Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
From: tedm@agora.rain.com (Ted Mittelstaedt)
Subject: Scientology & Business
Message-ID: <1991Jul20.062414.25718@agora.rain.com>
Sender: tedm@agora.rain.com (Ted Mittelstaedt)
Organization: Open Communications Forum
Distribution: na
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1991 06:24:14 GMT

Well, I had the misfortune to spend 8 months of my life working for a company
that was owned by a scientologist, and I have some pretty firm ideas about
Scientology after "escaping" from it.
  First, the Business/Financial section of the church is separate from the
Faith/Religious section.
  I have no quarrel with Scientologists who are only interested in the
"religion" from a religious standpoint.  They can wax poetic and defend their
particular "religious beliefs" to their death for all I care.  I place about
as much faith in their religious bullcrap as I place in the Catholic Church's
religious bullcrap.  I'm not in to organized religion and what I believe and
my relationship to my "God" is my own business.
  What I don't care for, however, is the Church of Scientology getting it's
fingers into corporations or businesses.  Many of you may not know that in 
addition to the good science fiction Hubbard published, and the religious
publishing that he did, that there is a gigantic library of what would loosely
be termed as "Business Management" works that he published.  Of course, most
of these books are not for general distribution, mainly because they are so
full of horse manure that they wouldn't stand a chance in the business 
academic world, they'ed be ripped to shreads.  There are consulting firms out
there that speciallize in doing nothing but coming in to a scientologist owned
business and basically telling the owner that he/she knows nothing at all 
about managing his business, and he/she quickly needs to dump a pile of good
money into the consulting firm for it to be able to "save" he/she's business.
  The first thing these firms do is to "survey" the business.  They'll spend
a good 3 to 6 month's interviewing just about everybody in the company
individually and asking them how they would "improve" the business, and what
their personal views of work are.  Of course, because you are supposedly
talking to an unbiased outsider, most employees will spend much time telling
everything they know about that is going wrong with the business.
  The next thing these firms do is then go to the owner and get them to 
dissamble the entire departmental structure.  They pretty much strip away any
authority any middle manager has.  When the firm is at a boil, with all the
employees not knowing who the hell they report to, these firms will then start
re-assigning everybody's job descriptions until no one knows what they are
supposto be doing.  Of Course, the good employees start getting fed up and 
quitting about now, so the already low productivity is reduced even further.
  Eventually, the firm is really screwed up.  Now, these people go on the
rampage, pulling out all the old files of interviews, and firing anyone who
doesen't have the necessary "Moral" abilities (re: agrees with their methods)
  Finally, you are left with a firm that is basically a bunch of incompetent
people, who happen to agree with the Scientologist Method" usually church
members.  Now these firms go into the final phase, since the business is 
berefit of any real talent, they start hiring Church of Scientology members
into the business.  (yes, there ARE really competent people who belong to
the Church of Sci.)
  In the end, the firm eventually gets healthy again, but is petty much in the
Church of Scientology's pocket.  Most of the employees are church members who
contribute heavily, and the firm of course makes regular donations to the 
Church of Sci.  The outside consulting firm, having now done it's job, exits
the scene for another 5 to 10 years Of course, their never far away, ready at
a moments notice to repeat the "cleansing process"

  Things to watch out for:

L. Ron Hubbard tried to define everything as a "Product" even services.  Look
for attempts being made to define obvious services as products. Example:
"A baby sitter does not provide a service.  She provides a product.  The
product is a well-babysat-baby"  and other such nonsense.

L. ROn Hubbard claimed to believe in equality in the company.  What actually
occurs is that there are managers and supervisors, but they merely rubber-
stamp business.  No one EXCEPT the top executive makes any kind of real
decisions.  This includes such trivial nonsense as deciding the number of
pencils each department is allowed to buy on a given week.  Look for examples
of all decision-type work needing to be approved by the top person.  Pre-Done
forms tend to be real prevalent here.

L. Ron Hubbard enjoyed assigning real strange english syntax to what would
otherwise be normal business terms.  He was also real good at the alphabet
soup routine: taking an ordinary task and renaming it to words made up of
the first letter of the phrase.
Example: Walking the dog would be : a Well Walked Dog, or WWD.  This makes
the sentence "How are your WWD's this week?" a reality.  Counseling or 
Advising became Auditing.  Training becomes Personal & Professional Enhancment
or PPE and so on.  Services become Products.

Above all, Scientologist corporations depend on making the employee unsure
of what their task really is, or whether or not their doing it well.  Since
decision making is concentrated at the top, Scientologist corporations 
usually heavily discourage individual inititave, and punish those who 
display it.

tedm@agora.rain.com

By the way, I like people, including people I know who are scientologists.
I HATE scientology, espically those high up in the Church who'se egos are
keeping the monstrosity rollong