What People Say

MICHAEL C. JENSEN Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard University

Werner and I are writing what I think is a terribly profound piece on integrity.... Integrity is an incredibly important factor of production, at least as important as knowledge and technology. Werner is the most rigorous guy I've ever worked with. We can spend an hour working on a four-or five-sentence paragraph." "Werner is absolutely a genius, an amazing man, a remarkable man." That collaboration, along with several other projects of mutual interest, eventually coalesced as the Barbados Group.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE "Beyond Coordination and Control Is... Transformation", published by the independent internet weekly economicprincipals.com, by David Warsh, April 8, 2007

PETER BLOCK Author and Consultant

"What’s caught me lately is the notion that the future is caused by imagination. An imagination of the life causes a leading of the life, rather than the leading of the life causes my way of thinking. And I just know it’s powerful, I never quite know how to get at it. I like the language of possibility. ‘Cause it’s hard. It’s the possibility I’m living into...A lot of this stuff I got from Werner Erhard’s stuff with  … EST, you probably recognize it... But the idea that if I hold a possibility, or a future, of the way I want the world to be, then I bring that into the room with me every time I show up. I don’t have to work on it… it works on me. Now that to me is beautiful."

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

DAVE LOGAN Associate Dean and Executive Director of Executive Development, and Associate Professor of Clinical, at USC’s Marshall School of Business

"Werner’s thinking – I don’t know any nice way of saying it – is just out there in the world.  You can’t have a Master’s Degree in organizational development or human resources without picking up some of it.  And it’s usually not credited back to him.  His stuff is just out there."

From a film interview with Robyn Symon, "Transformation – The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard", a documentary produced by Symon Productions Inc.,2007

BISHOP OTIS CHARLES Retired Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Bishop Charles also wanted "to make the 'technology of transformation' available to people in the Church … "Bishop Charles, who did est in 1977, considers Werner Erhard and Ignatius of Loyola "the two individuals most influential in shaping my manner of grappling with work and life in the last 15 years," because although "the two are separated by about 400 years, each had a gift of being able to put together a way of creating a space in which your own life and gifts were able to be clearly manifested."

READ THE FULL ARTICLE "Erhard's Life After Est", By Dan Wakefield, Common Boundary, March/April 1994

LYNNE TWIST Global activist, Author of The Soul of Money, Founder and President of the Soul of Money Institute

"There are thousands of consulting firms that come out of Werner’s work. There are hundreds of not-for-profits that come out of The Hunger Project alone. And hundreds that come out of the est Training and the Landmark Forum. It’s staggering the difference that that man has made in this world."

From a film interview with Robyn Symon, "Transformation – The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard", a documentary produced by Symon Productions Inc.,2007

RONALD HEIFETZ Founder, Center for Public Leadership, Harvard University

During this same early period, we looked at the Erhard Seminar Training. That was an important experience because we saw two hundred people in a room over two weekends go through a powerful curriculum and have a learning experience that seemed to change many of their lives.

From Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World, by Sharon Daloz Parks, published 2005 by Harvard Business School Press, copyright 2005 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, pages 157-158