Chapter Four

THE SECRET OF EFFICIENCY

     What is control?

     Whether one handles a machine of the size of a car or as small as a typewriter or even an accounting pen, one is faced with the problems of control. An object is of no use to anyone if it cannot be controlled. Just as a dancer must be able to control his body, so must a worker in an office or a factory be able to control his body, the machines of his work and to some degree the environment around him

     The primary difference between "the worker" in an office or a factory and an executive is that the executive controls minds, bodies and placement of communications, raw materials and products, and the worker controls in the main his immediate tools. However, it is far too easy for those anxious to agitate labor into measures not necessarily good for it, and for executives who themselves are anxious for control and anxious about it, to forget that the worker who does not control his materials of work and who is himself a controlled factor only, is practically useless to the plant itself. Both management and labor must be able to control their immediate environment. The most apparent difference between an executive and a "worker" is that the executive controls more environment than the "worker". To that degree, then, the executive must be more capable than the "worker" or the plant or business is doomed to difficulty if not failure.

     What is a good workman? He is one who can positively control his equipment or tools of trade or who can control the communication lines with which he is intimately connected.

     What is a bad worker? A bad worker is one who is unable to control the equipment he is supposed to control or the communication lines he is supposed to handle.

     People who wish to control others, but who do not wish others to control anything bring us into a difficulty by establishing a fallacy. That fallacy is that there is such a thing as "bad" control. Control is either well done or not done. If a person is controlling something he is controlling it. If he is controlling it poorly he is not controlling it. A machine which is being run well is controlled. A machine which is not being run well is not being controlled. Therefore we see that bad control is actually a not-control.

     People who tell you that control is bad are trying to tell you that automobile accidents and industrial accidents are good.

     Attempted control for bad or covert purposes is harmful and it carries with it the ingredient of unknowingness. The person who is attempting control is actually not controlling. He is simply seeking to control and his efforts are in the main indefinite and unpositive, which of course are characteristics which control does not countenance. When unknowingness is entered in to control, control can become antipathetic, but it does not become a fact. If you have ever covertly controlled your car you will under-stand what is meant. If you handled your steering wheel in such a way that the car would not "know" which way it was then supposed to go you would soon be involved in difficulties. You must handle the steering wheel of a car in such a way that the car then turns the proper turns and remains on a straight course on a straight road. There is nothing hidden about your intention of controlling the car and there is nothing unknown about the response of the car. When a car fails to respond to your handling of the steering wheel control has ceased to exist.

     In other words, one either controls something or he does not. If he does not we have developed a misnomer. We have developed the idea that there is such a thing as bad control.

     People who have been "badly controlled", which is to say, who have been merely shaken up and have not been controlled at all, begin to believe that there is something bad about control but they would really not know what control is Since they have not been controlled in actuality.

     To understand this further one would have to know one of the very basic principles of Scientology which is the anatomy of control. In part this principle consists as follows: Control may be subdivided into three separate parts. These parts are START, CHANGE and STOP.

     Start, change and stop also comprise a cycle of action. The CYCLE OF ACTION is seen in the turning of a simple wheel. The wheel starts and then any given spot on it changes Position and then the wheel is stopped. It does not matter how long the wheel is in motion, it still follows this cycle of action. A man walking a short distance starts, changes the position of his body and stops his body. He has, if he does this, completed a cycle of action. On a longer span a company starts, continues and at some date, early or late, ceases to exist. In change we get change of position in space or change of existence in time. In start we have simple start and in stop we have simply stop. Things may start slowly or rapidly, things may stop slowly or rapidly, things may change very rapidly while they are going. Thus the rate of start, the rate of change and the rate of stop have little to do with the fact that a cycle of action does consist of start, change and stop.

     The ancients referred to this cycle of action in a much more detailed fashion. We find the Vedic Hymns talking about a cycle of action in this wise: First there is chaos, then from the chaos something emerges and can be said to have been born, it grows, it persists, it decays and dies and chaos ensues. Although this in essence is an inaccurate statement it is the earliest example of a cycle of action.

     A modern Scientology example of a cycle of action is much more simply stated and is much more accurate. A cycle of action is start, change and stop. This parallels another cycle of action which is that of life itself. The cycle of action of life is CREATION, SURVIVAL and DESTRUCTION. Survival could be said to be any change, whether in size or in age or in position in space. The essence of survival is change. Creation is of course starting, destruction is of course stopping. Thus we have in Scientology two very useful cycles of action, the first of them being start, change and stop and the more detailed one being create, survive, destroy.

