This branch of the New Age "movement" likes to dress itself up in vague Zenlike platitudes that give it some Age of Aquarius cachet but aside from a brief early flirtation with Eastern philosophy it quickly became co-opted as a money making corporate scam.

(Some of these documents have been removed from the web. I copy this stuff into files as soon as I find it because these groups have a habit of pressuring people to take the information down. I'll provide the links even if they are dead, so if someone wants to try to retrieve them from google cache there will be something to start with.)


Background and some definitions

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/eldon.braun/awareness/mind.htm




Mind Dynamics - Alexander Everett

Mind Dynamics, founded by Alexander Everett, was the major forerunnner of the Large Group Awareness Trainings. Although it was only in existence for a few years, it has certainly sparked an entire industry of similar trainings.

Alexander Everett was from England and arrived in America in 1962 and went to Missouri. "Deciding that the Unity ministry was not his calling, he (Alexander Everett) left Missouri in 1963 and went to Fort Worth, Texas, where he had been invited to help establish a private boarding school. He remained in Texas for seven years. In Texas, he not only helped set up the Fort Worth Country Day School but more importantly, completed the work that led to the founding in 1968 of Mind Dynamics, the experiential human potential training organization that was to become the forerunner of est, Lifespring, Actualizations, and several other human potential training organizations that flourished in the 1970s and continue to do so in the 80s. 



Alexander states that Mind Dynamics grew out of the various paths of spiritual and personal growth that he had been exploring since leaving England. He lists, as the primary influences, Edgar Cayce's work, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Egyptology, Silva Mind Control, and, of course, Unity. He knew when he put the Mind Dynamics course together that, primarily, he wanted to develop a training that dealt with the workings of the mind, and secondly, since we live in the Aquarian Age, a mind sign, that he wanted to have the word "mind" in the organization's name.

The four-day trainings, which were largely experiential, caught on rapidly--not in Texas, where they were first offered, but in California, where Alexander was soon being invited to present them. As a result the headquarters of Mind Dynamics was moved to San Francisco in 1970. Interest in the course, however, was not restricted to California. During the four remaining years of the organization's existence, the course was taught throughout the United States and in Europe and Australia.

Looking back upon it, Alexander feels that the organizations expanded too quickly. It grew larger than he had originally intended, and was soon being controlled by the dynamic, young staff that he had recruited. Alexander brought in as trainers young men who were soon to become leaders in the human potential movement that spread throughout California in the 1970s and, later, across the country."

Mind Dynamics was a success and attracted William Penn Patrick's attention. He had a pyramid sales organization called Holiday Magic, which sold cosmetics. He also had a training organization known as Leadership Dynamics. He bought Everett's training in 1970 intending to use it as an additional training vehicle for his distributors. While Mind Dynamics was a non-confrontational course in self-hypnosis like the Silva Method, the Leadership Dynamics program was a hard hitting group encounter. The influences of both trainings are found in the training organizations which followed.

William Penn Patrick's Leadership Dynamics training organization went out of control in its methods according to a book called "The Pit, a group encounter defiled" by Gene Church (out of print). The resulting lawsuits pretty much shut down Leadership Dynamics as well as Mind Dynamics. The Holiday Magic MLM was busted as a pyramid scheme. Penn Patrick died when he crashed his F-86 Sabre at an airshow in Sacramento.
When Leadership Dynamics and Mind Dynamics shut down, some of the instructors went out on their own.

• Four of them founded Lifespring in 1974 and developed the Lifespring training with psychologist John Enright.
• [b]Another, Werner Erhard, founded est in 1971 which evolved into The Forum. (Landmark)
• Bob White left Lifespring, went to Japan, and started a training organization there called Life Dynamics.
• Randy Revell left Lifespring and founded the Context Trainings.
• Charlene Afremow joined Erhard's organization as a trainer. She later left in a dispute , returned to Lifespring, then returned to Landmark and is now leading Forums..
• Howard Nease founded Personal Dynamics.
• Jim Quinn founded Lifestream
• Thomas Willhite founded PSI World Seminars
• Stewart Emery worked for est and later founded Actualizations
• William Penn Patrick's training organization recovered and is known today as Leadership Dynamics.


LGAT: Large Group Awareness Training (also known as Mass Marathon training)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Group_Awareness_Training


The term Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT) refers to "training" offered by certain groups sometimes linked with the human potential movement.[1] By using LGAT techniques, these providers claim to (among other things) increase self-awareness and bring about preferred personal changes in individuals' lives.[2] Michael Langone has referred to Large Group Awareness Training as new age trainings[3] and Philip Cushman referred to them as mass marathon trainings.[4]

Large Group Awareness Training programs may involve several hundred people at a time.[5] Though early definitions cited LGATs as featuring unusually long durations, more recent texts describe the trainings as lasting from a few hours to a few days. In 2004, DuMerton, citing "Langone (1989)", estimated that "[p]erhaps a million Americans have attended LGATs".[6]: 39 Forsyth and Corazzini cite Lieberman (1994) as suggesting "that at least 1.3 million Americans have taken part in LGAT sessions".[7]

http://www.csj.org/rg/rgessays/rgessay_lgate.htm



Michael D. Langone, Ph.D.
Editor, Cultic Studies Journal



Cult Observer, Volume 15, No. 1, 1998

In the 1960s the encounter group movement was born. Advocating enhanced communication and intensified experience, this movement evolved into something that was part psychotherapy, part spirituality, and part business. In some scholarly articles, these groups were referred to as "large group awareness trainings" or LGATs. Erhard Seminars Training (est) was the most successful of these groups, and it has been widely imitated. Even though it no longer officially exists, in the minds of many est is identified with the entire LGAT movement. It is in a sense the progenitor of a myriad of programs that have been marketed to the public and the business community.

...

The est model of self-transformation is structured around an intense weekend experience which brings together several dozen or several hundred people and a "trainer" with one or more assistants. People are together morning, afternoon, and evening. Breaks, even for the bathroom, tend to be highly structured and limited. Participants are led through a long series of exercises that proponents say are designed to cut through psychological defenses, increase honesty, and help people take charge of their lives. Undoubtedly, many variations of this basic model exist, and some LGATs may depart substantially from this model.

Although reliable scientific data are not available, probably at least a million people in the United States have participated in at least one LGAT, with several hundred thousand having gone through est alone.

Because many observers of this phenomenon have associated such trainings with the new age movement (NAM), LGATs have also been called "new age transformational training programs," or "new age trainings." According to Dole and Langone, the new age can be defined as "an alternative religious paradigm that is rooted in Eastern mysticism, eclectic in its practices and beliefs, tolerant (or undiscerning, depending upon one's perspective) of nontraditional practices and beliefs, and optimistic about humanity's capacity to bring about a great evolutionary leap in consciousness." New age transformational trainings use an eclectic mix of psychological techniques and exercises that proponents believe will improve one's spiritual, psychological, and material well-being.

Some observers and scientific researchers have also associated some LGATs with at least the potential to cause psychological distress to some participants. Some compare the trainings to thought reform programs, or "brainwashing," and to "cults."

The implied, if not explicit, religious nature of many of these trainings and the potential for psychological damage in some trainings have resulted in lawsuits against some trainings and employers who have sponsored them. On February 22, 1988 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a notice on new age training programs which conflict with employees' religious beliefs. This notice gave official credence to the claim that some of these trainings are fundamentally religious in nature, even though they may be corporately organized as a business. An article from Labor Law Journal elaborates upon the EEOC document.


Werner Erhard & est

http://www.wernererhard.com/Photos/werner_erhard_photo.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training



The est Standard Training


Werner Erhard in 1979
The first est course happened at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco, California in October 1971. Within a year, trainings were being held in New York City, and other major cities in the US followed soon after. By 1979 est had expanded to Europe and other parts of the world. The popularity of est peaked in 1981, then enrollment for the various courses began to decline. The last est Training was held in December 1984 in San Francisco; in its place came a newly developed course called 'The Forum,' which began in January 1985. The est Training presented several concepts, most notably the concept of transformation and taking responsibility for one's life. The actual teaching, called "the technology of transformation," emphasizes the value of integrity.[2] 'est, Inc.' evolved into 'est, an Educational Corporation', and eventually into 'Werner Erhard & Associates'. WE&A purchased the assets of est in 1981.[citation needed]

Early influences

In William Bartley's biography, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man, the Founding of est (1978), Erhard describes his explorations of Zen Buddhism. Bartley quotes Erhard as acknowledging Zen as the essential contribution that "created the space [for est]."[1] Bartley details Erhard's connections with Zen beginning with his extensive studies with Alan Watts in the mid 1960s.[3] Bartley quotes Erhard as acknowledging:
Of all the disciplines that I studied, practiced, learned, Zen was the essential one. It was not so much an influence on me, rather it created space. It allowed those things that were there to be there. It gave some form to my experience. And it built up in me the critical mass from which was kindled the experience that produced est.[4]

Timeline

• 1971 - Erhard Seminars Training Inc, first est Training held in San Francisco, California
• 1973 - The Foundation for the Realization of Man - incorporated as a non-profit foundation in California (subsequently the name of the foundation was changed to the est Foundation in 1976, and in 1981 to the Werner Erhard Foundation)
• 1975 - est, an educational corporation.
• 1981 - Sold assets to Werner Erhard and Associates and est ceased operations[5]




You'll notice at this point that the connection to multi-level marketing and Holiday Magic cosmetics has been written out of the story. These human potential groups have many of the trappings of religion but are still basically Amway but without soap. They are demon recruiters and the point of these classes is to sell more classes. I know this from personal experience as I have a close relative as a member of another branch and was recruiting me as young as 13. I resisted for years and took one introductory class that was frankly pretty mercenary. The main focus is upselling and getting your friends to come to a "guest night" where heavy pressure to enroll is applied.


The next section will transition to Landmark. Feel free to chime in and ask me stuff at any time. I've been immersed in research on this for years and am probably glossing over things.


Further reading:

William Penn Patrick

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penn_Patrick

Description of the Behavioral Structure of the Training

http://www.rickross.com/reference/brainwashing/brainwashing44.html

"These human potential groups have many of the trappings of religion but are still basically Amway but without soap."

Amway is actually "Amway without soap." That leads to some interesting connections.

An undercover agent, FBI if I remember correctly, caught some higher ups in Amway frankly saying that all of the money was made from selling motivational materials and from rallies and seminars, and not from selling any soap. (The motivational materials are peddled to people supposedly to help them sell soap and "build their organization" of affiliates selling soap.) One of those Amway "double diamonds" at that meeting was Doug Wead. He is an Assembly of God minister, and was hired by the Bush administration, according to Wead, to coach Bush on how to "appeal to Evangelicals" and get and retain their support.

The Amway founders, Rich Devos and Jay Van Andel, are heavy hitters in the Republican party, big contributers to Bush, and of course it is a son in law of Devos who started and ran Blackwater.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1f/Outrageous_Betrayal.jpg


Who exactly is Werner Erhard?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Erhard




Early life (1935-1971)

John Paul Rosenberg graduated from Norristown High School, Norristown, Pennsylvania, in June 1953, along with his future wife Patricia Fry.[2]:30 Rosenberg married Fry on 26 September 1953[4]:4 and they had four[2]:51 children together. He left Fry and their children in Philadelphia (1960), traveled west with June Bryde[4]:4, and changed his name to "Werner Hans Erhard". Rosenberg chose his new name from Esquire magazine articles he read about then West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard and the philosopher and physicist Werner Heisenberg.[2]:57-58 June Bryde changed her name to "Ellen Virginia Erhard". The newly-renamed Erhards moved to St. Louis.

In 1961, Erhard sold correspondence courses in the Midwest, then California, and eventually moved to Spokane, Washington.[2]:85 After a few months, he took a job with Encyclopædia Britannica's "Great Books" program, and was soon promoted to area training manager. In January 1962 Erhard switched to the Parent's Magazine Cultural Institute, a child development materials division of Parents Magazine.[2]:112 In the summer of 1962 he won promotion to the position of territorial manager for California, Nevada, and Arizona, and moved to San Francisco; and in the spring of 1963 to Los Angeles.[2]:82-106 In January 1964, "Parents" promoted Erhard and transferred him to Arlington, Virginia as a southeast manager.[2]:94In August 1964, Erhard resigned his position in Arlington over a dispute with the company president and returned to his previous position in San Francisco.[2]:107-114 Erhard and his second wife moved into an apartment in Sausalito and had a second daughter, Adair, on December 27, 1964. Erhard began a close friendship with Alan Watts.[2]:117-138 In the next few years, Erhard brought on-staff at "Parents" many people who would become important in est, including Elaine Cronin, Gonneke Spits and Laurel Scheaf. In 1967 Erhard was promoted to vice president.[5]


The psychiatrist Marc Galanter described Erhard as "a man with no formal experience in mental health, self help, or religious revivalism, but a background in retail sales."[35]


Outrageous Betrayal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrageous_Betrayal


Outrageous Betrayal: The Dark Journey of Werner Erhard from est to Exile is a biography of Werner Erhard written by legal journalist Steven Pressman and first published in 1993 by St. Martin's Press. Pressman first became interested in writing a book about Werner Erhard in 1991 while working as a journalist for California Lawyer. He carried out research and investigative work for the book from 1991 to 1993, conducting interviews and consulting documents from court transcripts and previously published accounts.

...

In Outrageous Betrayal, Steven Pressman gives a chronological account of Werner Erhard's life and businesses, from high-school years through his formation of companies that delivered awareness training and the later controversies surrounding his business and family life. The book goes into detail regarding his early life as Jack Rosenberg and his name-change to Werner Erhard, his move to California, and the initial inspirations behind the training that would become "est". Pressman writes that Erhard took inspiration from the self-help course Mind Dynamics, cybernetics, from the books Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, and from Scientology and the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. He also notes how an attorney skilled in tax law helped Erhard in forming his first awareness-training company, Erhard Seminars Training.[21][22][23]

Pressman notes how Erhard and his businesses became successful within two years of foundation, and writes that his awareness-training programs trained over half a million people in his courses and brought in tens of millions of dollars in revenue. The book then describes controversies relating to both Erhard's businesses and his reported treatment of his family. Pressman details some of the lawsuits and professional desertions that hurt his business, as well as some of his conflicts with the Internal Revenue Service. The end of the book describes the impact and aftermath of a March 3, 1991 60 Minutes investigation on CBS News, where one of Erhard's daughters accused him of sexual abuse. Pressman also describes the successor company to Est, Werner Erhard and Associates, and Erhard's decision to sell the "technology" of his course The Forum to his employees and to leave the United States. The book's epilogue includes a firsthand account of a Landmark Forum seminar led by the former Est-trainer Laurel Scheaf in 1992.[7][21][22][23][24]


http://www.rickross.com/reference/est/est20.html



Background

Beginning in the 1970s a company named "est" (Erhard Seminar Training) sold courses, which are now often called "large group awareness training" and/or "mass marathon training" for "self-improvement." This included an introductory course known as "The Forum."

Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car salesman, created Est with no formal education past high school.

In the 1960s Rosenberg left his wife and four children in Philadelphia, changed his name to "Werner Hans Erhard," moved to California and started another family.

Erhard was reportedly "the role model, the living example of what the est Training could do."

But CBS News reported allegations of incest, rape and spousal abuse made against Werner Erhard by his daughters and former employees.

Not long after the airing of this program Erhard sold his company reportedly to his employees and went into prolonged seclusion.

The for profit privately owned company, which still sells the Forum and other training courses, is now known as "Landmark Education" and headed by Werner Erhard's brother and sister.

What follows is a news summary that includes statements made by Erhard family members and insiders, which was broadcast by CBS "60 Minutes" March 3, 1991.


"I am god"

Dr. Bob Larzelere was the head of Erhard's counseling staff for seven years during the 1970s.

"I am god...he did say sometimes in staff meetings," Larzelere told CBS News.

Wendy Drucker was a top manager who worked closely with Erhard for nine years.

Drucker told CBS, "I would never have believed that I, could be a person who would wind up in a cult...And yet, certainly mind control was involved. And if that's what cults do, and they set up a leader to be bigger than anybody else, a god-like figure, I would say yes, that was true in the organization."

"We were told to surrender to him as 'source.' I think that's idolatry...This was not like, being an employee. This was like being, a servant, or a devotee," Drucker said.

Ms. Drucker confirmed Larzelere's statement and said that Erhard told "...the whole staff. At staff meetings...'I am the source...I am god."


http://www.rickross.com/reference/est/est29.html


Whatever happened to ... EST?

Discover/July 1, 2007
By Stephen Ornes

In 1971, the Erhard Seminars Training--better known as EST--exploded out of San Francisco to become a worldwide phenomenon. The program promised personal empowerment, but reports claimed that moderators castigated and berated participants for their beliefs. After knocking them down, the moderators raised their spirits through guided meditations and repetitive readings. At the end of the two- or three-day seminar, participants either "got it" and experienced a transcendent life change or walked away dazed and confused.

In 1991, 60 Minutes ran a damning profile of charismatic EST founder Werner Erhard (born Jack Rosenberg). A onetime student of Scientology, Erhard was accused of sexual and physical abuse by his family, though some of those claims were later recanted. That same year, Erhard sold out to Landmark Education, which continues to attract millions of followers from all over the world. Landmark is now run by Erhard's brother and sister.

Rick Ross, whose nonprofit organization gathers information about cultlike groups like Landmark, says the "training" has resulted in psychotic breakdowns requiring hospitalization for some participants. In addition, he says people become addicted to the expensive seminars. "[EST] had a very appealing message," Ross says. "But it was not the empowering experience it was advertised to be."


Long story short, our brave hero is hounded by scandal and sells his company to his brother and sister. Everyone claims he is no longer directly involved. The new company is called Landmark Education and the new classes are called The Forum.

Just what every cult needs--it's own army of mercenaries. I think Landmark has been sinking its lunch-hooks into the Democratic Party. The connections are still kind of vague though. I'm keeping an eye on it.

Landmark Forum

http://www.skepdic.com/landmark.html


Landmark Forum began in 1985 by those who had purchased the est "technology" from Werner Erhard. In 1991 the group changed its name to Landmark Education Corporation (LEC), which continues to offer the Landmark Forum training, along with several other programs emphasizing communication and productivity. Erhard's brother, Harry Rosenberg, heads LEC, which does some $50 million a year in business and has attracted some 300,000 participants. LEC is headquartered in San Francisco, as was est, and has 42 offices in 11 countries. Apparently, however, Erhard is not involved in the operation of LEC.

LEC is aimed at New Age explorers of the 1990s, not the Flower Children from the 60s and 70s who were attracted to est. The search for "It", which characterized est, is out. Also out is the Zen master approach of est, which was often abusive, profane, demeaning and authoritarian. The Forum is apparently just as authoritarian as est but not as profane or abusive.

