believes what people want to do is make a difference in the world.  The “be careful, get everything you can” kind of thinking tends to dictate not only how people live and act, but how they look at the world.

What a person now needs to do, he says, is to “look at life, see what is wanted and needed, and start producing it.”

Erhard says each person must choose, for himself, the way he will make a difference in the world.

[post courtesy of the est website: Erhardseminarstraining.com]

READ THE KEYNOTE ADDRESS “Servant-Leadership: Creating an Alternative Future”, A Keynote Address by Peter Block, 2005 International Servant- Leadership Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana

-Werner Erhard

Read More Quotes by Werner Erhard

Talking about transformation is no more than a representation, an image of the real thing.  It’s like eating the menu instead of the steak – neither nurturing nor profound.  It is in being transformed – in being authentically true to oneself – that one lives passionately free, unencumbered, fearless, committed.  It is in living life in a transformed way that the steak and its sizzle show up.

We invite you to be here for the actual benefits of transformation, for the meal – not the menu. Read more…

From The Heart of the Matter, by Werner Erhard, 1984