“It is not Man’s dreams that fail him,” declared L. Ron Hubbard in 1969. “It is the lack of know-how required to bring those dreams into actuality.” For that reason and that reason alone, “Whole nations, to say nothing of commercial firms or societies or groups, have spent decades in floundering turmoil.”

The consequences stare back at us as headlines every day: crippling deficits, onerous taxation, failing business and, in the prosperous United States alone, more than 37 million people now living below the poverty line. It is not for nothing, then, that Mr. Hubbard further explained, “Man’s happiness and the longevity of companies and states apparently depend upon organizational know-how.”

If one genuinely understood how individuals best function—their needs, aspirations and the source of their failings—one would naturally understand how groups of individuals best function. Such was the stance from which L. Ron Hubbard addressed the problems of how we cooperate with others—not with administrative gimmicks or authoritarian decrees, but with a uniquely compassionate view of groups as individuals united in a common purpose.

In all, Mr. Hubbard spent more than three decades developing and codifying the administrative policies by which Scientology organizations function. These policies are derived from the fundamental laws governing all human behavior, and thus constitute a body of knowledge as important to the subject of groups as his writings on Dianetics and Scientology are to the rehabilitation of the individual spirit. Indeed, until Dianetics and Scientology, no one actually knew the principles governing group activities any more than they knew the principles of the human mind.