LEC aims to help people transform their lives by teaching them specific communication and life skills along with some heavy philosophical training. The advertised goals of LEC seem very grand and very vague. The programs are hailed as "original, innovative and effective." They "allow participants to produce extraordinary and even miraculous results, and provide a useful, practical new freedom which brings a quality of effectiveness and plan to one's everyday life." Landmark is dedicated to "empowering people in generating unlimited possibilities and making a difference. Our work provides limitless opportunities for growth and development for individuals, relationships, families, communities, businesses, institutions and society as a whole." They are "successful" and "internationally recognized." They are "committed to generating extraordinary communication --powerful listening and committed speaking that results in self-expression and fulfillment." Landmark is "exciting, challenging and enjoyable." "Well being, self-expression, accountability and integrity are the tenets upon which we stand. This stand leads to our extraordinary customer, assistant and employee satisfaction." And, of course, LEC wants to help you fulfill all your human potential, your "capacity to create, generate, invent and design from nothing." [Landmark Education Charter]


(This word "integrity" is significant. Keep it in mind as we go along.)


http://www.metroactive.com/landmark/landmark1-9827.html


The est of Friends

THE POCKET-PROTECTED AND PEDIGREED have turned out in surprising numbers for this event. The pervasive presence of high-tech and professional employees makes me wonder if the soulless, isolated nature of keyboard-pecking work isn't to blame. They're alienated from living things like flesh and dirt, I figure, noting a paucity of farmers and horse doctors in the room.

But maybe it's something simple, like who has 300 bucks to see if they like something. Or the fact that most of these employees didn't grow up here, and they're a long way from their parents and cousins and Fourth of July picnics and churches, all the things that keep people sure of who they are.

Whatever it is, it's working, and it might not be long before The Forum integrates into Silicon Valley companies. One fellow from Cisco stands up on the last night and says, "I took The Forum because my boss suggested it, and in Silicon Valley you don't say no to your boss." He grins sidelong glance at his employer, who's standing next to him. "But I'm very happy I came." A lot of people came at their boss's "friendly" behest, and several asked for information on Landmark's corporate programs, in which entire companies examine their rackets.

Here, just a short junket from Landmark's San Francisco headquarters, Forums fill up weeks in advance. One of 53 offices worldwide, including centers in India, Israel, Great Britain and Japan, the San Jose office enrolls about 100 people each month in The Forum. Enthusiastic grads can spend up to $4,000 completing the Landmark curriculum of courses. For companies the cost ranges from $250,000 to $4 million.
On the last night 39 people sign up for the $700 advanced course--a $27,000 drop in the $48 million-a-year bucket of Landmark revenues. Last year Landmark Education Corporation spent $13 million on salaries and bonuses for its 451 employees, dedicated $4 million to travel and made $2.5 million in profit.


http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/4932/



Pay Money, Be Happy
For thousands of new yorkers, happiness is a $375, three-day self-help Seminar. Welcome to EST: The Next Generation


* By Vanessa Grigoriadis
...

With its emphasis on self-examination, self-revelation, and sharing both with a roomful of strangers, the Forum seems more appropriate for seventies softies than aughties urban warriors. Yet for upwardly mobile twentysomethings like Tootsie -- the generation that talks sex with the callousness of Samantha on Sex and the City but armors up with irony to discuss the meaning of life -- the Forum offers a chance to explore their innermost hopes and dreams. In New York, the company recently moved out of its offices in a walk-up across from Macy's. Now it leases an entire floor of One World Trade Center.

Unlike other New Age staples that have been reified as expensive indulgences -- aromatherapy, bindis, Balinese end tables -- the Forum isn't remotely exotic. Nor does it offer enlightenment and a better body at the same time, like yoga. Held in a bright, antiseptic conference room, the Forum is run as a shades-drawn, no-whispering class moderated by one of 50 certified Forum leaders. Leaving during the three fifteen-hour days is discouraged -- a posterboard sign warns, IF YOU LEAVE THE ROOM FOR ANY REASON, EVEN FOR A FEW MINUTES, YOU MAY GET THE RESULT BUT HAVE NO RIGHT TO EXPECT IT.

The Forum is only the beginning: Seven out of ten people who take the Forum go on to a higher level of Landmark's "Curriculum for Living," which includes the ten-session "Forum in Action" seminar series, the four-day advanced course ($700), and the five-day "Self-Expression and Leadership" seminar ($200) -- about 250 hours in total. In addition, Landmark offers seminars on "Sex & Intimacy" and "Being Extraordinary" and a $1,900 "Wisdom Program." (Landmark also offers courses for children and teens.) Any of the 60-odd courses can be repeated, or, in Landmark terms, "reviewed." "I was very involved about five years ago," says former Rent star Anthony Rapp, who was turned on to Landmark by actor Andy Dick, a childhood friend. "A couple months ago, I decided to review the Forum. I just loved it: It was like going to see your favorite band in concert, the familiarity so comforting and empowering."

Some Landmark graduates also volunteer for the company, which has approximately 500 employees and a reported 7,500 unpaid "assistants" (though Landmark puts this number much lower) who answer phones, sign up recruits, and cater to the Forum leaders. "They have a person designated to make them lunches," says Laura White, a former volunteer at the Washington, D.C., Forum office. "Someone makes sure they have a clean pair of socks after the second break."

For some, it's almost a second career. "I've been assisting and then leading the 'Self-Expression and Leadership' course for about seven years," says Larry Panish, who owns the Tomato Restaurant in Chelsea and just sold the Moondance Diner. "To me, it's a fair trade: Landmark may get my time for free, but I get to continue in the process of self-realization for free."


By 1991, however, after a scathing 60 Minutes exposé, Erhard disappeared. These days, Landmark says Erhard has no role in its business, although their courses are based on his "technology" -- the structure, style, and system of beliefs he used in est and later in the Forum, which he created in 1985 when est enrollment started to dip. Landmark's Forum is shorter than est and has fewer rules (in est, attendees weren't just warned they might miss something if they went to the bathroom -- they weren't allowed to go at all), but it retains some similar exercises and the same tortured relationship to grammar. People aren't in the room; they are "present." One is not "committed to" something; he's simply "committed." A typical Forum phrase might read "The listening you are does not allow for the possibility of being committed that you are extraordinary."

Then there are the slogans written on the chalkboard by Forum leaders: change causes persistence; you must create a new way of being, but you are perfect just as you are. Even while Landmark teaches its truth, leaders repeatedly assert that "none of this is true"; participants need to "get it," but there's "nothing to get."

Consider the way one Forum leader compares the program with est: "The est training was based on experiencing your experience. The idea was that if you really, truly experienced your feelings, emotions, anxieties, all of those problems in your life would miraculously clear up. But that doesn't quite get to where the bad feeling came from. What's unique and powerful about the Forum is that it gives you the tools to get to the source."

The source, of course, is you.

"You!" shouts the tall man perched on a director's chair raised on a dais at the front of the room. "You are a loyal viewer of your own soap opera. You love it! You couldn't deal with life without it. Your friends are the people who watch it." He pauses for dramatic effect. "Well, guess what? It's going off the air."



After you get complete, explains Willmore, it's time to have an "enrollment conversation," as in "I'm calling because I want to enroll you in the possibility of me having an extraordinary life." That's followed by the "invitation conversation," in which you ask those close to you to attend your Forum "graduation" on Tuesday night ("because it would mean a lot to me"), and the "registration conversation," in which you ask them to take the Forum themselves ("because I think it would be good for you"). "There's also a bonus assignment," says Willmore. "Who thinks they can bring three or more people to their introductory Forum?"


Landmark often justifies the value of its courses by citing a 1997 Harvard Business School case study, "Landmark Education Corporation: Selling a Paradigm Shift," which outlines the company's business practices and underlying message in glowing terms but doesn't cover the psychological aspects or effectiveness of Landmark's programs. As of this year, Harvard is no longer printing the study, teaching from it in courses, or keeping it in its library. "Landmark ordered 75,000 copies of the study," says a source at the school. "That's when we knew we had a problem." (Landmark's spokesman, Mark Kamin, calls this figure "grossly inaccurate.")

Last year, Landmark had revenues of $58 million, and Rosenberg says the company has bought outright Erhard's license and his rights to Japan and Mexico. Entirely employee-owned and run by a board of directors elected by the staff, Landmark also draws on the expertise of successful devotees like Mick Leavitt, producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who works part-time in Landmark's business-development department. Eventually, says Rosenberg, that development might even include leaving behind some of the hard sell associated with Landmark's courses. "We've been accused of pressuring people in terms of our, quote, 'sales,' and we're out to avoid any of that," he says. Instead, "I'd like to experiment with advertising," he continues. "We're coming out with an audiotape. We'll probably do a book." Rosenberg is also "committed" that within five years Landmark will have an IPO.

The big question, of course, is, what exactly is the Forum selling? "There's no question that the combination of examination, encouragement, and the act of speaking out has been shown to have the psychological benefit of freeing people up to see things about themselves that they never have before," says analyst Kevin Garvey. "My problem is that there's an amount of control going on that Landmark's not honest about. People are being put into a state where they are -- here's the bogey word -- hypnotizable. So I don't care if they can screw better or make more money -- their freedom is being taken away. Can you have freedom without knowledge? I think the answer is no."


"Although there's a perception that people who get involved with such organizations are simply stupid, lonely, mentally ill, whatever, the dependence on such groups is very real," says Paul Martin, director of the country's only recovery center for such groups, Ohio's Wellspring Retreat. "For some people, life becomes living for the next seminar. It becomes, in a sense, a person's religion." Put a different way, "people become Landmark junkies," says exit counselor Rick Ross, who says he gets more calls about Landmark than about any other group. "They start to take courses, and they just don't stop."

"For six months, I was just hooked," says a recently counseled Landmark participant from Denver, Colorado. "My parents kept pushing me to do it, and I thought, 'My God! If everyone did this, there would be no need for drugs, 'cause the euphoria is just so . . . euphoric!' I took the whole 'Curriculum for Living,' assisted constantly, and even dropped out of school because being a medical assistant wasn't 'extraordinary' enough for me. Then I had a miscarriage. I missed a seminar because I was grieving for my baby. When I showed up the next week, the leader said, 'The good news is the loss of your baby doesn't mean shit. What does mean shit is that you have gone outside your integrity because you missed your seminar.' "


This whole article is good. It was hard to pick out things to snip out, so if you get a chance I'd recommend reading it. I've saved it in case it disappears.


Harvard is going to come up again later on in a big way. Here's a little more about that "study":

http://www.rickross.com/reference/landmark/landmark18.html




A Harvard Forum For Self-Promotion?
Boston Globe/November 6, 1998
By Alex Beam

The Harvard Business School seems to be out of the business of selling $6,000 videotapes with Rosabeth Moss Kanter droning out platitudes like "Great companies are focused in their approach to doing business." (They will, however sell you a $495, 30-minute video on "Managing Future Performance.") Now the B-School has a brand-new bag: flacking for the "personal development" seminar known as The Forum.

The San Francisco-based Forum came into being when Werner Erhard (John Paul Rosenberg to his parents) sold the "technology" for Erhard Seminars Training -- est -- to his brother Harry. The Forum, formally known as the Landmark Education Corp., has enjoyed considerable success with the self-actualization crowd, and with the Cambridge intelligentsia. That success is now chronicled in an HBS case study so sycophantic that Landmark has been using it -- improperly, Harvard says -- as a promotional tool.

The document, originally written for classroom discussion, is also sold to the public. Last revised in April, it reads like a 22-page advertisement for Landmark's "breakthrough in paradigm thinking." Authored by professor Karen Hopper Wruck, the case breathlessly quotes Forum executives who compare their work to that of Galileo and Socrates (!). The study also quotes from a Forum-sponsored Daniel Yankelovich survey of graduates. Surprise! All six veterans of the Forum's weekend training quoted by Wruck loved it!

Wruck quickly dismisses critics who call the Forum a cult. The Forum is listed on the Internet FACTnet database of "cults, groups and individuals that are alleged to be using coercive persuasion mind control techniques," but they have sued people who call them a cult. In an appendix, she quotes at length from four experts who insist the Forum is not a cult, but cites no contrary opinions.

Had Wruck been seeking to find anyone critical of the touchy-feely Forum she needed only to cross the campus and chat with Radcliffe public policy fellow Wendy Kaminer. The Forum is the subject of acidulous commentary in Kaminer's best-selling book, "I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional." "If you want to experience or 'process' New Age's heady combination of pseudoscience, religion, and money," writes Kaminer, "visit a session or two of The Forum, the new incarnation of est."

In her defense, Wruck told me: "I understood that it was a controversial company, but I wanted to study a company that directly addressed issues around human behavior. A case study is a pedagogical vehicle, not a position paper or an endorsement." Harvard has affixed an unprecedented disclaimer ("Please be aware that . . . the school does not endorse this company or any other company") to the document.

Mark Kamin, a Landmark spokesman, said his company ordered several thousand copies of the document after it was published. He adds that Landmark signed an agreement with Harvard not to use the case for promotional purposes, "and we've endeavored to keep that agreement." When I told him that a recent seminar attendee said the case was being used to puff Landmark, Kamin said, "I can't guarantee that people who led seminars didn't say, 'Hey, there's this case study.' "


This part is getting kind of long, so I'll continue in a new post.




edit: forgot to put in the header for the NYmag article

Landmark Encroachment into Work Places

This next article has totally disappeared from the internets as far as I can tell. I have the whole thing saved, I'll just post some excerpts.

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/eldon.braun/awareness/siren_call_of_pied_pipers.htm
(where it used to be)



The Siren Call of Modern Pied Pipers
by Lawrence A. Pile

In an article in Working Woman entitled "Wacky management ideas that work," Nancy K. Austin wrote, "... making it in modern times requires staking out brave new competitive territory. And to do that, the tool managers most urgently need is imagination."

{1} Few CEOs, managers, or even shop foremen would argue with that observation. Where differences arise, however, is in proposals offered to produce or stimulate this needed imagination. Along with new or expanded imagination and creativity, corporations large and small throughout North America are increasingly looking for ways to augment productivity (and profits) by helping their employees to more effective performance through stress reduction, self-regulation, accelerated learning, and accepting a greater share of responsibility for themselves and their companies.{2}

To accomplish these commendable and even necessary goals, numerous businesses are turning to a mushrooming crop of training and consultation firms offering workshops, seminars, and courses which claim to transform employees into highly motivated and efficient visionaries and producers. Among the major corporations which have enlisted these firms are AT&T, GM, Ford, IBM, Calvin Klein, Westinghouse, Dupont, Scott Paper, Campbell Soup, Lockheed, RCA, Procter and Gamble, All State Insurance, NEC, Boeing Aerospace, General Foods, GE, and McDonald's in-short, approximately 20% of the Fortune 500 corporations,{3} plus innumerable smaller companies.
And it is not only business, but also government that is jumping on the creativity training bandwagon. The IRS, CIA, the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all engaged these training companies. Many of the trainers, however, use techniques and promote philosophies at variance with the moral and religious convictions of employees who are urged, and sometimes required, to attend the workshops.
Most often, these techniques and philosophies arise from the broad and variegated matrix of the so- called New Age Movement (NAM). And this fact has caused a great deal of controversy in and around the workplace, reported in numerous books and articles. The core of the controversy is highlighted by Arthur Johnson's statement that "There's a fine line between corporate culture and corporate cults."{4}


William Gleaton, former manager of human resources for a Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Albany, Ga., also lost his job after objecting to a training program offered by the Pacific Institute.{6} He sued and eventually reached an out of court settlement with the company. In May 1989 eight former employees of the DeKalb Farmers Market in Georgia also accepted an out-of-court settlement of their suit against their former employer charging that they had been fired for refusing to attend a training program they claimed promoted New Age ideas and techniques. The program in question was the Forum, said by detractors to be a watered down version of Werner Erhard's 1970s est (Erhard Seminars Training). According to the plaintiffs, "...the Forum's espousal of the supremacy of man violate[d] their belief in the primacy of God or other higher beings. Supervisors who declined to participate and recruit their employees were harassed, humiliated and interrogated."{7}

...

In the spring of 1991 almost three dozen Broward County, Fla., employees were sent at county expense to attend training offered by Lifespring, a program similar to Werner Erhard's EST and Forum. Though some workers said they enjoyed the program and even went on to further training at their own expense, other employees disliked it and balked at going further with it, while still others dropped out without completing the first sessions. According to an article in the Broward County Sun-Sentinel, "Employees were required to attend Lifespring after work, from about 6 p.m. to midnight for three days, then all day on the weekend."{9} In February 1992 Franklin County, Oh., Children Services discontinued staff training by the Forum (at taxpayers' expense) after a rash of negative news reports and complaints from the community.{10}



Whether the techniques employed are of the hypnotic or assaultive variety, the effects are frequently the same. Though there often are positive results in terms of the individual becoming more self-confident, stress-free, creative, or whatever, there are also frequently negative results not commonly admitted by the trainers. Singer and Ofshe state that "[t]he majority reaction seen in people who leave thought reform programs ... is a varying degree of anomie, a sense of alienation and confusion resulting from the loss or weakening of previously valued norms, ideals, or goals ... The person feels like an immigrant or refugee who enters a new culture."{20} This sense can be overcome in time as the person adjusts his or her behavior and thought to the new "paradigm."

But Singer and Ofshe (and others) have found much more serious problems occurring in a significant minority of individuals, possibly as many as 15%,{21} including "reactive schizoaffective-like psychoses" (i.e., they suffer psychotic episodes), "posttraumatic stress disorders" similar to many Vietnam veterans, "atypical dissociative disorders," "relaxation-induced anxiety," and "miscellaneous reactions ... such as difficulty in concentration...; self-mutilation; phobias; suicide and homicide;" and psychologically induced strokes, heart attacks, ulcers, and other ailments.{22} In rare cases participants in such seminars, specifically EST and Lifespring, have actually died during sessions,{23} largely as a result of inadequate screening for people with delicate constitutions and lack of properly trained staff to intervene in a timely fashion to prevent serious harm.


One celebrated case in 1987 illustrates another type of legal and financial liability that can be incurred by corporations that sign up their employees for New Age training. This involved Pacific Bell, which sent about 15,000 of its 67,000 employees to "Leadership Development" training sessions led by associates of Charles Krone, a student of Russian mystic Georges Gurdjieff. When the California Public Utilities Commission investigated, hundreds of employees complained that "the training was based on spiritual philosophies not appropriate in a job setting."{27} The CPUC ruled that PacBell stockholders, rather than consumers, must pay $25 million of the estimated $160 million total cost of the training. In addition, employees sent to training seminars which cause them serious psychological or even physical injury may claim damages from their employer as well as the trainers if attendance was mandatory, either explicitly or implicitly. The fact that numerous such claims have already been made by individuals against most of the New Age seminars mentioned above{28} should be warning enough for companies considering enlisting them to train their workers.

