Scientology's Admin Tech

Hubbard obviously believed that he was an administrative wiz. He wrote thousands of administrative "Policy Letters" over the years, covering everything from the broad organization structure down to the minutiae of how to clean windows, handle your "in-basket" and how to write letters.

Each and every policy letter is supposed to be followed to the letter in every Scientology organization. That means all the churches and every business using Hubbard's technology.

Some of the dictates from Ron are fairly obvious and seem to work well enough. But overall the result of applying all his policy letters is to cause an organization to, at best, struggle for survival and, more commonly, fail.

There are many examples of how bad this "tech" is. For instance, the whole structure is designed for extreme micro-management. It just invites every level of management to meddle in every employee's job. However, to keep things simple, I'll just expand on one good-sounding but hugely flawed concept.

Statistics.

It sounds okay. Every job someone does has one or more statistics that count the number of products that particular job produces. All the statistics are carefully graphed and actions are taken depending on whether the "stat" went up or down, and by how much.

Sounds like a lot of busy work, but doesn't sound harmful, does it?

It is.

Statistics: a good way to destroy your organization.

Oh, it's a real good idea to know how many widgets your company sold, and how much money in and money out. In general you do need that kind of information and every business does that kind of record keeping.

But every person, every job?

Here's the key part of this "tech". As part of the "handling" of statistics, if a person's statistic is up, that's good, they get rewarded. If their statistic is down, that's bad, they get punished.

Of course. What else would you expect?

And that is not the way to intelligently run a business. Anyone with real world business experience can see what's wrong immediately.

Judging a person's performance on their job by only counting "things" produced in a time period focuses attention narrowly on today or this week. Long-range ideas that might interfere with production for a few weeks, but would greatly improve things long-term will always be abandoned. Actions that improve quality, but decrease quantity must always be ignored. Things that would improve customer service, but which interfere with "getting the stats up" will never happen.

And, because the managers at every level are rewarded for "up stats" and penalized for "down stats" the whole structure becomes narrowly focused on "getting the stats up", every person, every job, every level.

The inevitable result of "stats" is "stat push". This is a heavy demand for ever-higher statistics from management and the frantic doing anything and everything to be able to report higher statistics by the worker.

Imagine a job, a section, a department, a division or a corporation where things like planning, scheduling, improvement, coordination, cooperation, responsiveness are all ignored in favor of "getting the stats up". That's chaos and disaster. It's deadly.

Imagine what happens when a worker must endlessly report higher and higher numbers of products, "or else!" Either the quality goes out the window, or the numbers are faked. As the demands for higher "stats" continue, it is, inevitably, both.

Another side-effect is that the statistics become less and less connected to reality. This is why the Church of Scientology reports eight million members (or is it twenty?) when reality is so much less: They have counted the "Scientologists statistic" for years and the statistic has been a flat-out lie. This is why you can't get off the mailing list: That would cause the "bulk mail out" statistic to go down, and that can't happen. This is why Scientologists get super-hard-sell pressure phone calls for money on Wednesday night: Stats are reported on Thursday and must be up "no matter what!"

The end result is crap products, upset employees, angry customers and eventual and inevitable business failure. And that is solidly built into "statistics" as defined and managed by the Hubbard Administrative Technology.

And, while statistics is considered one of the more important pieces of Hubbard's Admin Tech, it isn't the worst, by far. But that's enough for a sample.

A few times, some Scientologist has attained managerial status in a department of a major corporation and secretly implemented Hubbard Admin Tech in his department. Not going to name any names, but the departments so "enhanced" became disaster zones. Customer and employee complaints helped upper management track down and eradicate the Hubbard Tech to recover sanity. It really doesn't work.

For the True Believers of Scientology, this is hard to take. Their business fails and they blame themselves for not "applying it correctly". But the harder they try, the more exactly they attempt to apply Hubbard's instructions, the deeper they get into trouble. Unless and until they recognize that the fault lies with Hubbard's policies, they can't escape the endless downward spiral of hopelessly applying his policies more and more strictly while their business tanks and their employees suffer.

The Church of Scientology runs strictly on Hubbard Admin Tech. You will have noticed how effective they are. Anyone escaping from Scientology's Sea Org has horror stories relating to Hubbard's Admin Tech and the organizational insanity it engenders. This is just another reason why the Church of Scientology has failed, is failing and will always fail.
-