     Start, change and stop imply the conditions of a being or an object. Create, survive, destroy imply the intention of life towards objects.

     Control consists entirely of starting, changing and stopping. There are no other factors in positive control. If one can start something, change its position in space or existence in time and stop it, all at will, he can be said to control it, whatever it may be. If one can barely manage to start something, can only with difficulty continue its change of position or existence in time, and if one can only doubtfully stop something, he cannot be said to control it well, and for our purposes he would be said to be able to control it poorly or dangerously. If he cannot start something, if he cannot change its position in space, if he cannot stop something, then he is definitely not in control of it. If he is trying to start, change and stop something or somebody without positively doing so he has entered unknowingness into the activity and the result will be questionable to say the least.

     Thus there is such a thing as good control. Good control would consist of knowingness and Positiveness. A girl who can start a typewriter, continue its motion and then stop it could be said to be in control of the typewriter. If she had difficulties in starting it, in continuing its action and in stopping it she would not only be in "bad control" of the typewriter, she would be a bad stenographer.

     Where "bad control" enters in, so enter incompetence, accidents, difficulties, inefficiency and, not the least, considerable misery and unhappiness. As we define bad control as not-control, or as an unknowing attempt at control without actually effecting control, it can be said that unpositiveness results in a great many difficulties.

     To give you some idea of how far this might go in life, you might get the idea of being moved around in a room by somebody. This somebody would tell you to go to the desk, then would tell you to go to a chair, then would tell you to go to the door. Each time he tells you to go somewhere, you of course have to start yourself, change your body's position and stop yourself. Now oddly enough you would not mind this if you knew that somebody was telling you to do it and you were capable of performing the action and you were not receiving orders in such a wise as to interrupt your obedience of the command before you completed it. Let us say, for instance, that somebody told you to go to the desk, but before you arrived at the desk he told you to go to a chair, but before you arrived at the chair told you to go to the door and then claimed you were wrong in not having gone to the desk. You would be, at that time, confused. This would be "bad control" since it does not permit you to finish any cycle of action before another cycle of action is demanded of you. Thus your cycles of action become involved and a confusion results. But this in essence would not be control since control must involve an understandable or knowing positiveness. Good control would not change the order before you had a chance to arrive at the desk. It would let you arrive at the desk before you were asked to start again for the chair. It would let you arrive at the chair before you were asked to start again for the door. Now you would not mind the positive control but it is certain that you would be quite upset by the broken series of orders which did not permit you to finish any cycle of action. Now, to give you some idea of how this could influence one's life - which would you rather have give you a series of orders such as above, to move around a room: your father or your mother? It is certain that you had the most trouble with the parent you would not have chosen to have given you those orders.

     Control is so far from being bad that a person who is sane and in very good condition does not resent good, positive control and is himself able to administer good, positive control to people and objects. A person who is not in very good condition resents even the most casual directions and is actually not capable of controlling people or objects. The latter person is also inefficient and has many difficulties with work and with life.

     When a person cannot control things or when he resists things controlling him he involves himself with difficulties not only with people but with objects. It is also apparent that people with control difficulties more readily become ill and fail in other ways.

     When a person is incapable of controlling a piece of machinery it often occurs that the machinery reverses the matter and begins to control him. As an example, a driver who cannot exert positive control on a car is quite likely eventually to be controlled by that car. Instead of a driver driving a car down the street we have a car taking a "driver" down the street and sooner or later the car, not being very expert at control, winds its driver up in a ditch.

     Even mechanical failures are attributable to a lack of control. It will be discovered that an individual who cannot easily control a machine is quite likely to have considerable difficulties with that machine. The machine itself suffers sometimes in nearly inexplicable ways. Motors run for some men and do not run for others. Some machinery will go on for years in the hands of a mechanic, but when the mechanic leaves it and another takes his place who is not adept, the machine may be found to break down and experience difficulties never before noticed in it. It is stretching things a little bit to infer that a person who cannot control things needs only to look at a piece of machinery to have something go wrong with it, and yet there are cases on record where this has happened. The factor involved is more easily understood in, for instance, an accounting department. A person who cannot control figures of course sooner or later involves the books he is keeping in complexities and intricacies which not even an expert accountant can straighten out.

     The cycle of action of this universe is start, change and stop. This is also the anatomy of control. Almost the entire subject of control is summed up in the ability to start, change and stop one's activities, body and one's environment.