Conclusion

Enthusiastic endorsement and testimonials aside, it is an open question whether New Age trainings really produce their advertised results. As PacBell found out, its expensive flirtation with Kroning served mainly to lower employee morale, divide the workforce, and create an uproar in the community. As for the stated goal of many of the business-targeted programs to forge greater employee loyalty and cohesiveness, these are certainly necessary qualities in any workplace. But if a bi-product of their generation is a mentality that, as Langone says, "insists on the primacy of good feeling and the validity of one's own reality,"{29} then the time-proven creativity-enhancing clash of ideas among coworkers may well be inhibited. According to New Age thought, "It is not possible to be wrong, just different."{30} But as Austin says, companies must allow for failure and support risk-taking, both "when it works and when it doesn't."{31} This implies being able to say, "Your idea sounded good, but it proved to be wrong." Saying "Your idea was valid according to your reality, but our customers have a different reality" doesn't cut it in the business world.


http://www.believermag.com/issues/200305/?read=article_snider



MAY 2003
SUZANNE SNIDER


EST, WERNER ERHARD, AND THE CORPORATIZATION OF SELF-HELP
IT MAKES ONE YEARN FOR THE DAYS WHEN WE WERE ALL ASSHOLES

...

est and the Forum did eventually spread East, even though neither incarnation of Erhard's enterprise advertised its workshops. Instead, they relied solely on recruitment by est and Forum graduates, who pulled people into the Forum fold via a quasi-pyramid scheme. Each student was, and is still, encouraged to bring friends and family to the last workshop "session," where the students are encouraged to share their experiences with their invited guests. The guests may hear Erhard-speak from their intimates at these sharing sessions, lessons such as "If you put the truth into the system in which you cradled the lie, the truth becomes a lie. A very simple way of saying the truth believed is a lie. If you go around telling the truth you are lying. The horrible part about it is that the truth is so darn believable, people believe it a lot."[6] Clearly, if a guest wants to understand his or her newly thinking or newly confused loved one, the guest may have to enroll in the workshop as well.

Such was the choice faced three years ago by Tatiana,[7] a healthcare professional in New York City, who wanted to be able to relate to her new boss, himself a Forum graduate. Tatiana initially resisted the Landmark Forum training, but opened up to it on her third day. She offered a few of the Forum's better points. "It's very focused on action, which I like," she said, "and I like the idea of personal responsibility, separating your story of reality from reality." She didn't remember feeling confined by bathroom and eating rules, but admitted she furtively ate a bag of nuts through part of the training. The final session, though, a sales pitch, left a bad taste in her mouth.

Tatiana's boss took great stock in the Forum message and its benefits in the workplace, even though he refused to foot the bill for her training. "He basically said, 'This is what I'm into and how I communicate. If you're going to work with me, this is the way we communicate here.'" She said she didn't want to pay the money (presently $375 for a 36-hour workshop), but she understood his point. "He was avoiding future conflict. He didn't want us to blame him for things that went wrong. He wanted us to take personal responsibility, and not put our shit on him," she explained. And it did, in fact, seem to work at first. All of her colleagues took the Landmark Forum workshop at the boss's request, or had already taken it on their own incentive. "But," Tatiana finally admitted, "my boss didn't really want to take on anything, even when he should. He has a problem with responsibility. And with conflict."


These same press materials boast of the Forum's association with many Fortune 100 companies, proposing these associations as standards of legitimacy and success. This is not mere PR posturing; in 2001 alone, the Forum cleared $58 million in revenue. Approximately 100,000 people attend Forum workshops each year. When the Forum cast its net, it caught CEOs, corporate executives, doctors, politicians, lawyers, psychotherapists, artists, prisoners and ex-convicts, children, Russian diplomats, even NASA. (In 1984, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center paid $45,000 for Erhard's training.) Landmark's own pie chart reports that 40% of Forum participants are from professional/technical fields, 20% are managerial/self-employed, 12% are in sales, 16% are administrative, 6% are students and 6% are "other." Traditionally, the est and Forum audiences, along with the larger HPM movement, have been mostly white. Outside of the United States, however, the Forum has been enthusiastically attended by the citizens of Japan, Israel, India, Australia, South Africa, the Phillipines, Mexico, and most European countries. The Forum is also popular among celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Cher, and Elizabeth Taylor.

est and Forum concepts have become so embedded in management language and strategy that they are no longer recognized or even credited for some of these appearances. One of the most famous est parables involved a story which demonstrated the difference between a rat and a human. In short, a rat in a maze of four tunnels will always find the hidden cheese in the maze. If the cheese is moved from its usual spot, the rat will eventually change its approach and try a different tunnel. A human, Erhard challenged, will continue to go down the same tunnel where the cheese used to be, over and over again, and come back disappointed. Videotapes and textbooks featuring the rat and cheese story show up in management curriculums and offices all over the country, but few people know the story's origins.

In addition to the thousands of companies who have formally sought Forum training for staff are those companies subjected to New Age training, or "management training" influenced by Forum thinking or one of the Forum's many spin-offs. On February 22, 1988, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a ruling against New Age Training programs in the workplace. Clarence Thomas approved the EEOC notice N-915.022 on September 9, 1988. The policy cites several hypothetical examples of "New Age training" violations in the workplace. The introduction also points out real-life infractions: "1. a large utility company requires its employees to attend seminars based on the teachings of a mystic, George Gurdjieff [Fourth Way], which the company claims has helped improve communications among employees. 2. Another corporation provides its employees with workshops in stress management using so-called "faith healers" who read the "auras" of employees and contact with the body's "fields of energy" to improve the health of the employees…4. The [personal growth] programs [hired by government agencies and corporations] utilize a wide variety of techniques: meditation, guided visualization, self-hypnosis, therapeutic touch, biofeedback, yoga, walking on fire, and inducing altered states of consciousness."


My conclusions: Forum discovers that selling its "technology" to big business is lucrative but the est brand is still following them around. Even though the owners have repackaged the courses to seem scientific instead of explicitly spiritual, the New Age elements are raising eyebrows and interfering with the brand. However, they are starting to embed their messages into other aspects of corporate culture. Time for another name change.

You gotta problem with these people or somethin'?:laughing:

Check out the 'Assholes' series at PopIndy(we really need to codify that..), you'll find some of your favorites.

http://www.wernererhard.com/threelaws.html

The unholy trinity: Werner Erhard, former Landmark forum leader Steve Zaffron and Michael C. Jensen, Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration Wait, what? Oh yes, it gets just that weird. We've had a peek at Werner Erhard, let's take a look at the other two jokers.


Steve Zaffron

http://www.stevezaffron.com/images/content/photo_steve_zaffron.jpg


http://en.allexperts.com/e/s/st/steven_zaffron.htm


Steven Zaffron is a Landmark Forum Leader, the current Chief Executive Officer of Landmark Education Business Development, Inc. and a founder of Landmark Education. He is also the executive responsible for Landmark Education's Research, Design and Development Division.

Mr. Zaffron has been a guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School and the Marshall School of Business at USC. He graduated magna cum laude in philosophy from Cornell University and received an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago"Meet the LEBD Team.", Steve Zaffron, http://www.lebd.com/display_content.jsp?siteObjectID=208&top=167&mid=207. Zaffron is also a Landmark Forum Leader for Landmark Education, and his photo can be seen among other faculty Steven Zaffron, Faculty Photo, Landmark Education http://www.landmarkeducation.com/display_images.jsp?top=21&mid=166&siteObjectID=331 here: faculty photo.

Mr. Zaffron has been accountable for the creation and ongoing development of Landmark Education's programs, guiding the creation of over two dozen new programs and products focused on a wide range of topics, including communication, productivity, ongoing adult learning, relationships, conflict resolution, executive development, and corporate strategy.
Erhard Seminars Training

Zaffron first began working for Werner Erhard as an est trainer for Erhard's Erhard Seminars Training, joining the staff in 1979. He later was hired as an executive within Erhard's next venture, Werner Erhard and Associates.

"Another one of Erhard's new executives was an est trainer named Steven Zaffron who years earlier had been a door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush Company and later sold speed-reading courses. Three years after first joining Erhard's staff in 1979, Zaffron had been indicted on mail fraud charges for participating in a scam to collect phony unemployment checks. Zaffron agreed to a plea bargain in the case and was placed on three years' probation shortly before Erhard conferred on him the coveted "lifetime" designation to do Werner's transformational work" Pressman, Steven, Outrageous Betrayal: The dark journey of Werner Erhard from est to exile. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. ISBN 0312092962 , pg. 217..


(This little tidbit about mail fraud doesn't make it's way into his PR these days.)

Anyway, that job description has been considerably softened for his new gig:

http://www.stevezaffron.com/


Steve Zaffron, CEO of Vanto Group, is an internationally respected leadership authority, organizational consultant, and author.

He focuses on strategy, innovation, leadership for change, and the cultures and dynamics of high-performing organizations. His strategic and practical insights have guided leaders of large and small organizations worldwide for more than 25 years.

http://www.stevezaffron.com/images/content/vanto_group_logo2.gif

This logo is pretty much the only place the word Landmark appears, but Vanto is the reincarnation of Landmark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmark_Education




Business consulting

Vanto Group, Inc., founded in 1993 as "Landmark Education Business Development" (LEBD), a wholly owned subsidiary of Landmark Education Enterprises, Inc., uses the techniques of Landmark Education to provide consulting services to various companies. The University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business carried out a case study in 1998 into the work of LEBD. The report concluded that the set of interventions in the organization produced a 50% improvement in safety, a 15% to 20% reduction in key benchmark costs, a 50% increase in return on capital, and a 20% increase in raw steel production.[25] LEBD became the Vanto Group in 2007.

Now this may not seem very secretive, as the information is easily obtainable on wikipedia, but interestingly enough only as a subsection on the LEC wiki page. It comes up on google of course, but unless you realize the significance of the connection there would be no real reason to go delving into it very deeply. The Landmark wiki page is kept pretty clean of most signs of controversy and if you were just skimming it would seem fairly innocuous. A look at their discussion page where all the fun bits of wiki are usually located, you will see this message:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Landmark_Education


Notice re Checkuser case

A checkuser case resulted in "confirm" on several users as sockpuppets of each other, that edited articles on closely related topics including Landmark Education, Werner Erhard, Landmark Education litigation, Scientology and Werner Erhard, Erhard Seminars Training, and Werner Erhard and Associates, among others. As a result, several of these users and sockpuppets of each other have been blocked. The checkuser case page is here: Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Eastbayway. Cirt (talk)
[edit]

(Many psychotherapy cults are notorious for trolling the internet for suppressing evidence of controversy and LEC is no exception. They are also extremely litigious.)


Coming up next, a look at Michael C. Jensen, Ph.d

:grin: Thank you. I've always wanted to put this all in one place. I'll check out the "Asshole" series. I'm going to try to do one more page tonight here, but my brain is starting to get fried. Cult jargon makes me stabby. I'll have more to add later in the week.

http://www.people.hbs.edu/mjensen/

http://www.people.hbs.edu/mjensen/mjensen.jpg

http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facEmId=mjensen


MICHAEL C. JENSEN, Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School in 1985 founding what is now the Negotiations, Organizations and Markets Unit in the School. He joined the Monitor Company in 2000 as Managing Director of the Organizational Strategy Practice, became Senior Advisor in 2007 and as of 2009 is no longer associated with Monitor. He was LaClare Professor of Finance and Business Administration at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Rochester from 1984-1988, Professor from 1979-1984, Associate Professor from 1971-1979, and Assistant Professor from 1967-1971. He founded the Managerial Economics Research Center at the University of Rochester in 1977 and served as its Director until 1988.

Professor Jensen earned his Ph.D. in Economics, Finance, and Accounting and his M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Chicago and an A.B. degree from Macalester College. He was awarded honorary Doctor of Laws degrees, Docteur Honoris Causa, by Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, July, 1991; by the University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, December 2000; by the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, June, 2001; and by the University of Toronto, June 2005. He was named Honoris Causa Professor by HEC Business School, Paris, France, Nov. 2006.

Professor Jensen is the author of more than 100 scientific papers, in addition to numerous articles, comments, and editorials published in the popular media on a wide range of economic, finance and business-related topics. Most of his papers are downloadable from his SSRN Author Page at: http://ssrn.com/author=9 He is author of Foundations of Organizational Strategy (Harvard University Press, 1998), and Theory of the Firm: Governance, Residual Claims, and Organizational Forms (Harvard University Press, 2000). He is editor of The Modern Theory of Corporate Finance (with Clifford W. Smith, Jr., McGraw-Hill, 1984) and Studies in the Theory of Capital Markets (Praeger Publishers, 1972). His book co-authored with Kevin Murphy and Eric Wruck, CEO Pay and What to Do About It: Restoring Integrity to Both Executive Compensation and Capital-Market Relations will be published by Harvard Business School Press in 2010.

In 1973 Professor Jensen co-founded (with Eugene Fama and Robert Merton) the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the top three scientific journals in financial economics, serving as Managing Editor from 1987 to 1997, when he became Founding Editor. From 1992 through 1998 he served on the steering committee of the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative at Harvard University (a Harvard interfaculty effort to bring together a wide range of scholars interested in understanding the limitations of the human brain and its role in generating counter-productive human behavior). In 1994 he co-founded and is currently Chairman of Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. (SSEP) which is devoted to the electronic publication of scientific working papers in the social sciences http://ssrn.com. Since 2003 Jensen has been a member of the Barbados Group, a worldwide group of a dozen scholars, including philosophers, economists, psychologists, technologists, and educators to develop the ontological foundations of performance. The group’s work and that of its members is available at http://www.ssrn.com/link/Barbados-Group.html.


http://www.wernererhard.com/images/3laws.jpg

http://www.wernererhard.com/threelaws.html



The Three Laws of Performance

by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan


The authors of this book, Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, acknowledge Werner Erhard as as the developer of the original ideas upon which much of the material in the book is based.

Foreword by Michael C. Jensen, PhD.

I have no doubt that the ideas, distinctions, and methodologies that underlie what Steve and Dave so expertly present will have a substantial impact on the world. I am honored to be invited to write this foreword.

When I was first introduced to some of the ideas contained in this book I saw the extraordinary impact they made on the audience. I was struck by the enormous potential, relevance, and applicability of this approach to transforming human beings and organizations. But from my worldview I could not understand how this dramatic impact occurred. Since then I have spent considerable time and energy researching these ideas on my own and in collaboration with Steve and Dave with the intention to see them become universally available. It has not been a simple task. This book takes a substantial step toward accomplishing this aspiration. My congratulations!

I contacted Steve early in my efforts to get to the bottom of these ideas and to fully grasp their ability to dramatically influence the power and productivity of people and organizations. Much of my research and writing is now devoted to these efforts. In 1997 I was hitting the wall as a leader with my Faculty Unit at the Harvard Business School. To be blunt I was failing. I asked Steve to help and he generously agreed to work with me and my group (the Organizations and Markets Group at HBS). That two days of work (during which he undertook a task that most of us thought impossible in such a short time) put us, as a group, back on the track to becoming a formally sanctioned unit of HSB. For that, and for being the teacher, counselor, partner, and colleague that Steve has been for me, I am deeply grateful.

Steve has a proven track record over decades of designing and implementing large-scale initiatives that elevate organizational performance, and that talent was truly required to bringing the Organizations and Markets Group at HBS to its current status. I've been fortunate to both observe and work with Steve in designing and delivering programs in other client and academic settings. He is a master.

I met Dave Logan through the Barbados Group. Dave has a deep expertise in researching and designing programs that synthesize organizational change, management, and leadership. I have been privileged to work with him in delivering sessions of an executive development program for a large multinational company. I am always amazed at Dave’s ability to penetrate to the core of what it takes to bring about progress. I recall one particularly difficult situation I faced when Dave coached and guided me in a way that quickly turned this situation around. Dave is also a master.

I must recognize the members of the Barbados Group; in particular, Werner Erhard, for being the catalyst that brought these extraordinary thinkers together and for his superb leadership of the group’s discussions. I am deeply grateful for the contribution these conversations have made to me personally and to this book.

I especially invite all readers to be open to what may occur as an unfamiliar and perhaps even strange way to think about people and organizational issues.

There is much to learn and the payoffs are huge.

Michael C. Jensen
Jesse Isidor Straus, Professor of Business Emeritus
Harvard Business School
SSRN


You'll notice that the Harvard website does not mention Werner Erhard in any way, shape or form. Gee, I wonder why?

The link for the Barbados Group given in the Harvard Business School biography goes to the so-called SSRN or Social Science Research Network.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalbrowse&journal_id=624742


There you can download "academic papers" that are also co-authored by Werner Erhard.


SSRN Abstract Database Search Results

Barbados Group for Development of a New Paradigm for Performance Research Paper Series

Incl. Electronic Paper eDocument is available from the SSRN eLibrary for free
Incl. Electronic Paper eDocument is available, fee may apply
Incl. Electronic Paper Integrity: A Positive Model that Incorporates the Normative Phenomena of Morality, Ethics, and Legality - Abridged
Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 10-061, Barbados Group Working Paper No. 10-01, Simon School Working Paper No. 10-07
Werner Erhard , Michael C. Jensen and Steve Zaffron
Independent , Harvard Business School and Landmark Education LLC
Date Posted: February 18, 2010
Last Revised: February 19, 2010
Working Paper Series
59 downloads

Incl. Electronic Paper Beyond Agency Theory: The Hidden and Heretofore Inaccessible Power of Integrity (PDF of Keynote Slides)
Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 10-068, Barbados Group Working Paper No. 10-02
Michael C. Jensen and Werner Erhard
Harvard Business School and Independent
Date Posted: February 16, 2010
Last Revised: February 16, 2010
Working Paper Series
251 downloads

Incl. Electronic Paper Integrity: Without it Nothing Works
Rotman Magazine: The Magazine of the Rotman School of Management, pp. 16-20, Fall 2009, Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 10-042, Barbados Group Working Paper No. 09-04, Simon School Working Paper No. FR 10-01
Michael C. Jensen
Harvard Business School
Date Posted: November 22, 2009
Last Revised: January 17, 2010
Working Paper Series
2785 downloads

Incl. Electronic Paper Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological Model (PDF File of Powerpoint Slides)
Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 09-124, Barbados Group Working Paper No. 09-01, Gruter Institute Squaw Valley Conference 2009: Law, Behavior & the Brain, Simon School Working Paper No. FR 09-27
Werner Erhard , Michael C. Jensen and Kari L. Granger
Independent , Harvard Business School and Center For Character and Leadership Development, United States Air Force Academy (!!! Fuck)
Date Posted: April 22, 2009
Last Revised: December 29, 2009
Working Paper Series
707 downloads



Scientific working papers in the social sciences? Looks like cult astroturf to me, dressed up with the shiny imprimatur of a professor who should fucking know better.


