Oh, Jose, there can NEVER be too much bad press for the cult.

Oh, Dean! You are soooo bad! I love it!

The worst thing about it, is that it has nothing to do with what statistics actually means in the real world. It just stupidly count things, on the same time frame for everyone, as if this could tell you anything meaningful about productivity. I guess Hubbard had no more understanding of that field of math than he had of calculus.

I work in an engineering company (we make complex systems which necessitate electronics as well as mechanical parts and software). We need stats (real ones, not just counting stuff for the sake of counting stuff) to help us keep in check the time estimates we give to clients. This is very important for them because a unexpected delay on our part can cost a lot of money to them. Also, because we need to charge enough to make a profit, but not so much that our clients go away, we need to know how much time is necessary to program and debug, mount the system, test it, ect.

What is the use of counting, say, the number of bugs solved per week per programmer, for that ? Say that one programmer solves 10 minor bugs, some of which were not actually bugs but mistakes by the technician, and another solves 2 major ones. Are you going to fire or punish the guy who did 2 bugs ? If so congrats, you’ve probably fired / punished the most competent one. Not only that, news travels fast and wide in this field and you’ll soon become known as a company which mistreat its good employees, in a market where competent programmers are in demand. Good luck recruiting someone with any talent after that.

Statistics means nothing without a careful analysis of what it is you’re measuring. And if all statistics means for you is counting stuff to make excel graphs, you should not be left anywhere near a managing position.

Would surprise me.

On their website, if you go in the FAQ section, they say that all psychiatric treatments including ECT have been opposed by “quasi – religious groups” 😛

I sense a subtle dig at scientology there.

One thing I learned was that when anyone told you he/she had the perfect solution for your needs, hiring them was an invitation to bankruptcy (unless you had a monopoly position, like cable providers…)

Take STATS based systems. Supposedly with stats, you can run your business more efficiently. Like Scientology’s weekly stats. Let’s look at a couple of situations:

Sales Person A makes $0.00 sales in week one. Obviously PTS, and needs to be demoted.

Sales Person B makes $500.00 sales.

Sales Person C makes $3,000.00 sales.

In week two, Sales Person A is doing amends, so makes no sales. Sales Person B makes $500.00 sales, but since sales did not increase, must be PTS. Sales Person C makes $10,000.00 sales.

In week three, Sales Person A is back onlines, drops a major project, and makes $100.00 sale out of desperation, so is in affluence. Sales Person B has been blasted scrambles, and makes $525.00 sales, and is in affluence. Sales Person C has sales of $2,000.00, but customer from week one returns goods, as ordered Widget A at $1.00 a piece, received and was billed for Widget B at $30.00 a piece, so sales are actually a negative number…

*****

Or to take a real life example from before I got given the Fortune 500 gig, I spent close to two hundred hours over eighteen months working on a customer. Zero sales. But then I landed them, and what I had predicted would be a $250,000.00 per year account turned into a $1,000,000.00 per year account.

A stats driven model would have shown me as a total loser. Up until I got the signed contract.

Another project I worked on took FOUR YEARS to the first sale. We invested a ton of cash in it, including a lot of new equipment (very little cash went to marketing, we ran the marketing side lean). Sales started off slow, but by the first anniversary or sale number one, they were a very nice addition to an already profitable year. The equipment purchased enabled us to cut our costs on other products, and add a new product line, which was mostly a break even proposition financially, but was an enormous boost from a marketing viewpoint.

Stats driven models tend to be miserable at measuring this sort of stuff. Even worse, a lot of the time they measure the wrong things.

Remember me mentioning the cable companies? Their customer support operations appear to be based on number of completed support calls. Not on number of satisfied customers, number of competed calls. Which is why the cable companies tend to have terrible customer satisfaction rates.

L. Ron Hubbard didn’t work in industry (at least if he did, I’ve missed hearing about it), but he came up with a Sure Fire system for companies and ORGs to follow, which guarantees growth, based on stats.

Stats like number of toilet paper rolls saved…

Sorry if I’ve gone off-topic. Whenever anyone starts talking about business stats at a company I am dealing with, I tend to warn accounting not to extend additional credit.

When they are 12 to 14 that until the Cadet Org
was that trashed. Hard to imagine but too much bad press.