Werner Erhard
Self-help guru
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.
Personal 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.
The public source identifies “Werner Erhard” as self-help guru. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Werner, Erhard and Self-help.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5714395. VIAF identifies the subject as 86005191. The Library of Congress control number is n91010700. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1971, 1984 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Werner Erhard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.