Of course his HBS listing of abstracts is noticeably Erhard-free.

http://www.people.hbs.edu/mjensen/pub2.html

This one catches the eye, however:


Karen Hopper Wruck and Michael C. Jensen, 'Science, Specific Knowledge, and Total Quality Management,' Journal of Accounting and Economics (1994) pp. 247-287. Reprinted in Michael C. Jensen, Foundations of Organizational Strategy, (Harvard University Press, 1998).

For Abstract and to Download Full Text of Science, Specific Knowledge, and Total Quality Management readable with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

This is the same Karen Wruck whose article was bought up by the thousands by LEC. What's going on Harvard Business School?


Dr. Jensen's wiki page also carefully fails to mention that he is a shill for Werner Erhard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jensen



Biography

Michael Jensen[1] was born on November 30, 1939 in Rochester, Minnesota, United States. He received his A.B. in Economics from Macalester College in 1962. He received both his M.B.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1968) degrees from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, notably working with Professor Merton Miller (1990 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics).

Between 1967-1988, Jensen[2] was a professor of finance and business administration at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of Rochester. He also founded and managed between 1977-88 the Managerial Economics Research Center at the University of Rochester. Since 1985, Michael Jensen also joined the Harvard Business School, keeping a double appointement until 1988, when he left the University of Rochester remaining only at Harvard. In 2000 Jensen retired from academic work, remaining a Professor Emeritus at Harvard, and joined the consulting firm Monitor Group.

He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Bern (1976), Harvard University (1984-85, before joining the faculty) and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (2001-02). In 1992 he held the chair of president of the American Finance Association, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and, since 2002, he is a board member of the European Corporate Governance Institute. Jensen is also the founder and editor of the Journal of Financial Economics.

The Jensen Prize in corporate finance and organizations research is named in his honor.


Research

Prof. Jensen has played an important role in the academic discussion of the capital asset pricing model, of stock options policy, and of corporate governance, developing a method of measuring fund manager performance, the so-called Jensen's alpha.

Jensen's best-known work is the 1976 paper he co-authored with William H. Meckling, "Theory of the firm: Managerial behaviour, agency costs and ownership structure," one of the most widely-cited economics papers of the last 30 years. Besides reigniting interest in theory of the firm (a field pioneered by Ronald Coase), the paper's argument that managers' interests are different from those of shareholders laid the foundation for the widespread use of stock options as executive compensation tools.

I'm not too surprised that the main money maker is the sales materials--surprising is that they would be so frank about it even just to each other.

That also reminds me that Blackwater is also tied to the Prince family. The whole pack of weasels (Prince & Devos) is rabidly anti-gay and pour tons of cash into anti-equality votes. That's why it always bugs me when people say this stuff doesn't matter. These assholes are very influential.

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/05/rich_devos_comments_about_gay.html

This is quite excellent. Just what I was looking for.

Here are two links to Pile's article:

http://www.caic.org.au/psyther/lgat/thesiren.htm

http://www.culthelp.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=963&Itemid=12

Here's another interesting link:

Commercial Cults & Multi-Level Marketing

http://www.culthelp.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=5&Itemid=9

There is also a bit about political cults at the culthelp website. Only Larouche is listed. Me thinks they need to include the Repubs und de Dems in there as well.

There's a lot in here which you are probably aware of:
http://www.ex-cult.org/Groups/Landmark/landmark-cherries.dir/_XOOM/apostate/index.htm

I noticed a link or two in this thread to the Rick Ross site - I read that site and the forums regularly out of some sick fascination with it all, I've been fortunate to be a few steps removed from any of this stuff, or any cult-like groups (although in the hippie/rainbow circles I used to run around in there were some close encounters).

I'd recommend the rick ross group database for LGATs or other shady groups, and their forums (eg discussion boards, not to be confused with Erhard's Forum!) for all sorts of research and personal stories. They also have a section on Multi-level marketing, although it's definitely the LGATs and the cultish groups and destructive churches that get more discussion.

Discussion:

http://forum.rickross.com/index.php

Info database on groups:

http://www.rickross.com/sg_alpha.html

Articles on Est/Forum/Landmark/Erhard:

http://www.rickross.com/groups/est.html

There was some great research and info uncovered with the James Arthur Ray sweatlodge situation - often the details and connections posters on this site found would show up in MSM articles soon after being posted. Interesting reading:

http://forum.rickross.com/read.php?12,77450

"I think Landmark has been sinking its lunch-hooks into the Democratic Party. The connections are still kind of vague though."

I couldn't quite make any connections there either, but I have a strong suspicion about it as well. The Obama campaign was so similar to the Landmark seminars.

Don't know if I told these stories to you before...

American apple growers, as part of an ongoing program run by the USDA, taught the Chinese how to grow apples and got the industry started there a few years back. The program was modeled after the one in Japan back in the early 1900's. The Chinese then in the late 90's started dumping apples below cost, in the form of juice concentrate, onto the US market and in violation of trade agreements. There was some effort by the Feds at ending it until the Bush administration stopped enforcing the regulations. The market was then flooded by Chinese concentrate, and this eliminated the "juice apple" business for growers here - apples that can't make it to market as fresh eating apples for cosmetic reasons always went into juice a cider. At about the same time, the cider scare shut down thousands of small cider operations that small growers were running, and the FDA (heavily and inappropriately moving into ag issues previously managed by the USDA since the Bush administration, who staffed the FDA with pharmaceutical industry hacks) ruled that "falls" - apples that had fallen to the ground - could no longer be harvested. This all seriously hurt small growers and put many out of business altogether - hundreds? thousands? It also meant increased pressure to plant high density orchards and to grow for size and color, and to limit the number of varieties the growers planted, and that is all pushing the apple industry toward the CAFO and industrial agriculture models that now dominate the livestock and row crop sectors. It weakened the growers and gave more power to the corporate buyers and brokers and super market chains.

Today, it is hard to find apple juice or cider made from apples grown here, while just ten years ago it was hard to find apple juice or cider made from apples grown anywhere other than here. Since the COOL - country of origin labeling - law is not being enforced (against the big players, the little guys have the Feds crawling all over them as never before)) it is hard to even tell where produce is coming from now.

Back 7 years ago or so, a few of us investigated this to find out which American companies were receiving the smuggled goods - apple concentrate with false labels on the containers and brought through Canada to elude US customs. Who here was buying it, packaging it, and distributing it into the US market? We looked at every apple juice producer in the country, verified where they were getting their apples, talked to all of the growers supplying them with apples, matched inputs to outputs, and watched the routing of the containers coming in from Canada.

About that time, I was talking to someone who lived near the Amway operation in Ada Michigan, and I had heard the story about Amway putting up some new plant there. and no one was sure what the purpose for it was. The woman told me that strings of container cars were coming in every day and that the whole neighborhood no smelled like apples. After some more investigation, it turned out that it was in fact Amway that was the fence for all of Chinese concentrate, the entry point into the US market for it, from where it was then slipped into the flow around the country. Devos being a big Bush donor and "pioneer" and the Bush administration not enforcing the regulations can't be a coincidence.

Then we have Amway and the tart cherry growers. The growers, a couple hundred small operations, scraped together $100,000 and gave it to Michigan State University to research nutritional value in the fruit - part of an ongoing program by the USDA to connect dietary issues to produce, for public benefit. The research did discover exceptionally high levels of certain nutrients. Then, Amway approached the university and bought the research for $7 million dollars, half of which went to the lead researcher who has now presumably retired in luxury. Within days, Amway then ordered massive amounts of tart cherries, virtually the entire crop, so growers turned away other buyers. At the last minute, as the fruit was being harvested, Amway cancelled the order - prices collapsed, fruit went to waste - and most of us believe that the whole thing was a ruse and that they never had any intention of buying any fruit. Amway then buried the research. The research was a threat to their phony "nutraceutical"- business.

The growers, with the encouragement and support of the USDA then begin distributing the research results, and that led to paramilitary raids by the FDA on the fruit growers. The FDA declared tart cherries to be a drug, and said that the small growers were illegally selling an untested, unapproved and unregulated drug and threatened to shut them down, and then turned around and released a statement to the media that fruit growers were making "false claims" about the health benefits of fruit, which is not what they charged the growers with, and which was not true but which would be plausible to the public. That needs to be put into context - the FDA virtually NEVER bothers the big corporate food producers or the pharmaceutical industry.

I'll snag those. That Pile article is like gold.

The other links I'll delve into after I add a couple more things that I have to this thread. It's easy to get absorbed in following the connections. So many assholes!

I think an excellent case can be made for describing the Repubs and Dems as coercive groups at this point. I don't know how to explain the intense loyalty in the face of so much cognitive dissonance any other way. The fake "fights" between the two just seem to reinforce it.

connected to Landmark that calls itself 21st Century Democrats. I haven't looked at those links for about a year. I'll go back and check it out and see if something can be fleshed out here.

We never see Dem presidential candidates up close in CA really. They know we will go blue even if they run a bonsai tree so they just stop off and pick up cash. I would have been interested in seeing what was going on in the battleground states. There were some low-level Landmark people who were doing campaign things on their own, but I haven't been able to make any connection to the higher-ups. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were.

I had no idea they'd gotten that cozy. I never heard any of that. That's incredibly shocking and horrible. Most of the stories I read are cults ruining individuals by duping them with their own greed. This phase of duping large groups of innocent people and destroying them with government collusion is fucking frightening. That's a huge operation.

I second your recommendation on reading the forum. Ross makes trolls eat hot death and really keeps it safe for people to discuss their experiences in abusive groups. People go there first with tips on connections and areas that a cult is spreading into. One or two are starting to pick up on Vanto.

I've been able to warn away a few of my friends who were getting recruited to take courses. Fortunately most of them are too broke to be juicy temptations to cults. Most of these groups target people with disposable income, are generally kind of isolated and usually have just experienced some huge life change.

http://www.vantogroup.com/services.jsp






Our Services

Vanto Group offers a unique technology to business corporations. A fundamental premise of Vanto Group's work is that the individuals in an enterprise and the enterprise itself have the possibility not only of fulfillment and success, but also of greatness.

Vanto Group's engagements encompass a full range of consulting services:

Cultural Integration
Forging a new organizational culture based on common goals and values.

Strategic Vision, Planning, and Implementation
Creating, with full company participation, a powerful, achievable future for your organization.

Workforce Mobilization
Building and coaching high-performance teams.

Leadership Training
Eliciting innovation, initiative, and action at any level in the organization.

Breakthrough Project
Accelerating organizational performance with outcome-driven teams

Executive Excellence
Developing new levels of partnership and effectiveness among an executive team.

Union and Management Relations
Forging powerful relationships.

Mergers, Acquisitions, and Alliances
Melding business cultures for optimal performance.

[/b]Diversity Empowerment[/b]
Honoring uniqueness as a source of strength and creativity for the organization.


(This one really bothers me, so I'm highlighting it here)



Union and Management Relations

Union and management relations historically are based on mistrust, conflict of interest, and ingrained adversarial attitudes. Surmounting this history and building a strong foundation of trust are essential to achieving new levels of productivity and a competitive advantage.

Vanto's initiatives, tailored to specific union and management situations, bring about a dramatic shift in how people work together to fulfill organizational goals. When people can see themselves as an integral, vital part of an organization's future, they are able to step outside their separate, often adversarial roles and experience themselves as part of a team.


"During the work Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) did with Vanto (formerly LEBD), we tore down a lot of the old traditional barriers between union and management, the stuff that kept us from achieving the company's goals.”

"The cost of producing megawatts has so far dropped 18%. Our grievances dropped more than 50%. The incentive program we developed is probably paying the largest incentive payouts in the country for utility workers. Instead of a very difficult and untrusting environment, there is a new attitude and new level of productivity that reap benefits for the company and the workers."

Jerry Roberts
President
United Steel Workers of America, Local 12775






Our Clients

Vanto Group is a global consulting firm distinguished by the track record of its clients:

Apple Computer
Banco do Brasil
Baytown Refinery, Exxon
Bellevue Hospital Center
BHP-Billiton (Australia, Chile, Peru)
Bergen Brunswig Drug Company
Compania Minera Antamina
De Lucht Petrol Stations
Fortis Bank
Glaxo Wellcome
Guidant Corporation
Heinz
Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals (China)
JP MorganChase
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Lonmin Plc
Magma Copper Company
Marsh McLennan
Mercedes Benz USA
Minera Escondida Ltda.
MMC FINPRO Insurance
Monsanto
National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA)
New Zealand Steel
Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO)
Northrop Grumman Corporation
Panamco (Coca Cola Bottling Company, Brazil)
Petrobras (Brazil)
Reebok International
SAP (Brazil)
Santos Ltd (Australia)
Standard Chartered Bank (India)
State of Bahia (Brazil)
State of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
Telemar (Brazil)
UNUM Insurance
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
U.S. Department of the Navy
Visanet




http://www.vantogroup.com/details.jsp?top=168&mid=4191&siteObjectID=910



Transformation as an Organizational Competency

By Pamela Dodd

Bob Mueller knows first hand the power of large-scale transformation. Together with San Francisco consultancy Vanto Group (formerly LEBD), a wholly owned and independently managed subsidiary of Landmark Education Corporation, Mueller helped Magma Copper Co. turn transformation into a key organizational competency in the mid-1990s.

Magma had a history of low productivity due to bad union-management relations, including strikes, escalating hostility and distrust, and legal suits. As the vice president transformational technology, Mueller initiated a three-phase strategic process for Magma's culture transformation. In Phase I, 140 executives, managers, and union officials spent a total of 11 days over a five-month period creating a company charter, and establishing accountability charts and overall goals for the next 13 years. The charter and accountabilities expressed the commitment of all Magma stakeholders to teamwork, safety, community well being, financial and environmental responsibility, high performance, innovation, respect, trust, integrity, and a bold future.


...

Integrity. Most organizations are designed to allow for, or tolerate, complaining, cynicism, resignation, and getting by with less than people's best. People who want to make a difference often are stopped by those who don't, and the whole atmosphere becomes one that lacks the integrity of true commitment. Integrity is being true to one's vision and commitments.

When all the people in an organization, from the CEO to the truck driver, share a common vision and commitment, the organization produces extraordinary results.

Mueller carried these messages of transformation to BHP, which acquired Magma Copper in 1996. Since then, Vanto, with Mueller on board, has worked with BHP to produce breakthrough thinking and business results at New Zealand Steel, Goonyella Riverside Coal in Queensland, Australia, Iron Ore Ports and Rail operations in Western Australia, and BHP Corporate in Melbourne, Australia.

A case study of Vanto's work at BHP New Zealand Steel is available. For information on personal transformation as a competency, read The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Ben Zander, Harvard University Press, 2001.




From my point of view reading this, it sounds like companies contract these "courses" from Vanto to mess with the traditional relationship between management and the workers. Maybe I'm just being sentimental, but the thought of some hard working stiff having to sit in a room and examine his "rackets" about his attitude towards the company just seems totally wrong. "You're making the company wrong again. Can't you visualize abundance instead of raising demands? Create a conversation that puts you in integrity." Barf!



http://www.landmarkeducation.com/landmark_corporate_consulting.jsp



Corporate Consulting

Because Landmark's programs dramatically improve organizational and personal communication skills, major corporations have been some of Landmark's most enthusiastic advocates. Vanto Group, a global consulting firm headed up by CEO Steve Zaffron, and Business Breakthrough Technology (BBT), a consulting firm based in Asia and led by director Ramesh Ramachandra, apply Landmark's unique technology in business situations. Both firms are wholly owned subsidiaries of Landmark Education.

Vanto Group and BBT design and implement strategic initiatives to elevate organizational performance and create unprecedented business results that give their clients a competitive advantage. The fundamental premise for both firms is that the individuals in an enterprise, and the enterprise itself, can go beyond success and fulfillment to achieve greatness.

Vanto Group and BBT offer a full range of consulting services from strategic planning to building and coaching high-performance executive management teams to implementing workforce mobilization initiatives. Both firms tailor these initiatives to the unique needs of their clients, with a specific focus on performance, agility, and the ability to maintain a competitive advantage.

Vanto Group has worked with hundreds of organizations in twenty countries, including Apple, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Heinz Northern Europe, Reebok, Northrop Grumman, BHP-Billiton, Petrobras, Telemar Brazil, and Polus Group Japan.

BBT has worked with clients throughout Asia including Central Sougou Kenkyusho, International Consumer Products (ICP), Kobayashi Judo-Orthopedics, Mekong Capital, Nihon Process, Nippo, Sharp, THP (Tân Hiệp Phát) Group, and Yasuda Metal.

Landmark Education and its subsidiaries hold memberships in the Academy of Management, American Management Association, American Society for Training and Development, International Society for Performance Improvement, and International Association for Continuing Education and Training.





I haven't looked into all the organizations listed in that last paragraph yet, but I'd be shocked if they weren't all LEC shell organizations. Scientology has several front groups like these and the two groups are very similar in ways. Landmark has been more efficient in recreating itself to run away from bad press.

The Book

http://www.threelawsofperformance.com/about_three_laws_of_performance_book.jsp

I haven't read it, so I can't give a personal review. We'll take a look at it though. I have a feeling it functions mainly to lend an academic air to the Vanto group. Some people are just always really impressed by seeing someone's name on a book cover. And who in this business would turn away any possible income stream?





The Three Laws of Performance

1. How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them. Leaders have a say--and give others a say--in how situations occur.

2. How a situation occurs to people arises in language. Leaders master the conversational environment.

3. Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people. Leaders listen for the future of their organizations, and create the conditions that allow others to coauthor that new future.


Zaffron attempts to explain using standard-issue Landmark jargon with one fo their favorite words, "commitment":


http://www.managementconsultingnews.com/interviews/zaffron_interview.php



McLaughlin: How do leaders change the default future and head everyone in another direction?

Zaffron: Well, first of all, you don’t have to be in a position of “authority” to set an organization on a new path. Leaders can exist in any position. But you do have to own the situation and take the risk to start conversations that will get others to confront the default future, particularly if it’s not the future you want.

On one client project, a middle-level manager went to the executive in charge and said I think this project is in trouble. She told him about some of our ideas on how teams can work together. This executive had 600 great scientists working for him, but they were not collaborating very well as a team.

We started an initiative that lasted a year and involved all the scientists. We helped them see where they would end up if they continued in their current direction, and then what was possible instead.

We helped them create commitments to that new future with what we call future-based language. That is comprised of declaration, commitment, promises, and requests. When people collaborate and create a commitment together, that becomes the future that they’re living into. We call that rewriting the future.

McLaughlin: You touched on the importance of language. Do you think that executives understand how powerful language is for attaining top performance?

