Werner Erhard
Novelist
Known best for founding Erhard Seminars Training, Werner Erhard & Associates, and The Hunger Project, this leadership expert and self-help author has delivered lectures at Harvard, Yale, and other prominent universities.
Before becoming an entrepreneur and author, he worked as a car salesman and an Encyclopedia Britannica employee. Later, he became Vice President of the Parents Magazine Cultural Institute.
He was greatly influenced by the 1937 Napoleon Hill book Think and Grow Rich, as well as by Maxwell Matz's 1960 work Psycho-Cybernetics. His publications include Handbook For Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing, and Being and Putting Integrity Into Finance: A Purely Positive Approach.
Born John Paul Rosenberg, he grew up in Philadelphia and Norristown, Pennsylvania as the son of a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother. His first marriage, to Patricia Fry, resulted in four children; after marrying his second wife, June Bryde, he changed his name to Werner Erhard.
In the late 1970s, he and the their singer & songwriter John Denver co-founded The Hunger Project.