Werner Erhard

Werner Hans Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg; September 5, 1935) is an American author and lecturer who founded Erhard Seminars Training (est), 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 Donella 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.