The story of Mr. Hubbard’s system of management and how WISE itself came into existence begins on May 9, 1950, when Mr. Hubbard released his monumental and definitive work on the human mind, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. In addition to everything it represented in terms of happiness, newfound potentials and eventual spiritual freedom for man, with its release, the seeds were sown for the development of the first uniformly workable system of management and organization.
Almost overnight Dianetics became a nationwide bestseller, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for 28 consecutive weeks. By June, the first Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation was established in Elizabeth, New Jersey with branch offices soon following in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Hawaii. By late fall of that year, more than 750 Dianetics groups had spread across the nation. By fall of the following year, Mr. Hubbard’s research had led him into the realm of the human spirit and Scientology was born.
Given the inherently spiritual nature of Mr. Hubbard’s research, it was not surprising that Mr. Hubbard’s readers and pupils saw themselves as students of a new religion. Thus, in 1954, the first Church of Scientology was established. Today, Scientology churches span every continent and Scientologists number in the millions.
The point, however, was that with such constant and widespread growth, a uniformly workable system of organization became vital if Mr. Hubbard was to satisfy the demand for Dianetics and Scientology lectures, training, delivery, guidance, publications and distribution. And such a system would have to be applicable to organizations, large and small, in nations from Great Britain to New Zealand and from South Africa to Finland.
Researching a New Technology
Mr. Hubbard set about researching organizational and management principles and techniques. Poring through volume after volume of business texts he soon came to realize that no uniformly workable technology of organizations existed. While there were many successful activities, there was little in the way of proven techniques and principles which could be applied uniformly to all organizations. And so it was that he embarked on a path of organizational research which would parallel his spiritual studies for the next three decades.
Developing, piloting, fine-tuning and codifying procedures, Mr. Hubbard began issuing the results of his research as administrative policies to Scientology organization staff around the world. Moving to Saint Hill Manor in the southern English county of Sussex in the early 1960s, he immersed himself into his most intensive period of organizational and administrative research. He developed the renowned seven-division organizing board, a breakthrough which expresses every basic function and the overall form necessary to operate and develop any organization.
Providing Solutions to Others
With the organizational form in place, he then issued policy after policy on each of the functions and duties laid out in this organizational chart. In 1965 alone, from his office at Saint Hill Manor, he penned more than 300 administrative policy letters. As these were issued, the staff of Scientology churches began applying them and soon Scientologists congregating for services at their local churches saw first-hand the results and began applying these same policies to their own activities with similar results.
All of these policies, more than 2,500 of them, were issued in the encyclopedic volumes of the Organization Executive Course and the Management Series set, making them broadly available to both Church staff and public Scientologists.
Use in Society
Not surprisingly, a number of Scientologists soon became business consultants and began applying the Hubbard Management System to businesses. Often these consultants corresponded with Mr. Hubbard, informing him of their successes and their application of his techniques and principles to the commercial world. He was delighted to learn of these results.
Today, L. Ron Hubbard’s management principles have reached more than 140,000 companies and corporations in 75 countries. There are 25 Hubbard Colleges of Administration and more than 150 Hubbard management consultants and consulting groups delivering Hubbard Management System services. All provide business people with solutions to productivity and prosperity, which raise the quality of life and inject a higher degree of sanity into as many lives as possible.
Administrative Solutions
“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.
To eliminate any guesswork as to one’s operating condition, Mr. Hubbard further delineates methods of monitoring organizational health by statistics. The statistic, as he defines it, is a number or amount compared to an earlier number or amount of the same thing. Thus, statistics refer to the quantity of work done or the value of it and are the only sound measure of any production or any activity, be it organizational or individual. Administratively, then, the statistic provides the barometer of organizational health, while Mr. Hubbard’s Condition Formulas provide the means for improving that state of health. Correctly utilized, these tools allow for precise isolation of troublesome areas and how to improve those trouble spots.
Given what Mr. Hubbard’s administrative breakthroughs represent in terms of providing rules by which groups ideally function, it was inevitable that his administrative discoveries would become much in demand throughout general industry and elsewhere. Accordingly, and expressly to meet that demand, the Hubbard Colleges of Administration were founded.
These institutions specifically utilize L. Ron Hubbard’s works for the enhancement of a professional’s ability to tackle the challenges of administering and running a group, company or organization. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the network now extends across five continents. It provides training in L. Ron Hubbard’s administrative methods to businessmen and women from all arenas: heavy industry, service industry, entertainment, communications, healthcare and every imaginable professional service. As the international flagship, the degree-granting Los Angeles institution further sees enrollments from well over a dozen nations and particularly Asia, where innovative managerial methods are especially in demand.
Recession, inflation, sagging productivity, debts, strikes, unemployment, poverty and want—these all-too-familiar symptoms of economic decline are actually indicators of a much deeper problem: a crippling lack of administrative know-how. If today’s businesses and governments could competently apply the basic principles of organization and administration, they would enact workable solutions to what has become economic chaos. Such is the role of L. Ron Hubbard’s administrative technology: to provide the means whereby businesses might prosper, governments rule wisely, people may be free of economic duress and, in short, failed dreams may be revived.