About L. Ron Hubbard

L. Ron Hubbard was a best-selling American author and lecturer.  He was born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska and passed away in 1986.  He was such a prolific writer that all his books and recorded lectures were not able to be published in his lifetime; even today new books and lectures are being issued for the first time.  In 2006, 20 years after his passing, the Guinness Book of World Records awarded Ron the world record of “most published author” in recognition of his 1,084 published works.

What made Ron truly unique is the highly disciplined engineering-based approach he used to research and develop noteworthy breakthroughs in the subjects we specialize in teaching our clients: communication, presentation skills, learning skills for today’s world and the effective design and delivery of outstanding professional development programs.  

For example, Ron was very interested in the key ingredients to create excellence in communication – specifically what makes a truly great communicator?  How do you win the hearts and minds of the people listening to you? How do you reach a solid positive agreement with another person if they’re skeptical or uncommitted? How do you successfully navigate difficult conversations? How do you create extraordinary outcomes? How do you build great relationships?

Ron personally delivered more than 3,000 presentations internationally which were delivered to sold-out auditoriums and lecture halls.  He was known as a captivating public speaker and audiences loved him.  So, he was very well qualified to write on the subject of public speaking and to teach what he'd learned about how to effectively communicate from a stage.  This includes discovering the true root cause of stage fright and the fastest way to become fully comfortable and confident regardless of audience size; how to keep the audience engaged and interested in every word; and how to develop strong rapport with an entire audience all at once.

Ron recognized a person’s ability to rapidly learn new subjects and skills affects their success and even their whole life.  So, he embarked on a program of systematic research into the subject of learning.  How can we acquire expertise more rapidly?  What are the barriers that keep a person from advancing?  How do we achieve intelligence and mastery in any subject?  How do we raise others’ self-awareness and help them learn more rapidly?

This led to his research in the field of training and professional development.  With his engineering and Navy background, Ron believed any training or educational experience that resulted in less than 100% for the person learning was inadequate.  He once made an analogy using a bridge, saying that if an engineer was tasked with building a bridge, it would be expected that the bridge would hold up for 100% of the cars that crossed it.  It would be a poor bridge indeed that only promised that “it works for some cars but not for others” or could only guarantee that cars would get “most of the way there”.  Ron developed new instructional design and coaching principles, and a way to elevate educator and trainer skills, that all combine to provide those who are learning an educational experience like no other, where every individual can achieve 100% competence, regardless of the subject matter.

We’ve been using the proven approaches in these areas for over 30 years for 2 reasons:   We searched far and wide and, when it comes to being effective in producing extraordinary results, they’re the best we’ve found.  And, even more importantly, because our clients, their teams and organizations, consistently tell us how much they love and win with these principles and skills they gain.

Ron used his income as a best-selling writer to finance many other research projects which included such diverse topics as successful management practices, leadership, strategic planning, photography, art and even religious philosophy.

While Ron wrote extensively on these other topics, they are outside the scope of Effective Training Solutions.  Our training materials, and the way we conduct training, are based solely on Ron’s articles and lectures in the fields of effective communication, presentation skills, accelerated learning, leadership and professional development.

Additional Personal Background For Those Who are Interested

Ron's long and adventurous road to discovery began at an early age. Under his mother’s home-schooling, he was reading well beyond his years. As a youngster he read Shakespeare, Greek philosophy and numerous classics. Yet Ron’s early years ranged far beyond books - with his family’s move to Helena, Montana, he was soon taming wild horses with the best of the local cowboys.

As a youth with a very active mind, and living in the American West, he was also soon friends with Blackfoot Indians—learning tribal legend from a local medicine man and achieved that very rare status of “blood brother”. By the age of 13 he had further distinguished himself as the nation’s youngest Eagle Scout.

When his father was assigned to the South Pacific as a United States naval commander, Ron embarked upon the first of his travels to Asia. By the age of 19 he had traveled more than a quarter of a million miles, seeing much of China and India. He became one of the few Western adventurers to enter Tibetan monasteries in the Western Hills of China and to study with the last in the line of royal magicians from the court of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China.

Returning to the United States, Ron resumed his formal education at George Washington University in Washington, DC. There, he studied mathematics, engineering and molecular physics, learning to apply rigorous scientific methodology to all of his later research.  At that time he also learned how to fly planes and helped run the university flying club.

After university, Ron began a 50-year literary career.  Even at the start he was among the most widely read science fiction authors of the time, and he also wrote scripts for several screenplays during Hollywood’s Golden Age, including a classic Clark Gable film.

During the Second World War, Ron entered the United States Navy as a lieutenant. He initially served as a senior American intelligence officer in Australia. Upon his return to the United States (as the first American casualty of South Pacific combat) he went on to serve with distinction in both the North Pacific and Atlantic—commanding antisubmarine corvettes and training crews for amphibious landings.

After the war, he continued to write extensively, both fiction and non-fiction.  In addition to writing, Ron always had a robust curiosity coupled with a strong desire to help people and to make the world a better place.  He never ceased investigating avenues for making that possible.