Werner Hans Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg; September 5, 1935) is an American author and lecturer known for founding est (offered from 1971 to 1984). In 1985, Erhard replaced the est Training with a newly designed program, the Forum. Since 1991, the Forum has been kept up to date and offered by Landmark Education. 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, 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. 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 there for eight years as an acolyte, and has been an Episcopalian 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 he 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 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.