L. Ron Hubbard – Solutions to Administration

“It is not Man’s dreams that fail him,” declared L. Ron Hubbard. “It is the lack of know-how required to bring those dreams into actuality.” For that reason and that reason alone, “Whole nations, to say nothing of commercial firms or societies or groups, have spent decades in floundering turmoil.”

The consequences stare back at us as headlines every day: crippling  deficits ,  onerous  taxation, failing businesses and, even in an ostensibly prosperous United States, some forty million people live below the poverty line. It is not for nothing, then, that Mr. Hubbard further declared: “Man’s happiness and the longevity of companies and states apparently depend upon organizational know-how.”

If one genuinely understood how individuals best function—their needs, aspirations and the source of their failings—one would naturally understand how groups of individuals best function. Such was the stance from which L. Ron Hubbard addressed the problems of how we cooperate with others—not with administrative gimmicks or authoritarian  decrees , but with a uniquely compassionate view of groups as individuals united in a common purpose.

In all, Mr. Hubbard spent more than three decades developing and codifying the administrative policies by which Scientology organizations function. These policies are derived from the fundamental laws governing all human behavior and thus constitute a body of knowledge as important to the subject of groups as his writings on Dianetics and Scientology are to the rehabilitation of the human spirit. Indeed, until Dianetics and Scientology, no one actually knew principles governing group activities any more than they knew principles governing the human mind.

At the heart of Mr. Hubbard’s administrative discoveries is the Organizing Board, or “Org Board” as it is more generally known. Developed in 1965, the Org Board is the  diagrammatic  pattern of organization, delineating every function relative to successful group activity. In fact, the Org Board actually describes the ideal organizational pattern for any activity.

That pattern delineates activities—be it group or individual—in terms of seven essential divisions. Those divisions, in turn, lay out all duties, positions and functions necessary for a coordinated effort. The divisions 1 through 7 of the Organizing Board are laid out in a sequence known as the Cycle of Production. Again, this sequence is in no way based upon an arbitrary. When Mr. Hubbard speaks of a production cycle, he is not speaking in terms of an assembly line or the human machine that constitutes the organizational pattern in the corporate world. Rather, he is speaking of those specific activities that all production, whether individual or group, naturally follows. In point of fact: if one wishes to accomplish anything, he must perform these seven basic steps. In that respect, the Organizing Board is not simply the ideal method of successful organization; it is actually the only method of successful organization.

Having defined the ideal organizational form, Mr. Hubbard next provides the specific administrative policies upon which that form functions. These administrative policies are contained in a set of reference texts known as the Organization Executive Course (OEC). The OEC Volumes provide the theory and particulars of every working facet in an organization—from hiring personnel to the ethical conduct of employees, from promotion to quality control and more. In fact, there is a volume corresponding to each division of the Org Board, describing the exact operations and functions of that division.

In additional volumes known as The Management Series, Mr. Hubbard provides all an executive need know on the subject of how to manage an organization. Included therein: how to organize, how to function as an executive, how to establish, how to handle personnel and even the art of public relations. Thus, the OEC Volumes provide the policies by which one runs an organization, while The Management Series provides the policies by which organizations are managed.

Among the principles found in these policies is the very key Conditions of Existence, which Mr. Hubbard defined in terms of the degrees of success or survival. The basic concept is vaguely known to the astute administrator who speaks in terms of “corporate health.” But whereas the idea of corporate health implies only two states—good or bad—and offers no precise means of improving that health, L. Ron Hubbard provides a great deal more. Specifically, Mr. Hubbard analyzed the various degrees of survival—from a non-existence state to a dangerous situation, to a condition of emergency to one of normal, affluence and power. Moreover, he has spelled out the necessary Condition Formulas, or actions, one must take for the improvement of any condition. That is, by simply performing the outlined steps, one rises through each condition to the next until one’s organization is indeed thriving.