How to Live Through an Executive - L. Ron Hubbard 00_01
0How to Live Through An Executive Audit
How to Live Through an Executive - L. Ron Hubbard 00_ Introduction
01_ The Ox-Cart of Modern Planning
INTRODUCTION
The experience of L. Ron Hubbard in the handling and organizing of communications and communications systems is extensive. Educated as a mathematician and engineer at George Washington University, he early became interested in problems of human relationships and the applications of elec- tronics thereto. He has studied and worked in several systems of communication in order to bring this system to perfection. Such systems included: the United States Army Signal Corps, the Marine Corps system, the Merchant Marine system (including British and Netherlands variations and wartime prac- tices and refinements), U.S. Government communications systems, U.S. Navy systems (including letter mail, filing, radio, codes, networks for amphibious landings, and, most complex of all, combat information centers, as in the handling of fighter planes from carriers and in submarine search and destruction). The more beneficial points of these systems have been utilized, and their obvious and glaring mistakes have been avoided.
In his study of business and organizational communications systems, both inter-office and inter-plant, Mr. Hubbard has discovered that much is still to be desired to produce in these even a rudimentary circulation of information. His calculations demonstrate that by reason of poor communications alone most business and industrial organizations are running at less than twelve percent efficiency. Additionally, the most valu- able personnel in American business are being wasted by improper communications service. Their time is spent largely in efforts to communicate and to obtain compliance with their plans and orders.
Recognizing that the role of the executive is planning and supervision, Mr. Hubbard, after a survey of many organizations, originated and composited the systems which are out- lined in this book. He had two chief objects in mind.
One, to save executives' time and make it possible for them to fill their proper role in an organization.
Two, to reduce the confusion amongst employees and workers who, served by inadequate communication channels and methods, can have no con- clear understanding of the problems and concerns of management.
In addition to the fact that workers are rendered inefficient and confused by misunderstandings about what they are to do, a poor communications system makes it possible for various elements, undesirable alike to worker and manager, to interfere between production and management and create disturbances which are reflected in broad and paralyzing strikes These elements gain their power by denying information to the worker or by perverting information.
It is Mr. Hubbard's concept that anyone in an organization is, to some degree, a manager, whether he manages the whole organization, a small group of people, or simply a file case or a machine. Each, with his responsibility, is part of the neuron or nerve system of the organization, and he cannot function without clear and adequate instructions. Nor can he function unless he can obtain cooperation.
Far from opposing associations of employees, Mr. Hubbard sees in these one of the few attempts to improve the circumstances and function of the worker. In his view, anything undesirable which has arisen around such associations derives immediately from the inability of the worker, under present systems, to maintain adequate two-way communication with those who are making it possible for him to have a job to do. The severance of communication renders the worker anxious and confused, and he becomes open to suggestion that he is not and never can be a managing part of the organization for which he works and must, therefore, exist under a constant state of cold or hot war with the upper management.
The worker feels that he can only revolt against sources of command which he cannot reach and which, using poor systems of communication, rarely reach him.
After broad study in this field, Mr. Hubbard compounded the present system. He used, in particular, his knowledge of the human mind and its functioning under optimum and non- optimum conditions. Here, a business is treated as an organ- ism, and it is discovered to be either sick or well in direct ratio to the inability or ability of its communications system to carry orders, execution and information throughout its entire body.
In the opinion of many who have studied Mr. Hubbard's system of communications, we now face an inevitable constructive revolution in plant management and national production.
-THE EDITOR