Biography

Werner Erhard’s life has been devoted to the creation of ideas. Some of his ideas have been turned into programs for the public, some made available through non-profit organizations, and some have been used by management consultants in their consulting to corporations and non-profits. After more than 35 years many of his transformational ideas have become a part of society’s thinking and culture across the globe.

In a new documentary, Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard, viewers get a glimpse of who Werner Erhard really is, with rare interviews with his family, press and top professionals.

In the early 1970s Werner Erhard introduced the notion of "transformation" to the American public in a way that it had not been heard before.

The methodology he developed provided individuals and organizations with a means to design new contexts or frames of reference for themselves. This resulted in more creativity and independent thinking, and as a consequence in more effective action, all of which has had a lasting impact on the important concerns in their lives.

Werner Erhard created a program in 1971 named the est Training, which was offered to the public by Erhard Seminars Training, Inc. and after 1981 by Werner Erhard & Associates. The est Training, attended by approximately a million people, was enormously popular and became a household word. The combination of Werner Erhard's cutting edge ideas and his ruthless compassion, honesty and skill in leading seminars catapulted est into the mainstream of American culture. With this wide-spread popularity, Erhard and his programs became the subject of television, newspaper, magazine, and even movie attention.

Because Erhard Seminars Training, inc. and Werner Erhard and Associates produced powerful results with hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in a very short time, he and his work continued to be a source of enormous influence as well as controversy. In 1991, Erhard closed his companies that offered his programs to the public. His former employees started a company of their own called Landmark Education. Erhard's original thinking and the processes developed from it are found updated and further developed in the programs of Landmark Education.

In addition to his business enterprises, Erhard co-founded independent, non-profit charitable enterprises, including: the Breakthrough Foundation, the Hunger Project, the Holiday Project, the Werner Erhard Foundation, and the Education Network. In 1988, Werner Erhard was awarded the Mahatma Gandhi Humanitarian Award in recognition of his contribution to people and society.

Erhard has lectured for a wide variety of prestigious institutions and professional associations around the world, including the American Psychiatric Association, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, UNESCO, the Oxford Union at Oxford University, Stanford University, MIT, Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School and The Kennedy Center For Public Leadership at Harvard, Yale University Law School, USC Marshall School of Business, and University of Rochester Simon School of Business.

If you are interested in more information about Werner Erhard's life there is only one biography published about Werner Erhard that is both factual and includes extensive interviews with Werner Erhard and family members. The book is titled Werner Erhard, The Transformation of a Man: The Founding of Est by William Warren Bartley III. While other publications exist in print and on the internet it is important to note that they do not have factual rigor as they are not properly referenced and in many cases rely on anonymous sources.

Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard
This documentary was created by the independent filmmaker and two-time Emmy Award Winning Producer for PBS, Robyn Symon.  It chronicles the history of Werner Erhard, his life, the world of the est Training and his work and ideas, all put into perspective through the dozens of stories told by numerous professional and academic experts. Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard is available in DVD by clicking here.