     A habit is simply something one cannot stop. Here we have an example of no control whatever and we have the step beyond the last extremity of entirely lost control. Control begins to dwindle when one is able to change things and stop things but is not still capable of starting them. Once a thing is started, such a person can change and stop it. A further dwindling of control, if one can now call it such, would be the loss of an ability to change something or continue its exsistence in time. This would leave one simply with the ability to stop things. When one finally loses the ability to stop something, that thing has to some degree become his master.

     In the stop of start, change and stop we see in essence the entirety of the stable datum. If one can stop just one particle or datum in a confusion of particles or data one has begun a control of that confusion. In the matter of a mass of calls coming into a switchboard simultaneously, each call insistently demanding the attention of an operator, control is asserted on the switchboard by the operator's stopping just one demand. It does not particularly matter which demand is stopped. Handling just one call permits one then to handle another call and so forth until one has changed the condition of the switchboard from a total confusion to a handled situation. One feels confused when there is nothing in a situation which he can stop. When he can at least stop one thing in a situation he will then find it is possible to stop others and finally will recover the ability to change certain factors in the situation. From this he graduates into an ability to change anything in the situation and finally is capable of starting some line of action.

     Control is then found to be very intimate to confusion. A worker who is easily confused is a worker who cannot control things. An executive who is frantic in the face of an emergency is an executive Who even in good times does not feel that he has any ability to actually start, change and stop Situations in which he is involved as an executive.

     Franticness, helplessness, incompetence, inefficiency and other undesirable factors in a job are all traceable to inabilities to start, change and stop things.

     Let us say that a plant has a good manager. The manager can start, change and stop the various activities in which the plant is involved; can start, change and stop the various machinery of the plant; can start, change and stop the raw materials and the products of the plant; and can start, change and stop various labor activities or difficulties. But let us say that this plant is unfortunate enough to have only one person in it who can start, change and stop things. Now unless the executive is going to handle all the incoming raw materials, turn on and off all the machinery, process every piece of material in the place and ship the finished products himself, he will be unable to run the plant. Similarly an office manager who himself can start, change and stop any of the activities of an office or handle them, if he were the only one in the office who could, would be powerless actually to run a very large office.

     In a plant or in an office it is then necessary for an executive, no matter how good he may be, to be supported by subordinates who themselves are not unwilling to be started, changed and stopped by him, but who can themselves start, change and stop the activities or personnel in their own immediate environment in the plant.

     Now given a good executive in a plant or office and given good subordinates (defining as good, their ability to start, change and stop things), we would yet have difficulty if we reached lower down on the command chart and discovered that we did not have any working people who themselves were capable of starting, changing and stopping their own particular jobs. We would have a condition here where the executive and the foreman would then be forced to do everything that was really being done in the plant. To actually have a good plant we would have to have an executive, foreman and workers, all of whom in their own environment were capable of starting, changing and stopping things and who were at the same time (including the executives) not unwilling to be started, changed and stopped in their duties, providing positive and understandable orders were used.

     As we look this over we see less and less the picture we have been uniformly presented with in plants and offices of the "management" and "laborers". As soon as we discover one worker in a plant who does not have to Start, change or stop himself or anything else we would then have somebody who would justify this title of "laborer". It is apparent that from the topmost member of the board down to the lowest worker on the payroll, each and every one of them is involved with starting, changing and stopping people, materials, machinery, products and pieces of the environment. In other words, each and every one of them present in a plant or an office is actually managing something. As soon as an executive realizes this he is then capable of running a far more efficient business since he is capable then of selecting out from amongst them, people who are best at starting, changing and stopping things, and these by example can bring others into a state of mind where they too are willing to positively start, change and stop things.

     We have people in the work-a-day world, whether managers or janitors, who are for instance fixated (stuck) on starting. These people can start all day and all night but they never get going. Such people talk about big schemes and big deals; such people talk a lot of enthusiasm about getting going but never themselves seem to move

     Others, no matter what their class or classification, get fixated on change. These manifest this usually by insisting that everything "keep running". They talk all the time about "keeping things going" but they will not listen to any new ideas or will not receive any new machinery, since that would necessitate stopping some old machinery and starting some new machinery. Thus we get antiquated plants and systems continued on forever, long past their usefulness or economic value. A subdivision of this is the person who must change everything all the time. This is actually another manifestation of trying to keep things running, but instead of keeping things running, these people shift everything there is to be shifted all the time. If an order is issued they change the order. If they receive the word to go they change it to stay. But this, it will be seen, is an unbalanced condition where these people are actually unwilling to keep anything running anywhere and are in reality on an obsessive stop.

