Werner Erhard - 1991 – Present

1991 – Present

Since his retirement in 1991, Erhard has kept a low profile except for a few public appearances. He appeared on Larry King Live in an episode titled "Whatever Happened to Werner Erhard?" via satellite from Moscow, Russia on December 8, 1993. As of 2001 Erhard maintained a residence with Gonneke Spits in Georgetown, Cayman Islands.

He has worked in the area of peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland with author Peter Block. He attended an event on May 11, 2004 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University entitled "From Thought to Action: Growing Leaders in a Changing World". The event was in honor of a friend, Warren Bennis, who had taken Erhard Seminars Training and then consulted for Werner Erhard and Associates.

In recent years Erhard has devoted his time to academic investigation, and presentations in writing and lectures of his ideas. In 2007, Werner Erhard presented a talk exploring the link between integrity, leadership, and increased performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for Public Leadership, led a course on integrity at the 2007 MIT Sloan School of Management’s SIP (Sloan Innovation Period), and spoke at the Harvard Law School program on Corporate Governance. In 2008, he took part in a presentation on integrity at DePaul University and co-led a course on leadership at the Simon School of Business. In 2009 he presented Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological Model at the Gruter Institute Squaw Valley Conference: Law, Behavior & the Brain.

He presented his work on "Why We Do What We Do: A New Model Providing Actionable Access to the Source of Performance." at the Kennedy Center For Public Leadership at Harvard University in December 2009

Erhard was selected to contribute to the 2011 Harvard University publication, The Handbook for Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing and Being, edited by the Dean of Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria and HBS leadership professors Scott Snook and Rakesh Khurana. In their introduction the editors write, “Erhard, Jensen and Granger anchor this collection by taking dead aim at the BE component. In a highly provocative chapter titled “Creating Leaders”, this eclectic group of scholars argues for adopting a decidedly ontological approach to leadership education...For these authors, integrity, authenticity, and being committed to something bigger than oneself form the base of ‘the context for leadership,’ a context that once mastered, leaves one actually being a leader. It is not enough to know about or simply understand these foundational factors, but rather by following a rigorous, phenomenologically based methodology, students have the opportunity to create for themselves a context that leaves them actually being a leader and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self-expression."