“You and I want our lives to matter. We want our lives to make a real difference – to be of genuine consequence in the world. We know that there is no satisfaction in merely going through the motions, even if those motions make us successful or even if we have arranged to make those motions pleasant. We want to know we have had some impact on the world. In fact, you and I want to contribute to the quality of life. We want to make the world work.”

-Werner Erhard, The Hunger Project Source Document

A Shot Heard Round The World: A World That Works For Everyone

“While no one wants to be the first to say it, who each of us is and the fundamental choices each of us makes in life seem to matter very little.

Even acts of great courage and intelligence, while admirable and even inspiring, exist in sharp contrast to the apparent unworkability of the world at large.  Our greatest technical achievement, walking on the moon, while galvanizing the world for a moment, did not fundamentally alter people’s experience of their ability to make a difference in their lives and in the world.

Sometime around now – it may have happened five years ago or 50 years ago – but sometime around now, the rules for living successfully on earth shifted, and an opportunity, unseen before, began to reveal itself.

This opportunity is a context – a particular space or paradigm, a way of being – which unexpectedly creates the possibility for a person’s life to truly make a difference.

In this context, the way each of us answers the question, ‘What is my life really going to be about?’ can literally alter the course of humanity.

The possibility to create the context in which people’s lives really matter is undoubtedly the most profound opportunity available to anyone, ever.”

- Werner Erhard – From “A Shot Heard Round The World: A World That Works For Everyone” – 1980

A World That Works For Everyone

“For many people, life seems to be a kind of brief candle hardly worth living. But for those who are bold, who are venturesome, who have the humility to deal with what is possible rather than what is predictable, life is an exciting and challenging adventure. Life is no brief candle to me. In a world that can work for everyone, especially in which I can make a difference—that is a life worth living!  That is living!  That is being alive!”

-Werner Erhard

The Handbook For Teaching Leadership

Knowing, Doing, and Being

Teaching Leadership: Approaches That Emphasize Being

“How does one teach leadership in a way that not only informs [students] about leadership but also transforms them into actually being leaders? In this section, several authors share courageous and often unconventional approaches to teaching that target the very essence of who we are, the BE component of leadership education.

“Erhard, Jensen and Granger anchor this collection by taking dead aim at the BE component.  In a highly provocative chapter titled “Creating Leaders”, this eclectic group of scholars argues for adopting a decidedly ontological approach to leadership education that promises to leave students actually being leaders. Contrasting their ontological approach−described as being and action as experienced ‘on the court’−with more traditional perspectives where leadership is observed and commented on ‘from the stands,’ this chapter presents a rigorous theory of leadership education that begins and ends with the following bold promises to students:

• You will leave this course being who you need to be to be a leader.
• You will leave this course with what it takes to exercise leadership effectively.

“For these authors, integrity, authenticity, and being committed to something bigger than oneself form the base of ‘the context for leadership,’ a context that once mastered, leaves one actually being a leader. It is not enough to know about or simply understand these foundational factors, but rather by following a rigorous, phenomenologically based methodology, students have the opportunity to create for themselves a context that leaves them actually being a leader and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self-expression.” -  editors comments from The Handbook for Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing, and Being, Edited by Snook, Scott A., Nohria, Nitin N., and Khurana, Rakesh, Sage Publications, Inc., 2011.

Werner Erhard

“The truth is not found in a different set of circumstances. The truth is always and only found in the circumstances you’ve got.

– Werner Erhard

One Creates From Nothing

One creates from nothing. If you try to create from something you are just changing something. So in order to create something you first have to be able to create nothing.

-Werner Erhard

Integrity: Where Leadership Begins – A New Model of Integrity

“We present a positive model of integrity that provides powerful access to increased performance for individuals, groups, organizations, and societies. Our model reveals the causal link between integrity as we distinguish and define it, and increased performance and value-creation for all entities. And our model provides access to that causal link.

The philosophical discourse, and common usage as reflected in dictionary definitions, leave an overlap and confusion among the four phenomena of integrity, morality, ethics, and legality. This confounds the terms so that the efficacy and potential power of each of them is seriously diminished.

In this new model, we distinguish all four phenomena (integrity, morality, ethics, and legality) as existing within two separate realms, and within those realms as belonging to distinct and separate domains. Integrity exists in a positive realm devoid of normative content. Morality, ethics and legality exist in a normative realm of virtues, but in separate and distinct domains. This new model: 1) encompasses all four terms in one consistent theory, 2) makes the “moral compass” potentially available in each of the three virtue phenomena clear and unambiguous, and 3) does this in a way that raises the likelihood of those now clear moral compasses actually shaping human behavior.

This all falls out primarily from the unique treatment of integrity in our model as a purely positive phenomenon, independent of normative value judgments. Integrity is thus not about good or bad, or right or wrong, or what should or should not be.

We distinguish integrity as a phenomenon of the objective state or condition of an object, system, person, group, or organizational entity, and define integrity as: a state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, perfect condition.

We assert that integrity (the condition of being whole and complete) is a necessary condition for workability, and that the resultant level of workability determines the available opportunity for performance. Hence, the way we treat integrity in our model provides an unambiguous and actionable access to superior performance (however one wishes to define performance).

For an individual we distinguish integrity as a matter of that person’s word being whole and complete, and for a group or organizational entity as what is said by or on behalf of the group or organization being whole and complete. In that context, we define integrity for an individual, group, or organization as: Honoring one’s word.