     Plants, businesses, factories, ships and even the government are victimized particularly by people who can only stop things. No matter how well some unit may be running, some order is issued that stops whatever it is doing. It is enough for such people to discover that something is going to do something to cause it to stop. Usually one gets around this by failing to inform such people that something is running.

     Thus we can see that there are people who abuse the cycle of action of start, change and stop and who are themselves fixated upon one or another factor in the cycle of action or who are incapable of withstanding any factor in it, which means, of course, that they are in a continuous and arduous confusion.

     It is noteworthy that those people who can only start things are normally creative. The artist, the writer, the designer is looked upon to start things. He actually might also be capable of continuing them or stopping them but his purest function is creation.

     There are amongst very rational and good men those whose greatest ability is continuing things. They can also start things and stop things if they can really continue things. It is upon these men that we depend for the survival of a business or an operation.

     Then there is the class that is used by the society to stop things. Such people have normally a police function. Certain things are declared to be bad and these things so designated are then turned over to people to stop them. Imperfect production is stopped by inspectors, Bribery, corruption or crime is stopped by police. Other nationally aggressive persons are stopped by the military. And it should occasion no surprise that these specialists in stop are of course specializing in destroy. It should occasion no further surprise that when one looks at the element in the society most likely to decay the society, one looks for those whose job it is to specialize in stops. These people in tile main, while serving a very good function for the society at large, if they became fully in charge, as in a police state, would only destroy the state and its people, as has been noted since the days of Napoleon. The most recent nation which turned over the entire function of the state to police was Germany and Germany was stopped very thoroughly. Germany also effected nothing but destruction.

     When we have a society which is very good at starting we have a creative society. When we have a society which is very good at keeping things running we have a society that endures. When we have a society that is only capable of stopping things we have a society which is destructive or which is itself destroyed. Therefore we must realize that a balance amongst these three factors of start, change and stop is necessary, not only in an individual, but in a business, and not only in a business but in a nation. When one can only do one of these one is considerably limited in his usefulness. The optimum condition would be for everyone from manager down to janitor to be capable of starting, changing and stopping and to be able to endure being started, changed and stopped. Thus we would have a balanced and relatively unconfused business activity.

     No business can succeed unless it has been properly started, unless it is progressing through time or changing position in space and unless it is capable of stopping harmful practices and even competitors.

     As it is with a nation or a business so it would be with an individual holding down a single job. He should be able to start, change and stop anything under his immediate control. If he is running a machine he should be able to start the machine, to keep it turning (changing) and to stop it, and this should be under his own determinism. His machine should not be started by some engineer and stopped at some period of the day without any attention from himself. Furthermore, if he felt the machine should be shut down and oiled he should have the authority to do so and should not have to withstand the pummeling of some machine foreman who, without understanding the situation, simply observed that a machine was stopped which according to his lights ought to be running.

     Even a janitor, to have any efficiency at his job and thus to have a clean set of offices or a plant, would have to be able to start, change and stop the various objects having to do with his particular job. He should not have to keep on sweeping after the floor is clean and he should not have to stop sweeping before he has cleaned the floor and he should be able to start sweeping the floor when he believes it ought to be swept. Naturally if he is able to do these things he is also able to co-operate with his fellow workers, and himself he stopped or started or altered in his activity, so as to execute his job while making it possible for them to do their jobs.

     Here, however, we envision a nation or a plant or an office or a small section or department running without any supervision at all, whereas there would be executives and foremen and workers. It is doubtful if supervision of others would occupy much of anyone's time. As the ability of the worker and foreman and executive to start, change and stop those things which they should handle and control declines, it will be discovered that supervision enters it. The less capable people are of starting, changing and stopping the people or objects under their immediate control, the more supervision they require When super vision gets Up to 80 percent of the plant's activities it is certain that the confusion will be so great that inefficiency will result in such magnitude as to ruin the activity.

     Supervision then is actually a criticism of the junior. It implies that a junior does not know or is not able in the field of control.

     Co-operation and alignment of activity is different than supervision. Where one has a chain of command one docs not necessarily have supervision. One does have, however, co-ordinated planning for an entire operation which is then relayed to others in the operation so that Co-ordination can take place. If everybody is agreed on the worthwhileness of any activity and if everybody in that activity were capable of actually controlling those items or persons which were in his immediate sphere of action, it would be found that planning would not have to engage in much supervision in order to effect the execution of the ideas involved. This is a very high order of dream. Only where Scientology has been thoroughly at work could such a thing occur - that an organization could run in agreement with itself without supervision or punitive action.

