The Simon Graduate School of Business Website

Accessibility Navigation:

Course Instructors

Michael C. Jensen is the Jesse Isidor Strauss Professor of Business Emeritus, Harvard Business School.  He is also Co-founder and Chairman of Social Science Electronic Publishing Incorporated and Senior Advisor for The Monitor Group. Professor Jensen was a long-time member of the Simon School of Business prior to joining the Harvard Business School and is one of the key architects responsible for our School's present-day success. He is widely regarded as a leading financial economist and organizational theorist and, among other things, has been responsible for developing the agency theory model (with former Simon School dean Bill Meckling), starting a highly successful academic journal (the Journal of Financial Economics), promoting social science scholarship in general (through Social Science Electronic Publishing which operates the Social Science Research Network, www.ssrn.com), advancing the theory and practice of successful managerial compensation, and teaching path-breaking courses (while at Simon, one of the courses that Professor Jensen designed and taught served as the genesis for the "three-legs-of-a-stool" economic approach to organizational architecture). Professor Jensen has a B.A. in Economics from Macalester and an MBA and Ph.D. in Business from the University of Chicago.

Werner Erhard. For the past 35 years Werner Erhard has been the creator of innovative ideas and models of individual, organizational, and social transformation. While he may be best known for the est Training and other seminars and applications he and others derived from those models, the models have been the source of new perspectives by thinkers and practitioners in fields as diverse as philosophy, business, education, psychotherapy, third world development, medicine, conflict resolution and community building. He has served as consultant to various corporations, foundations and governmental agencies. He has lectured widely at seminars, meetings, conventions and educational institutions. Millions of people around the world have participated in the public and corporate programs he created. A majority of the Fortune 100 companies and many governmental entities have used his ideas and incorporated his models. Fortune magazine’s 40th Anniversary issue (5/15/95), in examining the major contributions to management thinking, recognized Werner’s ideas as the major innovation of the last few decades in shaping modern management thinking about empowering people. For his humanitarian work around the world, in 1988 he was awarded the Mahatma Gandhi Humanitarian Award. Social scientist Daniel Yankelovich, had the following to say about a study his organization did on participants from The Forum, one of the programs Werner created and developed. “Several of the study’s findings surprised me quite a bit, especially the large number of participants for whom The Forum proved to be ‘one of the most valued experiences of my life’. This is not a sentiment that people, especially successful, well-educated people, express lightly. More than 7 out of 10 found The Forum to be one of their life’s most rewarding experiences."

Allan Scherr. Allan Scherr is a consultant based in Rhinebeck, New York. He retired from EMC Corporation where he was Senior Vice President, Software Engineering. Earlier, he was with the IBM Corporation where he held a series of positions leading and managing large software development organizations and projects. Dr. Scherr led the original development of MVS, IBM’s principal mainframe operating system. He was also a significant contributor to IBM’s networking products and applications software. In recognition of his contributions, he was named an IBM Fellow. His last position with IBM was Vice President, Technology, in the Applications Solution Group. Dr. Scherr was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Steve Zaffron. Steve Zaffron is the CEO and Chief of Technology Development of the Vanto Group. Steve has served as the head of the research and development team that produces new courses and he has taken the primary leadership role in designing the “Landmark Forum” which has had 1.2 million participants in 23 countries in the last 14 years. Steve brings years of experience to the issues facing corporations today, has a proven ability to work effectively with diverse corporate cultures, and is an expert in applying breakthrough methodologies to everyday business concerns. Over the past 23 years, Steve has worked with and trained, coached, and consulted thousands of business professionals and managers in government, private enterprise, and non-profit organizations, as well as individuals from all walks of life. He has personally led programs and seminars for over 100,000 people throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, South America, India, South Africa, and the Middle East. Steve has been a guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School, the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University and the Marshall School of Business at USC. He graduated magna cum laude in Philosophy from Cornell University and received a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago.

The Simon School would like to recognize Michael Jensen, Werner Erhard, Allan Scherr, Steve Zaffron, and the Vanto Group for their support of this program.