Oversimplifying somewhat, honoring your word as we define it means you either keep your word (do what you said you would do and by the time you said you would do it), or as soon as you know that you will not, you say that you will not to those who were counting on your word and clean up any mess caused by not keeping your word.

Honoring your word is also the route to creating whole and complete social and working relationships. In addition, it provides an actionable pathway to earning the trust of others.

We demonstrate that the application of cost-benefit analysis to one’s integrity guarantees you will not be a trustworthy person (thereby reducing the workability of relationships), and with the exception of some minor qualifications ensures also that you will not be a person of integrity (thereby reducing the workability of your life). Therefore your performance will suffer. The virtually automatic application of cost-benefit analysis to honoring one’s word (an inherent tendency in most of us) lies at the heart of much out-of-integrity and untrustworthy behavior in modern life.

In conclusion, we show that defining integrity as honoring one’s word provides 1) an unambiguous and actionable access to superior performance and competitive advantage at both the individual and organizational level, and 2) empowers the three virtue phenomena.”  – abstract for Integrity: Where Leadership Begins – A New Model of Integrity

-Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, & Steve Zaffron

Results

In life you wind up with one of two things – the results or the reason why you don’t have the results. Results don’t have to be explained.  They just are.

- Werner Erhard

Life is a Game

Life is a game. In order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else. If what already is, is more important than what isn’t, the game is over. So, life is a game in which what isn’t, is more important than what is.

-Werner Erhard

Leadership

“Instead of looking for a great leader, we are in an era where each of us needs to find the great leader within ourselves.”

- Werner Erhard

Context

“Context is the freedom to be…It has no form, no place in time; it allows form and time.”

-Werner Erhard

Being

“I want you to shift your perspective from living your life to being an actor playing the lead role in a play called your life.”

- Werner Erhard

Making A Difference

“What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people’s lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings.”

- Werner Erhard

Werner Erhard on Power

“Your power is a function of velocity, that is to say, your power is a function of the rate at which you translate intention into reality.  Most of us disempower ourselves by finding a way to slow, impede, or make more complex than necessary the process of translating intention into reality.

There are two factors worth examining in our impairing velocity, in our disempowering ourselves.

The first is the domain of reasonableness. When we deal with our intentions or act to realize our intentions from reasonableness, we are in the realm of slow, impede and complicate. When we are oriented around the story or the narrative, the explanations, the justifications, we are oriented around that in which there is no velocity, no power.

Results are black and white. In life, one either has results (one’s intentions realized) or one has the reason, story, explanations, and justifications. The person of power does not deal in explanations. This way of being might be termed management by results (not management for results but management by results). The person of power manages him or herself by results and creates a space or mood of results in which to interact with others.”    [more at the Friends of Werner Erhard Website]

- Werner Erhard

Happiness

“One of the things I am really sure about is nothing will make you happy. Very few things I am really sure about. That is one of things I am really sure about. Nothing will make you happy. It may give you give you a jolt. It may make you gleeful but it isn’t going to make you happy. What does that mean nothing will make you happy.

It means what it says: there is no thing that’s going to make a person happy. Most people think gee when I graduate then life will be great. No. You graduate that’s wonderful but life still ain’t great. When I get married then life will be great. Not true. Well when I get divorced then it will be ok.  Or when I get promoted, whatever it is, when I get a new car. When I get a chance to go on this new vacation… All of you have to do is to watch people on vacation and you can see very clearly vacations do not make people happy. No, no, no.

Most people live their lives working towards something, working for something, that they think is going to make them happy. And it’s really the Peggy Lee song “Is that all there is?”. No matter what it is you get that you think is going to make you happy I can promise you that in a very short time after you get it you’re gonna be well “Is that all there is? Is that all there is to that? You mean it’s not filling my life with joy?” Yes, that’s right it, it isn’t.

You have to bring happiness to life. You don’t get happiness out of life. What is there to be happy about? Nothing. When you can be happy about nothing. Just be happy. You know “I am happy” – those words are sacred. It’s like a declaration, it’s like a place from which I come, it’s like a stand I take upon myself. Its not I am pretending to be happy, it’s not I am acting happy.  No. I am happy!” – Werner Erhard

Heroes

“Heroes are ordinary men and women who dare to see and meet the call of a possibility bigger than themselves. Breakthroughs are created by such heroes, by men and women who will stand for the result while it is only a possibility – people who will act to make possibility real.”

-Werner Erhard

Making A DIfference

“What we create together is a relationship in which we work on making a difference in people’s lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings.”

- Werner Erhard

Living

“Living is really pretty simple. Living happens right now; it doesn’t happen back then, and it doesn’t happen out there. Living is not the story of your life. Living is the process of experiencing right now.”

-Werner Erhard – From a talk given in San Francisco on May 23, 1973 – Read the entire talk

A World that Works

“We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world what our lives are really about. Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity and heart. It is much more radical than a revolution – it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people’s lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings.

If not you, who?
If not now, when?
If not here, where?”

Werner Erhard

Transformation

“What we are engaged in creating is the opportunity for people to participate in the transformation of peoples’ lives and of life itself. This context of transformation is a context of freedom and opportunity, of empowerment and human joy, of contribution and of participation. Participation in this transformation is, for me, the fullest expression of being.”

-Werner Erhard

Werner Erhard and the Gyalwa Karmapa