Zaffron: No. But it’s not just executives and managers who don’t realize the power of the language they use. It’s people in general. We tend to use language only in a descriptive way. That is, we describe how something is or was.
But people have built-in interpretations of language that determine reality for them.

But people have built-in interpretations of language that determine reality for them. When their interpretations are not aligned with the bigger picture, their actions are disconnected, uncoordinated, and not as powerful as they could be. Understanding that is central to rewriting the future.

Future-based, or generative, language is more than descriptive; it opens people’s minds to the possibilities. Here’s an example: In his inaugural address, Franklin Roosevelt laid out the reality of the situation the world was facing and how difficult the road ahead was going to be. Then, he made the now-famous statement that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. He used language to create a new possibility.

McLaughlin: When we consider leaders like Roosevelt or Churchill, we tend to chalk up their success to being good orators.

Zaffron: Yes. We distance ourselves from what they do by saying things like they’re great orators, or they know how to motivate people, or they’ve got charisma. Not me, I don’t have that because I’m just an ordinary person. And so we disempower ourselves from the possibility of leadership.
In reality, leaders are ordinary people who create extraordinary commitments.

In reality, leaders are ordinary people who create extraordinary commitments. Another way of saying that in terms of the three laws of performance is that leaders enable the rewriting of the future.

McLaughlin: How do leaders enable that rewriting?

Zaffron: Well, leaders can’t rewrite the future by themselves; they have to involve others. They see that they need to bring people together who don’t normally collaborate, get them to face reality, give up their interpretations from the past, and see what’s possible. That makes implementing new ideas and projects much easier because people see those projects as fulfillment of their possibilities.

Usually, if leaders want to implement a new initiative, first they work out what needs to be done. Then they try to get people to implement it. We do the opposite. We first get a group of people together for a series of conversations, meetings, and programs. They work out what the future is that they want to commit to. And then they look at the project as a way to access that future.

McLaughlin: Can you give us an example?

Zaffron: Sure. We once worked with a copper mining company that had numerous unions. The price of copper was down and the company was headed for disaster. The unions were fighting with management, and management questioned the motives of the unions.

We were invited to begin the conversations of how to implement the three laws of performance. The first question for the unions and management was, do you see where this is going? Do you really want the company to go out of business? The company’s books were opened up, information was shared, and the truth was told.

They created a commitment to work differently in the future: They signed a fifteen-year labor agreement, which had never been done in the industry before. Then the question was how do we roll out these commitments to the rest of the workforce of 5,000 people?

We worked with them to involve everybody in having a say in the company. That doesn’t mean everyone controlled the company, but that they experienced being listened to. Whatever future management and the unions wrote, the employees saw as representing their voice in the matter.

When we first started working with this company, its share price was $9. Three years later, it was acquired for $38 a share. This did not involve any new mining discoveries or new production processes. It was all people working together in a new way.

McLaughlin: Why do people respond to future-based language?

Zaffron: It’s a natural response because people want to be effective and they want their work to matter. No one wants to work from nine to five and just go through the motions every day. But it ends up being like that for many people.
No one wants to work from nine to five and just go through the motions every day.

When people see that they can be co-creators of their organization’s future, that’s very exciting. Most people jump at the chance to make a difference.

McLaughlin: If you could give leaders one piece of advice about improving performance, what would it be?

Zaffron: I would say invite conversations with everyone you manage and your colleagues about what’s possible. Listen for their concerns, expectations, and their interpretations. Be willing to look at the world the way they do so that whatever you create is informed by the way the world is occurring for people.




This is mostly just warmed over Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a psuedo-science popular with LGATs and other Human Potential Movement leadership trainings.

http://www.skepdic.com/neurolin.html


Next up, the elusive "integrity".

This word is used in Landmark in a very specific way.

http://i955.photobucket.com/albums/ae35/mpkartist/TheThreeLawsofPerformance-GoogleBoo.png


http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6331.html



Working Papers
Integrity: Without It Nothing Works
Published: December 17, 2009
Paper Released: November 2009
Author: Michael C. Jensen
Executive Summary:

"An individual is whole and complete when their word is whole and complete, and their word is whole and complete when they honour their word," says HBS professor Michael C. Jensen in this interview that appeared in Rotman: The Magazine of the Rotman School of Management, Fall 2009. Jensen (and his coauthors, Werner Erhard and Steve Zaffron) define and discuss integrity ("a state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, in perfect condition"); the workability that integrity creates for individuals, groups, organizations, and society; and its translation into organizational performance. He also discusses the costs of lacking integrity and the fallacy of using a cost/benefit analysis when deciding whether to honor your word. Key concepts include:

* The personal and organizational benefits of honoring one's word are huge—both for individuals and for organizations—and generally unappreciated.

* We can honor our word in one of two ways: by keeping it on time and as promised, or if that becomes impossible, by owning up to the parties counting on us to keep our word in advance and cleaning up the mess our failure to keep our word creates in their lives.

* By failing to honor our word to ourselves, we undermine ourselves as persons of integrity, and create "unworkability" in our lives.

* Integrity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for maximum performance.
* There are unrecognized but significant costs to associating with people and organizations that lack integrity.


http://www.wernererhard.net/integrity.html


A similar paper is on tour nationally and around the world, given as a presentation by Erhard and Jensen:




The Integrity Paper

Integrity: A Positive Model That Incorporates the Normative Phenomena of Morality

Werner Erhard and Professor Michael Jensen discuss their positive model of integrity that links integrity and personal and corporate performance. They address integrity in a developing academic paper, whose primary purpose is to present a positive model of integrity that provides a powerful access to increased performance for individuals, groups, organizations, and societies.

The creation of this model reveals a causal link between integrity and increased performance. Through the work of clarifying and defining what integrity is and it’s causal link to performance, this model provides access to increased performance for private individuals, executives, economists, philosophers, policy makers, leaders, legal and government authorities.

This academic paper was initially presented at the Gruter Institute Conference on Values in June 2006. Since then it has been presented at the Center for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Boston, MA, May 10, 2007, Simon School of Business, U. of Rochester; Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, Sept. 2006, Nottingham College of Business, Nottingham, UK, ESADE Business School, Barcelona, Spain; HEC, Paris, France, Nov. 2006, Yale Symposium on Corporate Governance, Inaugural Lecture, (Yale Law School and Yale School of Organization and Management), New Haven, CT, January 2007, Gruter ... (several more at the link)


http://www.landmarkeducation.com/landmark_integrity_seminar.jsp





http://www.landmarkeducation.com/images/landmark_logo.gif


Graduate Seminar: Integrity - The Bottom Line

Register Now

Integrity is often thought of as moral uprightness and steadfastness - making the “good” choices, doing the “right thing.” In fact, it is far more than that. It is a home, an anchor, a created and continuing commitment - a way of being and acting that shapes who you are.

In Integrity: The Bottom Line, you will discover that integrity resides in the ability to constitute yourself as your word, to be true to your principles, and ultimately, be true to yourself. You'll learn that integrity is not constrained by, nor does it reside in, rules, prescriptions, or imposed demands. Integrity creates an environment of freedom, power, and joy.

Program Logistics
This seminar occurs in 10 evening sessions, usually during a three-month period. Each session is approximately 3 hours.



I think they just use it because it's fancy-sounding.

Whoops, I hooked this to the wrong post.

None of this story would be visible to the general public (and making it visible to people does not necessarily engage their interest. If we could work the Monsanto versus organic melodrama into the story somehow...) But for all who are close to and knowledgeable about this particular area - fruit growing - it is the central story of your life. It makes me wonder how many other stories are out there that are similar to this and that we don't hear about.

I think that the reason that stories like this don't interest people is because they already have too much "on their plates" - so many causes, each cause discrete and disconnected from anything else - and they have no overarching and comprehensive view of what is happening, so there is no place to "file" a story like this in their liberal smorgasbord of worries and causes. Let's say there are a hundred, or hundreds, of stories out there just like these from other areas - and I am certain that there are - that would then be hundreds of new causes for the liberals. It would be impossible. So they pick the causes that are "important to them" personally and never see the forest for the trees.

on the flash cards. I presume these are used in expensive seminars sold to "create profitability" for many companies.

http://i955.photobucket.com/albums/ae35/mpkartist/integrity.jpg




This is only from the second page of 28 of these suckers and already I'm asleep.
Anyone who can parse that has my sympathy.

The name Napoleon Hill comes up in discussions about the human potential movement, multi-level marketing, prosperity Gospel, and New Age spirituality. People may not be familiar with him.

From the Napoleon Hill Foundation website:

[div class="excerpt"]Napoleon Hill was born in 1883 in a one-room cabin on the Pound River in Wise County, Virginia. He began his writing career at age 13 as a "mountain reporter" for small town newspapers and went on to become America's most beloved motivational author. Hill passed away in November 1970 after a long and successful career writing, teaching, and lecturing about the principles of success. His work stands as a monument to individual achievement and is the cornerstone of modern motivation. His book, Think and Grow Rich, is the all time bestseller in the field. Hill established the Foundation as a nonprofit educational institution whose mission is to perpetuate his philosophy of leadership, self-motivation, and individual achievement. His books, audio cassettes, videotapes, and other motivational products are made available to you as a service of the Foundation so that you may build your own library of personal achievement materials... and help you acquire financial wealth and the true riches of life.

http://www.naphill.org/about/personal.asp
[/quote]

[div class="excerpt"]Truly inspirational. The single best book I have ever read.

By Avinash Sharma "MBA, M.S., Knowledge Worker"

If you asked me to recommend to you the single best book I have ever read, my answer would be a very definite "Think and Grow Rich".
First published in 1937, this is the end product of two decades of research conducted by Napoleon Hill. His research started when Andrew Carnegie (the steel tycoon who was then the richest man on earth) gave him the assignment of organizing a Philosophy of Personal Achievement. Hill, who was a poor journalist, armed with just an introductory letter from Carnegie, set out to interview over five hundred successful people including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, George Eastman, William Wrigley Jr. and Charles M. Schwab. Hill then revealed the priceless wisdom of his research in the form of the thirteen steps to success (in Think and Grow Rich) and the seventeen principles of success (in courses and lectures he conducted).

The concepts taught by Napoleon Hill transformed my life. Some of these include developing a definite purpose, building a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA), channeling the power of the sub-conscious mind and dealing with adversity. Everything he wrote about or talked about is thought provoking. He was wise, humble and funny. His philosophy is universal; he did not mix it with religion. The riches he referred to were more than money, for the Philosophy of Personal Achievement can be applied to anything in life.

Hill was well ahead of his time. This book has a chapter dedicated to some of today's most important issues - Specialized Knowledge, Decision Making, Imagination and Organized Planning (in which he deals with Leadership). He also has principles for Teamwork, Creative Vision, Health, etc.

This is a classic, and hence the examples are old (not to be confused with outdated). But they are as relevant today as they were in the early twentieth century.

Here is an example from T&GR in the chapter on Desire:

On the morning after the Great Fire of Chicago (1871), a group of merchants on Chicago's State Street went into a conference to decide whether to rebuild their stores or leave Chicago. All but one decided to leave. The merchant who decided to stay pointed a finger to the remains of his store and said "Gentlemen, on that very spot I will build the world's greatest store, no matter how many times it may burn down." His name was Marshall Field and his store still exists, and in Hill's words is "a towering monument to that state of mind known as a burning desire." I lived in Chicago from 2002 through 2004 and worked three blocks away from this impressive store on State Street. Sometimes I would visit it or stand outside it to derive inspiration and be reminded of the power of desire. It is amazing that Hill describes "burning desire" with a story based on the Chicago Fire.

There are thousands of self-help books out in the market and hundreds of self proclaimed "gurus" who have made a living by copying the wisdom in Hill's books. As I went through some of those books I realized that there was not much in them that Hill had not already written about. I recommend quality over quantity. Instead of reading through many books, I recommend that you study the following works of Hill and internalize his wisdom:

1. The Think and Grow Rich Action Pack (1937) - I recommend the Action Pack edition,

2. Napoleon Hill's Keys to Success: The 17 Principles of Personal Achievement - this is an excellent guide to his principles,

3. Your Right To Be Rich [Unabridged] - this consists of 12 hours of live lectures covering the 17 principles, that Hill conducted in Chicago in 1954.

By internalizing, I mean studying in depth - analyzing the ideas, making notes and summaries. I own more CDs by Hill, but I believe that these 3 items make the perfect study plan on the Philosophy of Personal Achievement.
I am greatly indebted to Napoleon Hill. The purpose of my writing this is to spread awareness of his work so that more people can benefit from it. This, I believe is the best way in which Hill would have liked to have been repaid.

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Grow-Rich-Napoleon-Hill/product-reviews/9569569611
[/quote]

[div class="excerpt"]
Napoleon Hill

Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970) was an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature. His most famous work, Think and Grow Rich, is one of the best-selling books of all time. Hill's works examined the power of personal beliefs, and the role they play in personal success. He became the advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933-36. "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve" is one of Hill's hallmark expressions. How achievement actually occurs, and a formula for it that puts success in reach for the average person, were the focal points of Hill's books.

Life and works

According to his official biographer, Tom Butler-Bowdon, Napoleon Hill was born in an impoverished, one-room cabin in the Appalachian town of Pound in Southwest Virginia. Hill's mother died when he was nine years old and his father remarried two years later. At the age of 15, Hill began writing as a "mountain reporter" for small-town newspapers in the area of Wise County and he later used his earnings as a reporter to enter law school, but soon had to withdraw for financial reasons.[4]

Influence of Andrew Carnegie

The turning point in the writing career of Napoleon Hill is considered[who?] to have occurred in 1908 with his assignment, as part of a series of articles about famous men, to interview the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, one of the most powerful men in the world. Hill discovered that Carnegie believed that the process of success could be elaborated in a simple formula that could be duplicated by the average person. Impressed with Hill, Carnegie asked him if he was up to the task of putting together this information with only reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses to interview or analyze over 500 successful men and women, many of them millionaires, in order to discover and publish this formula for success.

As part of his research, Hill interviewed many of the most famous people of the time, including Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Elmer Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Charles M. Schwab, F.W. Woolworth, William Wrigley Jr., John Wanamaker, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Jennings Randolph. Hill was also an advisor to two presidents of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

As a result of Hill's studies via Carnegie's introductions, the Philosophy of Achievement was offered as a formula for rags-to-riches success by Hill and Carnegie, published initially in 1928 as a study course called The Law of Success. The Achievement formula was detailed further and published in home-study courses, including the seventeen-volume "Mental Dynamite" series until 1941.

Hill later called his personal success teachings "The Philosophy of Achievement" and he considered freedom, democracy, capitalism, and harmony to be important contributing elements. For without these foundations to build upon, Hill claimed throughout his writings, successful personal achievements are not possible. He contrasted his philosophy with others, and thought Achievement was superior and responsible for the success Americans enjoyed for the better part of two centuries. Negative emotions, fear and selfishness among others, had no part to play in his philosophy, and Hill considered them to be the source of failure for unsuccessful people.

The Philosophy of Achievement

The secret of achievement was tantalizingly offered to readers of Think and Grow Rich, but was never explicitly identified. Hill felt discovering it for themselves would provide readers with the most benefit. He presented the idea of a "Definite Major Purpose" as a challenge to his readers in order to make them ask themselves, "In what do I truly believe?" For according to him, 98% of people had no firm beliefs, and this alone put true success firmly out of their reach.

Hill's numerous books have sold millions of copies,[citation needed] proving that the secret of Achievement is still highly sought-after by modern Americans. Hill dealt with many controversial subjects through his writings including racism, slavery, oppression, failure, revolution, war and poverty. Persevering and then succeeding in spite of these obstacles using the Philosophy of Achievement, Hill stated, was the responsibility of every American.

Some of today's philosophy of success teachers are also using the research formulas taught by Hill to expand upon our world's knowledge of personal development. It is clear that Hill's work applies in all generations and is indeed timeless

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Hill#Influence_of_Andrew_Carnegie
[/quote]

http://www.wernererhard.com/work.html



The Barbados Group



The Barbados Group is an international group of scholars, consultants and practitioners who were brought together by Werner Erhard. The Group is committed to creating a new paradigm of performance. The working name for this new paradigm is "The Ontological Foundations of Performance." This new paradigm is based on the fundamental proposition that the performance of an individual, group or organization is a correlate of the way the world in which, and on which, that entity is performing "occurs" for that entity. This new paradigm also offers access to this "occurring" through a specific use of a distinct aspect of language.

The Barbados Group includes thinkers and experts in leadership and organizational performance, along with Werner Erhard, such as: Sir Christopher Ball, Patron, Talent Foundation, Peter Block, Partner, Designed Learning Inc., Bruce Gergory, Senior Science Educator, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Michael C. Jensen, Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard Business School, Senior Advisor, The Monitor Company, Chairman, Social Science Electronic Publishing (SSEP), Inc. and best selling authors David C. Logan University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business and Steve Zaffron, CEO, Vanto Group to name a few.

The Barbados Group is not merely a think tank but also a group with a commitment to create this new paradigm, and to communicate and further the ideas of the new paradigm in the world.

The first publication in book form to come out of the Barbados Group’s exploration, and the tenets of "The Ontological Foundations of Performance," is Three Laws of Performance, the 2009 best selling book by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan.

This abstracting journal will post the work of the members of The Barbados Group.



http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Jeljour_results.cfm?nxtres=1&form_name=journalbrowse&journal_id=624742&Network=no&SortOrder=ab_approval_date&stype=desc&lim=false

(naturally it's the SSRN)


http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/07.04.08.html




Beyond Coordination and Control Is... Transformation

...

The Ontological Foundations of Performance? Among the leaders of the Barbados Group is self-help guru Werner Erhard, founder Erhard Training Seminars, or est, as it became known, which in the 1970s enjoyed a vogue as a rival of sorts to the Church of Scientology, before Erhard sold the seminar business to a group of friends and relatives (who renamed it Landmark Education) and went to live outside the United States. Part of the Barbados plan, Jensen explained in a conversation last week, is to "lay the foundations for real science of leadership.


Jensen's interests in the innermost secrets of human nature emerged in Chicago, flowered in Rochester and found expression in celebrated course at he founded at HBS known as CCMO -- Coordination, Control and the Management of Organizations. When first taught, at Harvard Business School, in 1985, it attracted 35 students. By the mid-90s, the course as taught by Jensen and others was regularly enrolling 600 students in study of human physiology, the psychology of emotions, the management of knowledge, and the possibilities for various "rules of the game" within organizations, governing everything from compensation to governance to performance measurement. After retiring from teaching, Jensen had been working with fellow business school professor Chris Argyris on training to counter behavior he considered "not rational, self-destructive." While Argyris had made considerable progress, Jensen says, his technology wouldn't "scale," that is, it had difficulty accommodating more than ten people at a time; and it took a long time to produce results.