     One is able to gauge those workers around him by the amount of confusion in which they are involved. That confusion tells one at once the degree of inability to control things. That inability to control things may not be entirely the fault of the worker. There are two things which can be psychotic: one is the surroundings and the other is the person. A sane man has difficulty in insane surroundings. An insane man has difficulty in even the sanest and most orderly surroundings. Thus there are two factors involved in any operation: the person and the surroundings. It could also be said there are two factors involved in any business: the surroundings of the business itself and the business. One sane business trying to operate in a world of madmen would have a very great difficulty getting along. One way or another the inability of the madmen to start, change and stop things would infect the business and deteriorate its efficiency.

     Thus it is not enough that an individual himself be capable of controlling his job. He must also be able to tolerate the confusion of those around him who cannot control their jobs, or he must be able to tolerate sane and steady control from those around him.

     Insanity is contagious. Confusion is contagious. Have You ever talked to a confused man without yourself, at the end of the conversation, feeling a little confused? Thus it is in work. If one is working with a great many men who are incapable, one begins, himself, to feel incapable. It is not enough to live alone. It is impossible to work alone. Realizing this one also understands that his ability to control the immediate machinery or work tools with which he is involved would also include an ability to assist others in his vicinity to control those things with which they are involved.

     Many a good worker has been lost to a factory because the good worker could not make his own work good enough to satisfy himself, being faced in his job with so many confused elements and orders that he at last rebelled. Thus good workers can be spoiled. In any department it is possible to spot the people who spoil good workers. They are the people who cannot start, change and stop such things as communication or machinery and who are themselves most liable to franticness and confusion. These are the people who would rather have solutions thrown in the waste-basket and problems posted on the bulletin board.

     What could one do if he were surrounded by people who were confused and incapable of starting, changing and stopping their various activities? He could himself become sufficiently capable at his own job that he would set a fine example for others and thus himself be a stable datum in the confusion of that area. He could do even more than this. He could understand how to handle them and, so understanding, could bring orderliness into the minds and activities of those men so as to balk their inabilities as they might affect him. But in order to do the latter he would have to know a great deal about Scientology and its various principles, and that is somewhat beyond the scope of this particular volume.

     For the individual worker who wishes to do a good job and to go on having a job and to rise in his position it is almost enough that he understand his job thoroughly so that no part of it confuses him and so that he can start, change or stop anything with which he is connected in that job and that he himself can tolerate being started, changed and stopped by his superiors without himself becoming unsettled. In other words, the greatest asset and greatest job insurance a worker could have would be a calmness of mind concerning what he was doing. A calmness of mind is derived from the ability to start, change and stop the objects and activities with which he is involved and to be able to be started, changed and stopped by others without himself being as confused as they are.

     Thus the secret of doing a good job is the secret of control itself. One not only continues to create a job, day by day, week by week, month by month, he also continues the job by permitting it to progress, and he is also capable of stopping or ending any cycle of work and letting it remain finished.

     Workers are most often victimized by bosses, juniors, or marital partners who are not themselves capable of controlling anything, yet who will not be controlled and who in some peculiar way are obsessed on the idea of control. A worker who is thus intimately connected with something that he himself cannot control and which is incapable of actually or really controlling him, performs his work in a confused state which can only lead to difficulties and distaste for work itself.

     It can be said that the only thing bad about working is that it is so very often associated with inabilities to control. When these are present then the work itself seems tiresome, arduous and uninteresting, and one would rather do anything else than continue that particular work. There are many solutions to this. First amongst them is to regain control of the items or functions which one is most intimately connected with in doing his job.

     However, control in itself is not an entire answer to everything, for if it were one would have to be able to control everything, not only in his own job, but in an office or on earth, before he could be happy. We discover in examining control that the limits of control should be extended only across one's actual sphere of operation. When an individual attempts to extend control far beyond his active interest in a job or in life he encounters difficulty. Thus there is a limit to the "area of control" which, if violated, violates many things. There is almost a maxim that if an individual consistently seeks to operate outside his own department he will not take care of his own department. As a matter of fact, in Scientology organizations it has been discovered that a person who is consistently involving himself with things far beyond his actual scope of interest is not covering his actual scope of interest. Thus there is obviously another factor involved than control. This factor is willingness not to control and is fully as important as control itself.