| Company type | Private sole proprietorship[1](defunct) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Personal development, Large Group Awareness Training |
| Founded | February 1981 |
| Defunct | 1991 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, USA |
Key people | Werner Erhard (Founder) |
| Products | Seminars, workshops |
Werner Erhard and Associates, also known as WE&A or as WEA, operated as a commercial entity from February 1981 until early 1991. It replaced Erhard Seminars Training, Inc. as the vehicle for delivering the est training, and offered what some people refer to as personal[2] and professional development[citation needed] programs. Initially WE&A marketed and staged the est training (in the form of the est seminars and workshops), but in 1984 the est training was replaced by WE&A with a more modern, briefer, more rigorous[citation needed] and more philosophical program - based on Werner Erhard's teachings and called "The Forum".[3][4]
In 1991 Erhard sold the assets of WE&A to a group of employees, who later formed Landmark Education. Erhard then retired[5][better source needed] and left the United States.[6]
Skepticism about therapeutic groups as a means of personal development may be warranted. [...] More direct evidence comes from a careful study of Large Group Awareness Training programs, variously known as Erhard Seminars training (est), Lifespring, or simply the Forum. The basic procedure of these courses parallels the group training workshops described earlier, but the emphasis shifts from group effectiveness to personal development. [...] In the most rigorous independent study to date, a team of researchers led by psychologist Jeffrey Fisher obtained permission to study the impact of participation in a training processs sponsored by Werner Erhard and Associates. The investigators assembled a sample of eighty-three people who took part in the Forum, along with fifty-two comparison groups of non-participants with comparable baseline characteristics. Fisher and his team assessed the Forum participants' traits and beliefs four to six weeks before taking part in the Forum, four to six weeks afterward, and eighteen months later. Based on the wide range of the Forum's purported benefits, Fisher's surveys measured life satisfaction, social competence, self-esteem, physical and emotional health, and a variety of character traits. In the short term, average Forum participants experienced a small but significant increase that the course of their life was under their own control [...]. In the eighteen-month follow-up, however, [...].
Mr. Erhard's est encounter sessions - which, by some estimates, had as many as 500,000 takers between 1971 and 1984 - attracted plenty of criticism for their authoritarian form of indoctrination. But they also produced hundreds of obsessively eager acolytes: enough for him to set up a watered-down and more marketable organization, known as the Forum, which replaced est in 1984. The Forum offers a series of two transformational weekends for $625. The thinking behind them is often Heideggerian - or at least very similar to Heidegger's - with a few of its own twists and turns. Professor Dreyfus was hired to help give it a more Heideggerian slant (though he is certainly not responsible for its current form). [...] Heidegger's critics will derive some satisfaction from the fact that he has ended up, half-understood, on the lips of followers many of whom are white-collar cranks. Theirs, certainly, are not the most interesting thoughts of the century.
The est training is replaced by a modernized, briefer, less confrontational, more Socratic sort of program called 'the Forum' [...].
In 1991, after twenty years and seven hundred thousand customers, Erhard retired and sold his intellectual property to his brother Harry Rosenberg. Investigated by the IRS and hounded by lawsuits from his children and ex-employees alleging abuse and exploitation, he left the country soon after.