That changed when Jensen's daughter, from whom he had been "somewhat estranged," phoned one day after taking a weekend Landmark course. To that point, the occasional business school student had recommended Landmark courses to him; fellow professor Warren Bennis was said to be a long-standing advocate of Landmark's teaching methods. But this was different, Jensen says. "I got a call from my daughter, and she was like a different person." One person in a room with 110 people in a weekend course from Friday to Sunday had accomplished "an amazing set of results," she reported, and almost everybody had been similarly affected. "I have a favor to ask," she said. "I would like you to try it."

So Jensen flew out to Landmark headquarters in San Francisco and took a course. The year was 1998. "I became very interested in what this technology was. It was not brainwashing, not a cult. It was something I had never seen before, but it clearly had scale." Eventually he wrote a case for the business school with which to teach.

...

At some point, he met Erhard -- "maybe it was in Japan," Jensen says -- and, at some point, "the world 'occurred' to me in a different way." The mechanism is something other than cause and effect, says Jensen; better to describe it as action that is "correlate." When individuals experience such a shift in the way the world "occurs" to them, "their behavior, and therefore their performance, will shift, without even thinking about it. That's the way it is....When that happens, incredible change in performance and cooperation are the result. "Werner is absolutely a genius, an amazing man, a remarkable man." The two began a collaboration ("he invited me to help him with his stuff"); Jensen, in turn, offered to venture a deeper explanation of the phenomenon. "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." That collaboration, along with several other projects of mutual interest, eventually coalesced as the Barbados Group.


Sir Christopher Ball

http://www.rickross.com/reference/landmark/landmark247.html


Landmark's claim that the "research" in its information packet was "independent" truly beggared belief when applied to the work of The Talent Foundation, which was founded shortly after his first Landmark experiences by Sir Christopher Ball, an avowedly very enthusiastic Landmark adherent. (His testimonial compares Landmark to Shakespeare, Mozart and Turner and scarily records his mass recruiting efforts.).

Ball, in reporting on The Talent Foundation's study of Landmark, looked forward to "sponsoring" another study to confirm the amazingly positive findings.


Peter Block

http://www.masteryfoundation.org/peace/ireland/blockanderhard/



Peter Block

Peter Block is an author, consultant, and speaker who helped initiate the current interest in empowerment in corporations and whose work now centers on ways to bring service and accountability to organizations and communities. Peter was a founder of the consulting firm of Block Petrella Weisbord and The School for Managing of the Association for Quality and Participation, where he serves on the Board of Directors. He is the author of four best-selling books—Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used; The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work; Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest; and The Answer to How is Yes: Choosing What Matters Over What Works—as well as numerous articles on organizational change and building productive communities.
Werner Erhard

Werner Erhard is a teacher, consultant, and the creator of one of the most influential technologies of the last 30 years, the technology of transformation. This technology has been the basis for two widely popular and effective educational programs, The est Training and The Landmark Forum, as well as a successful corporate consulting business and several other enterprises and organizations. In 1983, Werner accepted the request of the newly formed Mastery Foundation to consult in the creation of a transformational program for those who minister and serve others. Since then, he has continued to donate his expertise and services to the Mastery Foundation, at times developing new program material and leading courses.

back to Ireland Initiative

* Overview
* Ireland Initiative
* Israel Initiative
* Outcomes & Results




Bruce Gregory

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41fME-0PiFL._SL500_AA240_.jpg


Can't find anything about him, except books and his listing at the Harvard astrophysics website


Dave Logan

Co-author of Three Laws of Performance. I can't figure what he might have contributed, he has his own personal coaching business and books explaining human potential in terms of "tribes".

I know Peter Block. What he's doing now is this "Small Group" hocus-pocus:
http://www.asmallgroup.net/ He's the guy in the blue shirt in the group picture. I went to one of their meetings (or rather it came to me) as part of a anti-war teach-in some friends of mine were doing at a community center. Many movement type people go to these things. I had no idea what was going on at the one I attended.

http://asmallgroup.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1616563%3ATopic%3A1274

http://api.ning.com/files/vuUh0rgUyT6iuUSMFqmNPBbYPaSOA2MgiPDRFyrjrqOgi65RO2NQsdow5y3ZIreWah0UKqp-grKIG2YzqO-01r5uwcM9mPW4/asg_pb_community_icon.png

Reply by Dan Joyner on November 19, 2008 at 10:59am

[div class-excerpt]I’m looking forward to comments and discussions regarding this book. I’m honored to have been closely associated with Peter and many of the people he has mentioned, in this body of work. He often says “we created this work together” Peter is an amazingly talented, generous and humble member of this community whose gifts are freely offered to everybody… All the people closely associated with the creation of this work are unbelievably skillful and caring practitioners and community members. They long for the creation of “belonging” in communities and organizations. Like me, many have an undying faith in people. That faith in people enters the room with them every time they show up.

I worked 30 years in a bureaucracy, 25 of them as a leader. I’ve since had hundreds of ah-ha! moments relative to those experiences, as I’ve engaged in this work. For example, for years I was amazed at the behavior of cynics in the organization. The venomous discord spewed from their mouths toward “the hands of those who seemingly cared for them” didn’t make sense to me. Conversely, how could the hearts of good people be hardened by a system so committed to its purpose and mission? Patriarchy breeds cynicism… Living out the processes (boxes) and responsibilities (lines) of a pyramid shaped organizational chart created the fertile soil where cynicism thrived. Efforts to flatten, re-engineer or inverse the chart had little effect. Efforts to flatten, re-engineer or inverse the people didn’t work either…

In the book, Peter looks at the work of Werner Erhard and illustrates three keys to thinking about authentic transformation. These three keys have given me a simple framework from which to start designing my work with clients:

1.) Power of Language – Erhard asserts that “all transformation is linguistic” The work is to change the conversation – to have a conversation that we haven’t had before.

2.) Power of Context – Our mental models or context impacts our world view. These basic beliefs are what lie underneath our actions. Rather than living the past over and over, a shift in context changes our relationship with the past. It creates an opening for a new future to occur.

3.) Power of Possibility – Possibility is a declaration of what we stand for each time we show up. It’s a value or condition we want to occur in the world. When a possibility is declared in the presence of your peers, it gains power.[/quote]



Do you know anything about these guys? I just found the link on the adsmallgroup website.

http://www.1801mills.org/mills/about_us.html

The language is very odd.

but I'm not sure they have the resources to give this more exposure.

http://www.mlmsurvivor.com/survivor1.htm

Damn it. I wonder if Rick Ross would take it on.


We're probably better off if liberals don't take it on. They tend to be more pro-cult than anti in my experience. Go look at the link curt posted down at the bottom about Peter Block. You will hurl.

http://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/uploadedImages/Cincinnati_Magazine/Articles/Features/2008/01-JAN_08/JAN08%20PeterBlock.jpg

Peter Block is a New Age Pimp.

The first time someone asked for my distilled impression of Block, the best-selling author of various “bibles” on corporate team-building, management, and consulting who drove his Passat into Cincinnati in 1998 and never left, that’s what I said. Looking back, I can see how I unwittingly echoed his own penchant for boiled-down pithiness when the idea of the New Age Pimp first manifested itself last April in New York City over a fish dish in a dimly lit Italian joint in the Village with a group of colleagues. I rolled that phrase around in my head to make sure it fit, proud of the way bite and bawdiness commingled there in a floury tortilla of cynicism. At the time, I knew Block only slightly. We had served together on the board of a struggling nonprofit, and my blink-quick, wary assessment of him then was that he was an egotistical, wealthy, entitled do-gooder who was too good to be true.

After months of off-and-on observation of Block and his work, I now see that Block is a master seducer of the masses. That seduction comes from an earnest place: a genuine desire to change Cincinnati the same way he has changed corporations—one small group at at time. It’s also a seduction tinged with Block’s own fundamental insecurity about four decades of professional success based on a body of work—books, classes, management consulting—that is largely experiential.

But after all that time spent floating in Block’s aura, what unnerves me about this New Age Pimpdom is not Block himself but his disciples—overwhelmingly middle-class, well-educated, and white—who become “starry-eyed protégés who swallow the ideas whole,” as one observer put it to me. Sometimes, they give his spiel a goofy sheen. In fact, their granola-fueled cheer and group-hug intimacy has little to do with Block and everything to do with the age-old search for community, membership, and guidance.

Which isn’t all bad, though I could do with fewer spontaneous hugs. And yes, “New Age Pimp” is an ultra-reductive distillation of who Peter Block is. It’s a sucker-punch judgment of a complex man who is trying to live authentically; a man happy to help us fuel our own forays into the Well-Examined Life, to “step up,” as he puts it. He began his career as an organizational consultant on the East Coast in the late 1960s; then 10 years ago fell in love with a Cincinnati woman and moved here. Cincinnati is not exploding with best-selling authors; he could have nabbed celebrity status simply by turning up at Playhouse and opera openings. Instead, he got interested in this community and has, since then, showered our town with the Best of Block—for free. He’s been involved with InkTank and Elementz, two inventive arts-centric programs serving Over-the-Rhine and the West End. His pro bono work includes Clark Montessori School and the Union Institute and University, where he has led staff and faculty in what he calls “power conversations” designed to invigorate everyone from lunchroom ladies to Ph.D. cohorts. He helps the people in his small-group community workshops on civic engagement—some of whom are social service professionals, some ordinary citizens—find new ways to become, in the language of the soaring idealism of the 1960s, “part of the solution.” Block believes that Cincinnati has untold “gifts” (one of his favorite words), and that we need to explore those gifts and share them with one another rather than hoard them and splinter into frightened, warring factions.

All of which begs the question: Why would a man who made his name and fortune as a consultant to corporate America work so hard to give underdogs like InkTank and Elementz and Over-the-Rhine and the rest of us here in a city not known for consensus-building a collective leg up as we try to crawl out from beneath the self-loathing pall we’ve been under these past few years?

In typical Block fashion, it’s a hard question that begets an even harder one: Is Peter Block for real?

PETER BLOCK IS a 68-year-old Prius-driving, white-haired, Jewish, Donald Sutherland look-alike who sometimes refers to himself with self-deprecating charm as “asshole.”2 Something about him reminds me of Richard Branson, swashbuckling founder of the Virgin Group and a former counterculture icon who’s made a killing selling his ideas to The Establishment. Like Branson, Block packs a walloping appeal—elegant yet casual, confident and harmlessly flirtatious. His comportment announces his importance even if you have no idea who he is.

If you were to go to a Block event—as a participant in one of the community get-togethers he calls his Civic Engagement Series, or as part of his network of ad hoc think-tanks called A Small Group (ASG)—you’d be greeted by chairs pre-arranged in small circles of four or five, where participants sit with their knees nearly touching as Block moves through the room.

He starts with questions. How have I contributed to creating the current reality? What promise am I willing to make to this enterprise? Block expects participants to take his generic queries and apply them to whatever issue the group is addressing—to try out answers among themselves and share what they come up with as a large group. And if all goes well, there will be what Oprah Winfrey calls “a-ha” moments: those flashes of insight when you realize something simple yet intrinsically flawed about the way in which you’ve been thinking.

Block’s goal is to challenge and change the way participants think and how they respond. Personally, I find it difficult (as in: boring) to watch adults engage in something akin to public group therapy. But Block’s philosophy is that doing this one small group at a time will ultimately create a crashing, Katrina-like flood of “gift bringing”—his term for a renewed commitment to leadership and involvement in everything from interpersonal relationships to the work of the larger community. What he says during sessions of ASG he repeats virtually verbatim during the Civic Engagement Series. Chat with him and you’ll hear the same “Blockisms.” What gifts do you bring? What are your disappointments that do not place blame? It’s like he’s arming civic foot soldiers with the verbiage of self-discovery.

Block is successful at this because he’s attractive to mostly everyone. Men want to be him and women want to be with him. He blushed when I asked him about his sex appeal; however, it’s true that attractive people attract people, and he's attracted a gaggle of disciples all over the country.

“My first impression was, ‘He’s a-maaa-zing,’” says Linda Fabe, an organizational development consultant who has attended the Civic Engagement Series. “I feel so warm and appreciative of who he is in this world.” Block has, Fabe says reverentially, “a lot of light in him. I feel like he’s a clear, very present person with a lot of authenticity.”

ASG cohort and Indianapolis lawyer Don Murphy might be one of those men who wants to be Peter Block. “Mesmerizing,” Murphy says, when I ask his impression of Block. He connected with Block in 2005, as a master’s student in organizational development at Pepperdine University, where Block led a two-day session. Now he uses Block’s tactics as the director of performance improvement for the Indiana Public Defender Council and when he teaches at the Indiana Institute of Technology. Beyond that, Block has had the most powerful effect on his personal life.

“I realized that I can actually show who I really am at any particular moment,” says Murphy, an African-American who’s “been doing self-development work as long as I’ve been alive.” Murphy goes on about Block like he’s recounting the first time he fell in love. “He has this way of looking at you,” he says. “You can tell he’s reading your soul. I felt completely naked. Some of the men started getting defensive—white men in the class—and attacking him. He handled it all with aplomb.”

Conversely, John Hilley, a Presbyterian minister who works with a Nashville consulting firm specializing in management training and leadership development, registers a more balanced response to Block. “I still don’t fully understand where he’s coming from, but he’s spoken to the deep places in me,” says Hilley, who attended three ASG sessions last year in Cincinnati. Hilley applied Block’s tactics to working with 150 faith leaders in Nashville. The project was “to get clergy to take a more public stand around moral issues of immigration,” Hilley explains. Block’s small-group self-questioning techniques helped to minimize the “posturing and discussion and advice-rendering,” Hilley says, and moved the larger group toward solutions.

With every disciple I speak to, it becomes evident most are on the hunt for guidance and leadership, for someone to challenge their old ways of interacting and validate any new ones. Block is their man.

BLOCK HAS BEEN at the forefront of corporate self-help for nearly four decades. He pioneered team-building at Exxon in 1969. Then (like, yes, a pimp—or better yet, a hustler) he and his former Exxon boss Tony Petrella, and later, corporate colleague Marvin Weisbord, founded Block Petrella Weisbord and took the show on the road, earning exorbitant fees for gently browbeating upper-echelon managers out of their top-down management styles. A spate of books—now regarded, some say unduly, as seminal texts on their subjects—followed: Flawless Consulting: A Guide To Getting Your Expertise Used (1981), touted by his publisher as “the best-selling consulting book of all time”; The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work (1987); Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest (1993); Freedom and Accountability at Work, written with Peter Koestenbaum (2001); and The Answer To How Is Yes: Acting On What Matters (2001). This spring he releases Community: The Structure Of Belonging; a Flawless companion fieldbook was published in 2000, cementing what Block calls “the Flawless brand.” Eight years ago Block started the Ira Block Foundation, named for his late father, which helps fund some of his community programs and finances his philanthropic efforts. He lives off of book royalties and current consulting work.

Still, not everyone takes to Block’s style. For some, the metaphysicality of “gifts” and the emphasis on personal accountability are hard to digest. Block has taken a beating in the same free market in which he’s made his name. The customer reviews on Amazon.com for The Empowered Manager and Flawless Consulting soar with praise and zing with stinging criticisms. “The least amount of stars I could choose was one,” writes Rosemary Steers of Michigan about Flawless, “otherwise, I would most certainly have chosen NONE.” She goes on to write the book is fraught with “too much psycho-babbling.”

“Are [his critics] right? I don’t know,” says Ward Mailliard, a teacher at Mount Madonna School near San Jose, California, and cofounder of the Mount Madonna Center, a retreat facility. Mailliard has known Block since 2001; he assigns portions of Flawless Consulting and The Empowered Manager to his high school seniors. Block, he says, knows the criticisms leveled at his work.

“What Peter says is, ‘OK. You’ve decided to engage in a hierarchal, control-oriented system. How’s it going?’ What Peter’s offering is a shift of thinking,” Mailliard says. “He’s not saying what they should think. He’s suggesting a process. Why should you criticize that?” Mailliard ends with a pitch-perfect summation that could have been scripted by Block himself. “The ego wants to live forever,” he says, “and preferably in comfort.” Meaning, I assume, we want to live without challenges to what we’ve believed in for so long, never mind whether those beliefs work or not.

BLOCK HAS MADE a good living causing ego discomfort. Businesses pay him to tell them what they’ve been doing, saying, and thinking wrong. Here in Cincinnati, he’s doing the same thing, but on a community-wide level. On the home page of Block’s A Small Group initiative, the subhead declares the organization’s mission as “Restoring and Reconciling Cincinnati.” Block thinks we Cincinnatians suffer from low civic self-esteem. He’s doing his part to reverse that, keeping a breakneck schedule of local engagements shoe-horned in among out-of-town consulting gigs.6 When I ask Block if he’s engaged the “regulars” (i.e., City Council, 3CDC) among the city’s stable of go-to groups, he replies with typical self-effacement: “I haven’t aimed at that level. I’ve been aiming at the grassroots level.” However, Chiquita, the University of Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber are a few of the heavy hitters he’s counseled during the 40 or so talks he’s given since moving here.

He isn’t all talk. Block has quietly made donations to boards he sits on, such as InkTank, the Over-the-Rhine writing cooperative where he and I briefly overlapped as board members before I resigned at the end of 2006, and at Elementz, the West End hip-hop arts center. He has loaned start-up money to LeBraun Colvin, a talented young black graphic artist who runs Studio Endure, a new shop in Over-the-Rhine specializing in ghetto-fabulous customized sneakers and clothing.

“I’m trying to support small African-American businesses in my own incompetent way,” Block tells me during a break in a program at the Union Institute last July. “I’m a co-signer for [small black businesses] so they have zero liabilities.”

I like this approach. He’s on to something. “White people have to give up some comforts if things are gonna change,” I say.

Block insists it’s not about race. “It’s a class issue,” he says. “It’s not just white people, it’s people with money.” Besides, Colvin’s frustrations renting space and transcending the status of a marginal business have been instructional for the management guru. “He’s my classroom,” says Block. “I have to learn about this.”

During the same conversation, I ask Block why so few blacks and poor people come to his sessions. It’s the only time he ever comes close to a rant.

“I’m not interested in learning any more about the black experience,” he says, leaning toward me. “I’ve got enough problems with the fucking Jewish experience. I don’t want to marry your stuff with mine. We don’t have conversations with rich people and poor people to say, ‘How’m I doing?’

“The conversation about race is not new,” he says, hitting his stride, “and the wrong people are always having it.” He points out that after the 2001 riots there were lots of formalized “dialogues” in Cincinnati about race. But “they were all white liberals talking to each other.”

What, I wonder to myself, is the difference between the white liberals who participated in those post-riot dialogues in 2001 and the people who routinely show up for his conversations now? But I demur. Another chance to explore this quandary will present itself shortly.

