What bothered and still bothers many people about est and now Landmark are the manner of presentation--fairly large, very structured seminars (i.e., large group awareness trainings, or LGATs), with a confrontational trainer--and the emphasis on recruiting family, friends, and associates to participate. As I've been clear about, I continue to have issues with this latter aspect, and if I had to do all over again I'd have been less of an "est pest" 25 years ago.
These writings, however, give one the opportunity to engage with the ideas Erhard taught/teaches, separated from the LGAT experience and from the "share the training," pressure-others culture of an organization. As transcriptions of talks, they can be a bit hard to follow. They are, though, definitely followable, and well worth it.
Edit: It seems that much of this new disclosure of ideas and abstractions is due to the influence of the retired Harvard Business School Michael Jensen, who took the Landmark Forum in 1998 and became fascinated with it.
As practitioners, Landmark's managers were "totally uninterested in providing access to the model [meaning the mechanisms that underlay their successful techniques]," Jensen says. They were primarily interested in giving access to a powerful way of living with people rather than helping them understand. They had to give up this notion that understanding was the 'booby prize' -- that's the language they use." If people didn't understand [what was being accomplished]," according to Jensen, "they were going to wind up saying it was a cult, or brainwashing." He began to understand his task as "get[ting] them to change the way they operated to have a bigger impact."This makes a lot of sense to me. Whatever valuable ideas and principles Erhard has articulated must be able to be separated from a particular style of delivery, particularly the LGAT format.
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