I DO NOT get lost driving to Milford on a hot Saturday morning in August, but I do get a little lost on the campus of the Jesuit Spiritual Center where Block is leading a day-long ASG session focusing on his de rigueur topics of self-development and personal responsibility. After wandering into a large, lodge-like facility where a bunch of black church ladies are setting up for a service and then into an all-male dormitory, I drive across campus until I spy a parking lot with a few SUVs, luxury sedans, and a Lexus with a “COEXIST” bumper sticker. Ah. I am in the right place.

Inside the airy, sun-soaked pavilion, 16 doe-eyed people who have signed up for this particular ASG meeting sit in a large circle. There’s Michael and Joan Hoxsey, co-owners of a consulting firm called Relationship Resources, and Mag Casarez, director of peer programs and community development at Clermont Counseling Center, all of whom I’ve seen at other Block events. There is also Barbara McAfee, a WNBA-tall singer who performs at some of Block’s sessions. “I feel like a bee that gathers pollen from community to community,” she says.7 People go around the circle and introduce themselves. Then Block serenely interjects that he has “some thoughts.”

His goal is to “get people together in groups of six to ask questions you can’t wiggle out of,” he explains. “When you get people in a group something in the world changes. When you get people in groups of six something larger changes. The only reason problems exist in the world is because we wouldn’t get together. The reason for problems is it changes how we get together.”

The group sits rapt and silent. Some take notes.

“I’m in [this work] for the politics,” Block continues. “I’m in it for the relatedness. I don’t believe in positive thinking. I’m not a positive person. You think e-mail has made relating to my children any easier? Get outta here.”

He is blunt and funny; a curmudgeonly stand-up comic who deftly articulates the private thoughts of the shy skeptic. As he rambles, McAfee makes her way to an electric keyboard the way black musicians do in Baptist churches when the preacher hits a groove and the sermon begins its ascent toward the explosive pageantry of Showtime at the Apollo. On cue, she vamps a musical flourish to one of Block’s punch lines. When he segues into how they met, she begins playing with gusto. “She understands the work better than I do,” he says.8

McAfee sings plaintively: “Come to the circle, with a quiet mind, with a watchful heart, leave your mask behind. Wake in the circle from your troubled sleep, from the doubts that keep you lonely.” When she finishes, people wave their hands in the air—International Sign Language for “applause.”

Following the impromptu sing-along, the participants split into four groups of four. As they shift their chairs, I again point out to Block the lack of color in the room.

“I don’t know how to reach them,” he says plainly, meaning blacks. “I don’t know that community. But don’t dismiss the ones that are here.9 The whole idea is to engage the disengaged, so maybe they’re not as disengaged as we are.” The implication is that blacks may be absent because they’re less likely to need to be present. “My glib answer has always been we’re the problem because this is work about ourselves,” he says.

The conversations sparked during the small groups, which talk for about 20 minutes, eventually bleed into the larger group as they come back together. One woman wonders aloud about the circumstances seconds before the August 2006 crash of Comair flight 5191 in Lexington. She speculates there might have been a different outcome had the two pilots “engaged” one another before manning the cockpit.

“They’ve found out that the two pilots were talking to one another about their families before they took off instead of paying attention,” she says, “and I thought what if these two men who hadn’t flown together could’ve talked about their lives...”

“...before they got into the cockpit,” Block interjects. “Hmm. Interesting.”

These people have the universal desire—no, need—to make sense of the world. It’s the profound and simple reason why they’re here. But will a group sing-along help? I’m about to find out.

McAfee rises and launches into a rousing song called “Brain Rats.”

Brain rats!
I’ve got brain rats!
A pestilential blight upon my mind.

As she teaches the chorus to the circle, I notice two things. 1) The melody sounds like the theme from the old Flintstones cartoon (“FLINT-stones! Meet the FLINT-stones! They’re a modern Stone Age FAM-ily!”) 2) This makes Block very happy. When the group sings “Brain Rats” together, he sings loudest and with a proud smile.

I’m on my way out the door when I pause to talk with Joan and Michael Hoxsey. She tells me that they are consultants in a process called “A.I.,” or Appreciative Inquiry.10 They are fans of Block’s work, and during the 2006 school year were enlisted through his now-defunct Youth Possibilities program to do A.I. work at Seven Hills Neighborhood House in the West End where they helped a dozen teenage boys film a video titled “The Last Shot,” which tied thematically to the issues of relationship skills, communication, and sexuality. In the video, Hoxsey tells me, “One boy falls in love with a girl more interested in bling11 than anything else. He eventually loses his life trying to hustle to support her.”

Hoxsey says that in making the video the boys had revelations about teamwork and commitment. She and her husband discovered some things, too. “Being with these guys has been incredible,” she says. “The image we have of them is of these beautiful young men with great possibilities.”

After she walks away, her husband, Michael, unexpectedly hugs me—a little too tightly, I think. “You feel good,” he murmurs in my ear. “Isn’t that all we have to give one another?” Caught in a rare state of speechlessness, I pull myself away from him. What’s he talking about?

“Yes,” I say, looking him in the eye. “That’s all.”

PETER BLOCK'S Mt. Adams apartment, tucked into a cul-de-sac, is the home of a man who needs a respite, to be away. Though he spends a goodly amount of time at the Clifton home of his partner Cathy Kramer, he relishes this redoubt, where tasteful art abounds on the melon-colored walls. Among the pieces: two light boxes by outsider artist Amos Russell, a pair of sumptuous oils of a black mother and child, and a scattering of black-and-white photographs. Every seat is comfortable in the downstairs room where he reads and watches his favorite movies (Red River Valley and An Officer and a Gentleman) on his favorite network (Turner Classic Movies). He needs a new washer in the faucet of the guest bathroom and water pressure is weak in the toilet. “Hold the handle down on that toilet for, like, 30 minutes!” he shouts as I close the door. I note the bathroom reading—a book by Maria Montessori—as I wash my hands with his citrus blossom soap.

I’ve scheduled my personal time with Block through his assistant, Maggie Rogers, who lives in Mystic, Connecticut—Block’s actual headquarters. I’m seven minutes early. Block is wrapping up a meeting with Mag Casarez. He introduces us the way he customarily introduces strangers—with an invitation. “Do you know one another?” he asks. “You should.”

Born on the south side of Chicago, Block came from everyday people and beginnings so humble they brushed against hardscrabble. In 1962, he bounced a $30 check to the minister who presided over his wedding. When his uncle gave his older sister, Millicent, $100 as a wedding gift, Block checked his mailbox every day when he got married looking for his. It never came.

His father, Ira, was a desk clerk at a “second-rate” Chicago hotel who died at 52 when Peter was 13. “I think he kind of gave up,” Block says. “He died of exhaustion.” The boy was close to his father, a gentle man who bathed him, sang him to sleep, and as Block remembers, would “sit in a corner reading a book at parties.”

Ira’s death, he says, “was a huge loss [to the] feminine energy in the family. I struggled after that to go on. I retreated a great deal.”

His mother, Dorothy, was a Linotype operator on the graveyard shift at the Kansas City Star, where she moved the family after her husband’s unexpected death. Block recalls her as an emotionally unavailable woman who showed her love by working. “There wasn’t much mothering going on,” he says. Even now, he grows solemn remembering the family’s threadbare finances. “I don’t know how they lived,” he says quietly. “Running from creditors is how they lived.” Millicent still lives in Kansas City; his younger brother Jim, a photographer, lives in San Francisco. Jim took the rock-balancing photos on the cover of Peter’s book The Answer To How Is Yes.

Block dutifully sent money home from college and, as an adult, looked after his mother as she aged. It took him a long while to “become friends” with her. She let herself go after Ira’s death. “She looked like a bag lady,” he says. “Later, she said it was because she didn’t want to have to be appealing to anybody.”

The grit and gruffness he learned to appreciate in her lives in him. According to Block, Dorothy hated “butter, waitresses, and most animals.” He, on the other hand, is a gregarious misanthrope thankful for therapy who doesn’t necessarily feel guilty for occasionally not returning his two daughters’ calls. He credits his feminist leanings to his father’s influence and the experience of nurturing his daughters, Jennifer and Heather, while his former wife (they’re divorced) got a degree in women’s studies. But it’s Dorothy’s attributes he ticks off like a mantra.

“She was strong. She kept us together. She brought up my brother in hard times. She had strength. The arrogance in me, I realize she gave it to me.”

WITH NO ROMANTIC notions about poverty, Block wanted to make a comfortable living. He got an undergraduate degree in industrial management from the University of Kansas in 1961. Then a professor suggested he get a master’s. “He said, ‘If you get into grad school, they’ll give you money,’” he says. Yale gave him the most. He finished a graduate degree in industrial administration in 1963.

Soon after, Exxon hired him to work in employee relations and moved him to New Jersey. The company sent him to Maine to the National Training Laboratories to learn to run sensitivity training groups, an experience that launched him into organizational development.

In 1969 he started the consulting firm with Tony Petrella, his former boss at Exxon. “We got in early and found our voice in this thing called team-building,” he says. Then the big contracts started coming, followed by the books and five-figure corporate speaking fees. By the time he put out Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest in 1993, Block was being blasted for his “organic” approach to management—ideas that he admits are not based on research data so much as intuitive feeling and anecdotal experience. “One guy called me and said, ‘This book is wrong! It’s evil! I’m forced to read it for a business class. I’d use it in the bathroom!’ I said, ‘Thanks for the feedback. Bye.’”

Block takes the harshness of his naysayers in the same stride he takes the accolades. The leaders of corporate America, he says, are frightened by the prospect of relinquishing their expert status to middle managers who often have better ideas. Ironically, when a corporation solicits his advice, he sometimes receives a larger fee when his presentation is shorter, as though the money is a down payment on an attempt at change.

The one person who best knows Block and doesn’t drink his Kool-Aid is his partner, Cathy Kramer, whom Block met when he gave a presentation to the Association for Quality and Participation; at the time, Kramer was executive director. Ready to “get back to the city life” after living in Connecticut, Block moved here to be nearer to her. He didn’t ask—“I just moved,” he says. “I called her and said, ‘I’ve gotta sign the lease today. If you don’t want me to come, say no.’ She said, ‘I’ve gotta pick the kids up.’ So I took that as a sign.”

Interestingly, Kramer doesn’t seem impressed by Block’s public persona. When we talk about the success of his books, he imitates her: “Cathy says, ‘Oh! Here comes the best-selling author!’” When I floated the notion of interviewing Kramer, she was caring for her mother, who was in the final stages of cancer. But I got the impression she would have been reluctant to discuss her relationship with Block regardless of her mother’s health. How do you explain the sarcastic playfulness you share with a highly visible, high-maintenance man; or the abiding love that made him move to be close to you; or the wherewithal required to keep a modern, mature relationship afloat between two smart people with grown-up pasts? Better to let it lie.

But Block clearly lives a balanced, honest life with Kramer and her children. He coaches the tennis club at Clark Montessori and favors community work in his adopted home over business consulting, despite the fact that the latter is how he makes the bread to butter his bread. Invoking another one of his cleverly counterintuitive Blockisms, Block says that the reason he likes community work is because it’s “unsolvable.” “Even though it’s impossible, people care,” he adds.

And the challenge of the “unsolvable” is what most certainly attracted Block to dive headlong into helping Cincinnatians help themselves, employing the nearly navel-gazing tactics of self improvement to make this a more livable city. “It’s a checkerboard city,” he says. “You can’t escape the disinvested neighborhoods.” Then he utters what I think is a complete contradiction of what he’s just said: “I still don’t see the great racial divide people talk about.” My take: Block has a fine view of the city from his Mt. Adams kitchen, but from up there he can only see so far.

ANYONE WHO HAS ever served on one knows that egotistical posturing, exhausting discussion, and imperious advice-rendering soak up time on a nonprofit board, and that a guy with Block’s skills might spend a lot of his energy trying to get his fellow board members to come together. But Block has been surprisingly stealthy as a board member of InkTank and Elementz, two particularly inspired, community-centric nonprofits fighting the good fight. Basically, he comes to meetings and writes checks, mostly bypassing the process-oriented “engagement” he makes a living imbuing in others. I’ve seen him deftly keep board conversations (which can teeter into the tangential and the surreal) on track. He’s good at it; it’s as though he’s thinking a few steps ahead of the rest.

When it comes to the city, Block’s also thinking about the bigger picture. Larry Flynt, Marge Schott, and Pete Rose—“icons of about the lowest self-esteem” in Block’s opinion—shouldn’t be regarded as heroes, he says. They don’t represent the best Cincinnati has to offer. Block wants us to do the work of connecting; connecting first to the gifts you carry yourself, then connecting to the gifts in others. This seems an effort of Sisyphean futility given our early 21st century, self-involved, tuned-out iPod culture. And maybe that’s why Block seems unreal: He walks the quietly whooshing path of possibilities as though on a moving sidewalk at an airport, and he does it vacillating between the community and the corporations.

Back when Elementz was as grainy in founder Gavin Leonard’s head as an early Run-DMC video, Leonard sought Block’s counsel as well as his money. And Block contributed both.

Block’s concept of “gifts” jibes nicely with Leonard’s idea for Elementz: take the everyday interests of black urban kids and turn them into an outlet of enrichment. Months before I talked to Leonard, Block told me Elementz “goes after the gifts.” By this, Block meant that Leonard and Elementz make use of the very things society castigates and even criminalizes black teens for. The West End center caters to 14- to 24-year-olds, giving them a place to record rap demos, practice the art of turntabling, and socialize. “When you go into that place,” Block said, “kids see a reflection of who they are, not some business environment.”

Leonard agrees. “I’ve sat down with big donors before and all they want to know is do you have a security system? Do you have metal detectors? How will you track progress?” he says. “Peter’s looking for good energy, he’s looking for good ideas.”

Last October Urban Opportunities Alliance organized a get-together between small West End and Over-the-Rhine nonprofits and potential donors—a chance to get the threadbare groups together with the Deep Pockets. Block was supposed to jump-start the give-and-take at the event and Leonard circulated fliers and media invites with Block’s name on them. But, inexplicably, on the day of the meeting, Block didn’t show.

Leonard remains unfazed and wholly satisfied with Block’s participation. “He’s a good citizen,” Leonard says. “He’s a good guy. Sadly but truly that’s becoming mesmerizing in itself. That’s become a fairly extraordinary trait.”

Maybe what’s more extraordinary, what’s profoundly more “mesmerizing” than any affect of seduction, any right or wrong distillation of New Age Pimpdom, any designation of best-selling author or guru status, is that Peter Block cares at all to invite us into the circle.

Originally published in the January 2008 issue.

http://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/article.aspx?id=34636

May as well flush the union Curt. It's all about creating your own reality. Fuck, this crap permeates the air and creates a movement killing stench. Maybe the corporations are now paying him to create little pods to snatch other bodies. Whatever the case, he did get one thing right when he referred to himself as an asshole.

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At the front end of these various human potential schemes it is all happiness and light, vague and ethereal, but follow it down to the final results and we have real people smashed up and destroyed and it is all about money. All of it is "prosperity Gospel" one way or the other, since the spiritual enlightenment or personal improvement is always for the purpose of getting rich.

Amway is not really a soap business, it is a self-improvement business, and people get rich by selling self-improvement materials to others seeking self-improvement (hoping to get rich.) The Amway founders always connected spiritual improvement (Dutch Calvinist style) with material prosperity.

This is all the religion of Capitalism. The doctrine says that everyone wants to get rich, and that there are winners and losers. Winners get rich, losers are poor. You get rich most efficiently by selling others on the hope that they will get rich, by selling others on the hope that they too will get rich. How often have I heard this - "if you take away the wealth from a wealthy person, they will soon be rich again. If you give a poor person a million dollars they will soon be poor again." Sure enough, in the reviews of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill at Amazon, someone trots that out. So success in Capitalism is the result of some sort of elusive internal personal qualtities. Those qualities are only elusive because people are lying about them - calling a desire to dominate others "enlightenment" or "moral righteousness" and calling greed "a mission" or "service."

Rich Devos did not want to walk closer with Jesus, did not want to help others, he wanted to be a big shot, be a billionaire. Werner Erhard did not want to enlighten people, he wanted to be rich and powerful. They came up with clever ways to fleece people, and they merged the tent revival preacher with the snake oil salesman, because the snake oil they are selling is the come to Jesus experience itself, or rather the enlightenment expereince ois actually about selling snake oil.

If people did not need to lie about Capitalism, none of this stuff would exist.

Yes. Very interesting. "Many movement type people go to these things..."

That explains a lot, including why people here lost their minds when talking to us, why people insist that material conditions are irrelevant, why self-improvement is offered as a necessary prerequisite to political and social change, a replacement for political action. People are rejecting left wing politics because it clashes with the mystical self-improvement doctrines, contradicts them.

This is all the religion of Capitalism. The doctrine says that everyone wants to get rich, and that there are winners and losers. Winners get rich, losers are poor. You get rich most efficiently by selling others on the hope that they will get rich, by selling others on the hope that they too will get rich. How often have I heard this - "if you take away the wealth from a wealthy person, they will soon be rich again. If you give a poor person a million dollars they will soon be poor again." Sure enough, in the reviews of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill at Amazon, someone trots that out. So success in Capitalism is the result of some sort of elusive internal personal qualtities. Those qualities are only elusive because people are lying about them - calling a desire to dominate others "enlightenment" or "moral righteousness" and calling greed "a mission" or "service."

What gets me is that these gasbags have managed to brainwash large groups of people that they are being "practical" by believing these things. I mean, believing that wealthy people have magic traits that attract wealth is the ultimate fairy tale. It's magical thinking. But when you try to call people on it, they say you're being "unrealistic". I just want to punch myself in the face.

"Possibility is a declaration of what we stand for each time we show up. It’s a value or condition we want to occur in the world. When a possibility is declared in the presence of your peers, it gains power."

Speak truth to power, be the change you want to see - activism as self-expression.

Napoleon Hill: "What the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve."

Werner Erhard says that the material conditions around you are merely a reflection what your intentions have been, and to change conditions you need to declare new intentions.

That is what our liberal opponents have been doing - conceiving and believing and declaring. If you question that, you are attacking the great being - the "source," the universe, God, the truth - and since we are all our own Gods you are therefore personally attacking them as far as they are concerned. "I believe in great things and I am declaring them as a personal statement, and you are disagreeing! How could you suggest that I am bad and wrong?? What is wrong with you??"

Capitalism is magical thinking, and it does dominate everything, and survival does depend upon believing and those who don't are punished, so it is "realistic" to believe in the magical thinking. The magical thinking is "the way things are" because and only because people cannot imagine anything other than Capitalism, and more importantly they hope to prosper themselves, to be winners, or at least to survive, to be spared the fate of the "losers" by not offending or interfering with the winners. If you criticize the god of Capitalism, or the doctrine and beliefs, that god might withold favors and blessings.

If we don't challenge the magical thinking about Capitalism, magical thinking dominates everything.

I wonder what he was "advising" FDR about.

Wiki lists him under "New Thought". I've heard of some of these people but didn't know there was an umbrella term for them.





New Thought


The New Thought Movement or New Thought is a spiritual movement which developed in the United States during the late 19th century and emphasizes metaphysical beliefs. It consists of a loosely allied group of religious denominations, secular membership organizations, authors, philosophers, and individuals who share a set of metaphysical beliefs concerning the effects of positive thinking, the law of attraction, healing, life force, creative visualization and personal power.[1] It promotes the ideas that "Infinite Intelligence" or "God" is ubiquitous, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, all sickness originates in the mind, and 'right thinking' has a healing effect.

Although New Thought is neither monolithic nor doctrinaire, in general modern day adherents of New Thought believe that their interpretation of "God" or "Infinite Intelligence" is "supreme, universal, and everlasting", that divinity dwells within each person and that all people are spiritual beings, and that "the highest spiritual principle [is] loving one another unconditionally . . . and teaching and healing one another", and that "our mental states are carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living".[2]

The three major, but distinct, religious denominations within the American New Thought movement are Unity Church, Religious Science and the Church of Divine Science.]

...


A movement of the printed word

New Thought was also largely a movement of the printed word.[10] The 1890s and the first decades of the 20th century saw an explosion of what would become known as self-help books, including the financial success and will-training books of Napoleon Hill, Wallace Wattles, Perry Joseph Green‎, Frank Channing Haddock, and Thomas Troward.

In 1906, William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932) wrote and published Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World. [11] Atkinson was the editor of New Thought magazine and the author of more than 100 books on an assortment of religious, spiritual, and occult topics.

The following year, Elizabeth Towne, the editor of The Nautilus Magazine, a Journal of New Thought, published Bruce MacLelland's book Prosperity Through Thought Force, in which he summarized the "Law of Attraction" as a New Thought principle, stating "You are what you think, not what you think you are." [12]

These magazines were used to reach a large audience. Nautilus magazine, for example, had 45,000 subscribers and a total circulation of 150,000.[10] One Unity Church magazine, Wee Wisdom, was the longest-lived children's magazine in the United States, published from 1893 until 1991.[13]



Now that's interesting because Hill's book usually gets shelved in the Business sections of bookstores. You can see at the Amazon link it's in the sub-class "Motivational" instead of the New Age section where it really belongs. I want to know more about Hill.

At parties and once was seated next to him at the local Homeless Coalition's annual dinner. He was the featured speaker. I've never understood a single word that he said. The article you posted gets it right about the Small Groups. There's some really creepy smugness about him.

The article mentions Gavin Leonard who's a really good guy. He regularly hosts gatherings of Leftists from Reds to Greens that are focused on class. Didn't know he was involved with Block. Looks like Block gave him serious money for Elementz which is a hip-hop youth center in downtown Cincinnati, that has a political education component. At least he did something good.

Mike, below, referred to my comment about movement types being involved with him. The picture on the Small Groups website shows several of the leading movement types here sitting in that circle, including a wonderful woman who is head of the largest local Peace & Justice organization here. A good friend of mine who was a member of Workers World back in the day,(was doing work at Attica when the infamous uprising started, and was among the first people the inmates demanded be let in) now goes to these SG things, and is always talking about how she and I need to learn to communicate better. Drives me nuts. I've quit working with the P & J folks, because every strategy is based in developing a dialogue.

So, I don't know anything about the Democratic Party here, but this Block shit has certainly poisoned the activist climate in Cincinnati.

It's like one of those bugs that lays its eggs in another insect and they eat it from the inside when they hatch.

"but this Block shit has certainly poisoned the activist climate in Cincinnati." Mission accomplished! And the folks being poisoned don't even realize it...how elegant is that? This is another way that capitalism seeps into and permeates everything, everywhere.

"A fortune could be made off of these silly, leisure-class yearnings for some kind of sub-buddhic justification? Cool! Maybe we can unload these aluminum pyramid frames while we are at it?"

I am seeing it first hand trying to re-launch my music career and talking to all kinds of people in the business. Everyone has New Age success advice, while I see all of the hustling and self-promotion as a necessary evil at best that I would just as soon avoid. I swear that as recently as the 60's playing well was the main criteria, not promoting yourself well.

Heard of this one?

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/i-am-annoyed-and-disappointed/Content?oid=1370662


I am Annoyed and Disappointed


Café Gratitude espouses a raw food diet and a philosophy of self-transformation. But some current and former employees say it's left a bad taste in their mouths.
By Sam Levin

Even to a casual observer, Café Gratitude is clearly not your typical restaurant. In addition to its raw-food menu and communal tables, the Bay Area chain has its servers ask patrons a question of the day and deliver affirmatively named dishes such as "I am thankful" on bowls that ask, "What are you grateful for?" Yet for some of Café Gratitude's employees, the answer to that question isn't their management's policies.

What outsiders may not know is that the culture at Café Gratitude is closely interwoven with a self-help philosophy of personal transformation called the Landmark Forum. Café Gratitude's founders say the classes and seminars, which employees are highly encouraged to take, empower people, create a better work environment, and help change lives. Yet some employees say the curriculum fosters an uncomfortable environment in which their personal beliefs are compromised. One former employee says she was fired for refusing to attend a Landmark seminar, and it's unclear whether the company's practice of requiring managers to attend and pay for half of the $500 seminar is legal.

"It is definitely a challenge for those people to stay comfortable saying no," admitted Paddy Smith, general manager of the Berkeley Café Gratitude. Although Smith says she was initially "offended" by the invitation to attend one of the seminars, she eventually signed up and found it to be a "life-changing" experience. "I learned how to be empowered and creative, get the results I want," she said. At Café Gratitude, she added, Landmark's teachings manifest themselves in the form of better communication, honesty, openness, and a no-gossip policy, and are so ingrained into company culture that she has a hard time differentiating between the two. In fact, Café Gratitude wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Landmark.

Landmark Education grew out of Erhard Seminar Training, which was founded in San Francisco by Werner Erhard. EST, as it was known, was popular in the 1970s and 1980s and centered around the philosophy that people can achieve rapid individual transformation through sixty hours of intensive seminars that taught participants how to take responsibility for their lives.

Yet EST was often criticized for its aggressive efforts to recruit participants, and it dissolved in 1984. Seven years later, a group of individuals bought the "body of intellectual ideas" from Erhard and formed Landmark Education, which today shares a lot of those philosophies. "Landmark Education is the best place to find some of those ideas today — in a different form," said Landmark spokeswoman Deborah Beroset. She says EST's fundamental belief that individuals can achieve rapid transformation through empowerment remains at the core of Landmark's work.

Based in San Francisco, Landmark Education is a training and development company that currently has more than one hundred locations in twenty different countries. Like EST, its programs and seminars aim to empower participants with tools to help them take charge of their lives.

It was at one of these seminars in September 2000 that Matthew Engelhart and Terces Lane met. In 2004, they decided to start Café Gratitude as a way to support not only their love of raw food but also their appreciation of Landmark's philosophies. The restaurant's use of raw, organic ingredients — all vegan and gluten-free — have earned it a devout following and allowed it to expand to five locations in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Rafael.

Yet it's the philosophy, not the food, that appears to drive the company. Managers and the owners often describe Café Gratitude as "a school of transformation disguised as a cafe." The Engelharts created a board game for self-reflection, called "Abounding River," and the cafe is meant to be a place for people to play the game. Managers lead daily "clearings," during which employees answer a series of questions before "re-creating" each other in a process aimed at freeing the workers to be present and alive in the moment for the job. Hugging among staff is frequent.

All employees are encouraged to take Landmark's introductory course, the weekend-intensive "Landmark Forum." Matthew Engelhart estimates that about 75 percent of his staff has completed the seminar. All managers are required to attend.

Some employees, like those in the Oakland location, where 100 percent of the workers have graduated from Landmark, say these teachings create a close-knit, healthy work community. Many workers say it has changed their lives for the better. However, other employees say Landmark's philosophies have made them uncomfortable. And in some instances, refusal to engage in those practices has resulted in termination and demotion.

Ash Ritter had never heard of Landmark until her interview at Café Gratitude's now-closed location in San Francisco's Sunset district. According to Ritter, the manager asked her if she was "up for transformation" and "open to considering Landmark Forum." Ritter, who describes herself as open-minded, said she was.

At first, the daily process of "clearing" seemed interesting to Ritter. She was asked cryptic questions such as "Where are you being that it's better over there?" She was also taught about Café Gratitude's business model, called "Sacred Commerce," which integrates spirituality into the goals of profit-making.

Managers often talked about Landmark, she added. They weren't necessarily pressuring anyone to attend, Ritter said, but it was mentioned at every staff meeting, and they would invite employees to the next seminar. Employees would often go through the class together and then discuss it and invite others to try it. Ritter said she became skeptical about the seminar and didn't want to pay the $250 fee to attend.

But when Ritter was promoted to management, she received a contract that recommended she attend Landmark Forum. Because it was "recommended," Ritter didn't think it was mandatory. In fact, part of the reason she said she wanted to become a manager was to be a voice for some of the employees who, like her, were not entirely enthusiastic about Landmark.

After being promoted, Ritter says her first manager's meeting involved managers sharing their experiences at Landmark — often emotionally explaining the ways in which it changed their lives. "It was the theme," she said. "'Landmark saved my life.'"

According to Ritter, the leaders of the meeting then asked every manager to enroll ten people to come to an introduction to Landmark. They didn't say it was a required part of the job, but Ritter felt pressured to attend because they asked all managers to e-mail the district manager every time they spoke to an employee who had not attended Landmark about giving it a try. She said they encouraged managers to keep track of the people they talked to, even if they declined the invitation.

Ritter told her higher-ups that she didn't want to attend Landmark. According to her, they responded by saying, "We are not going to force you, but what is your resistance to Landmark? ... What do you have to lose? Lean into that discomfort and see where you can grow."

Finally, Ritter said, a manager told her that Landmark was required for full-time managers. Ritter said she wouldn't pay the $250 and that she wasn't sure it was even legal that they make her pay. Her district manager responded that she would pay Ritter's way. But Ritter still declined. "I said, 'That is not what I am interested in. Sorry, but it is just not in my spiritual belief system to participate in Landmark.'"

Shortly after that, Ritter was approached again by management with an ultimatum: "You have ten days to decide whether you will do Landmark. Otherwise, you will have to step down from management."

Three days later, Ritter stepped down to a server position but began speaking up in clearings, pointing out hypocrisies in the Landmark philosophies and the company's rules. According to Ritter, they preached "abundance," but servers were forced to work long, tiring shifts. She criticized her manager's lack of transparency during an hour-long clearing. Four days later, she said she was fired for "insubordination" and told that "your personal philosophy isn't working for us here." They also told her that her clearings were taking too long and costing the company money. "I was so surprised they would be willing to say all of that," Ritter recalled. "These are my spiritual beliefs."

According to Café Gratitude District Manager Chandra Gilbert, Ritter was fired for a number of reasons — her refusal to do Landmark being only one of many. Gilbert said Ritter had a "long-standing resistance to the culture" and was too often challenging authority. Encouraging employees to attend Landmark, she said, comes from a genuine desire to share something that has been so profound for the people who experienced it. Gilbert said that their weekly meetings do often involve discussing Landmark, simply because the meetings are opportunities to share recent experiences — including, but not limited to, experiences at Landmark. Gilbert also contested Ritter's assertion that management keeps track of who attends seminars and who doesn't. "There is no monitoring of registration," she said.

Several of Ritter's co-workers said the situation was unjust. "It didn't seem like she really did anything else. It was just a slippery slope once she got demoted," said server Heidi Fridriksson. Another server, Rory Austin, said, "I think it was because she continued to challenge the system that Café Gratitude had and was very outspoken."

And Ritter isn't alone in her discomfort with Landmark. One former employee who worked in Berkeley, and requested anonymity, said that she was not into the forced openness and sharing of the Landmark-influenced clearings. "Just as a personal thing for me, it felt very probing," she said. "I sort of felt like it was therapy from people who weren't really qualified to be therapists."

Another current employee, who wished to keep her name and store location anonymous in order to protect her job, said that she has never wanted to do Landmark and sometimes feels judged for not doing it. She was interested in a manager position but cannot receive a promotion because she doesn't want to attend the Landmark Forum. "Once you do get up to the management position, you really have to fulfill all the Café Gratitude philosophies, and Landmark becomes way, way more important," she said.

Carina Lomeli, who worked for a year in the Sunset location, said she quit because she found the work environment superficial and in violation of her religious beliefs. Lomeli said that she felt judged for not doing the Landmark Forum because, according to her, she was forced to note in a staff book when she had missed the Forum and why she had not participated.

She also felt pressured to take part in a staff event called the "Big Breathout," during which employees from all locations got together in a San Francisco warehouse for hours of holotropic breathing. Employees say the event involves intense breathing until psychedelic states are reached, with the intention of cleansing and rebirth.

Lomeli said there were rumors that employees would be fired if they did not attend. Fridriksson said she was approached by three different managers after she decided not to participate. Lomeli said the pressure made her so uncomfortable that she decided to quit. But Gilbert said it was not required: "It was a gift."

San Francisco labor rights attorney Kelly Armstrong said in an interview that the legality of some management actions appeared questionable. An employee's religious freedom is protected by the Fair Employment and Housing Act and, according to Armstrong, if an employee says Landmark conflicts with their personal religious beliefs and management responds by demoting, laying off, or denying promotion, the employee has grounds to retaliate. Armstrong also questioned the legality of requiring employees to pay for the Landmark seminar. She pointed to a recent case in which Ralph Lauren was forced to pay back employees who were required to buy its products out of their own pockets to wear while at work.

Yet for all those who criticize Landmark, many staff members profess deep gratitude for it and its influence on the company. Oakland manager Erika Winn, who has completed Landmark's advanced course, said that Landmark has truly freed her. "If you do take an objective view of where you are, you can go anywhere," she said. "You have the freedom to create."

All managers interviewed agreed that they want all employees to attend Landmark. At the same time, most said they didn't want to uncomfortably apply pressure, though they admitted the internal peer pressure can sometimes be a source of tension in the workplace.

Ryland Engelhart, a manager at the San Rafael location and son of the founder, said that he tries to strike a balance when inviting his employees, despite his strong desire to share his experience. Engelhart said that although the "sales pitch" aspect of encouraging Landmark can be really cumbersome for some, "I see the value of what people are getting as a much stronger force than the discomfort of someone being pushy."

In fact, founder Matthew Engelhart calls himself "the champion resistant to Landmark." Though his son Ryland took the seminar and kept encouraging his father to attend, it took eighteen years before Matthew finally did. "I understood that it was valuable, and I just resisted. Egos resist change," said the elder Engelhart. But after attending the seminar, Matthew said, "It completely blew my mind."

Co-owner Terces Engelhart said that the Landmark teachings have been extremely helpful in developing a managerial style for the company because they emphasize integrity in every aspect of the work environment. The philosophies of Landmark, she said, help people rid themselves of personal wounds and frustrations so that they can be truly open, honest, and present at work.

Unless, however, you're not open to that.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/i-am-annoyed-and-disappointed/Content?oid=1370662&storyPage=2

That almost seems like a perfect caricature of these jerks doesn't it? The one is Oakland is in a Whole Foods. I never went there to shop so I never saw them. There's a few in the City, I see.


Sacred Commerce? rofl

Talk about Prosperity Gospel! Geez, can we just flea-bomb this country??



Description: In this timely book, authors Matthew and Terces Engelhart present the idea that love before appearances is the antidote to our spiritual, environmental, and social degradation. Exploring topics such as mission statements, manager as coach, human resources as a sacred culture, and inspirational meetings, they offer a manual for building a spiritual community at the workplace—a vital concept in an age when work consumes the bulk of most adults’ time. Business, the authors explain, is all about providing a service, product, or experience the market wants, and no business can succeed by failing to understand this point. However, integrating the concept of “Sacred Commerce” into business can provide both financial success and spiritual satisfaction. Stressing that every business is an opportunity to make a lasting impact on the lives of both clients and employees, the Engelharts share the tools they’ve learned in their own enterprises to fulfill this vision. Sacred Commerce is the ideal mix of the personal and the practical—a guidebook written by people who have felt success, not just spent it. Dissatisfaction with work is at record levels, and the Engelharts show that you don’t have to suffer personally—or give up your humanity—to pay the mortgage.

Author Biography: Matthew and Terces Engelhart are the owners of Café Gratitude, a popular organic vegan restaurant chain in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Terces is also the author of I Am Grateful, a recipe and lifestyle book based on their restaurant. They live in San Francisco.

Reviews/Endorsements: “We are avid fans of anyone who can truly make a difference in these challenging times. Café Gratitude is a model for a successful business, and Matthew and Terces have proven they understand the importance of bringing respect, reverence, and love into the workplace. We’re thrilled they have chosen to graciously share their wisdom and experience with this book. There’s hope for us all.” —Woody Harrelson and Laura Louie, environmental activists and cofounders of Voice Yourself

“The Engelharts have an intriguing and preposterous notion: Companies can now serve as centers of self-realization and CEOs can nurture a business community’s spiritual transformation as well as a healthy bottom line. This is cutting-edge stuff and I’m cheering them on.” —Chip Conley, Founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality

“Café Gratitude is in the humankind business. The Engleharts’ commitment to a sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling business presence is hopeful in an era of cynicism and indifference. I have benefited from and am inspired by their valiant stand for making love the bottom line.” —Michel Franti, musician and filmmaker




I'd love to see the reaction if the workers dared to organize there. The normal reaction is to brand the workers as ungrateful. These shits would probably downgrade them to genetically inferior.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIj52Xbd4fY&feature=related

He really found a nice sales angle, didn't he? I could see how he'd attract some folks if they didn't know the background on this stuff. But it's just such a dead end. When "reality" refuses to be created by this braindead process, people just go nuts. They sink so much money into these workshops and classes on communication thinking the next one is going to fix the problem. They think something that cost a lot of money must actually have value or the workshop wouldn't charge that much. The people who wake up and realize they've been had are always deeply shocked at just how far they allowed themselves to be conned.

If you question that, you are attacking the great being - the "source," the universe, God, the truth - and since we are all our own Gods you are therefore personally attacking them as far as they are concerned.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_jvugNnBkwBw/SXiL7_6K4sI/AAAAAAAAFrM/JrL87yI0_24/s320/AngryGod.jpeg


And they think they are so necessary. When you tell them they are not, they get totally outraged. When you ask them to listen, they tell you have to ask the right way. God won't listen to your prayers unless you send up a benediction and a sacrifice.