Have you filed the TPS reports lately?, About Shadowrun corporations. Options

[emo samurai]

What's the average office like in Shadowrun? Is it Office Space or Brazil with datajacks, with 80% of the work being useless bullshit? Is it hard-hitting and dramatic, like Boston Legal? Is it a hyper-efficient bureaucratic killing machine, able to destroy people with the stroke of a pen? As time goes on, I'd imagine people would get faster, and 80% of the things people have meetings about nowadays, like charts and shit like that, would be automated. Is 80% of the workforce pretty much superfluous, with the whole work/escapism complex just being a well-hidden attempt at mass opiation and social engineering?

Also, I'd like to know what the average office is like in real life; is it anything like Office Space?

And when I talk about the average office, I don't mean the conspiratorial, back-room dealings; we already know what those are like, what with the conspiring and everything.

[Herald of Verjig...]

Meetings to prepare for the pre meeting meeting next week on proper meeting etiquette.

Incerases in work efficiency will just increase the amount done by productive behaviour between meetings, it won't do anything to actually reduce the meetings.

[nezumi]

From what I've read, to a certain degree the corporations have grown to simply support themselves. A significant portion of the organization is management, and a tremendous amount of resources are spent on managing said management. Of course, those people in the field have a pretty cutting edge, exciting work place, but for most people, it's just office politics.

Remember, Shadowrun isn't based off of the business ideals of 2006. They're based off of the business ideals of 1989. Corporations stay in business in part because they push their designers and manufacturers to produce more, faster, better. But even more so because they buy, litigate, bankrupt, sabotage, double cross, merge with, slander and otherwise harass their competition.

[Moon-Hawk]

[DestroyYouAlot]

[stevebugge]

It could be any of these. The department or division and the culture of the corporation in question will play a huge roll. Marketing could be a collection of hyper-creative types with pie in the sky ideas and lots of enthusiasm for ridiculous projects while Accounting could be a dreary dull place. In general most internal policies are geared towards 1 Saving Money, 2 Minimizing Mistakes, 3 Reporting Mistakes so that they can be Minimized, 4 Covering your departments ass when they make a mistake that was not successfully minimized, 5 Improving Quality, 6 Improving Productivity, 7 Improving Employee Morale, 8 resolving Policies with diametrically opposed goals. As the number of policies grows, the number of Manager needed to enforce, monitor, and evaluate them increases (usually exponentially). SO these management and management support offices probably DO resemble office space quite a bit, but the departments where real work is done probably do not resemble it much at all.

[okkam]

I can just imagine encountering Steve Carell's character from "The Office" as a first time Johnson. That would be hilarity.

[nezumi]

[Aku]

[Moon-Hawk]

Pure evil to the core. Also, I hear the CEO of Aztechnestle can't have an orgasm unless he kills a dog.
:-)

[emo samurai]

[stevebugge]

There are some companies trying the our business is every business model, however a lot of them are finding that it's really a good way to run yourself out of business. Your Nestle example isn't really an example of trying to be in every business though, it's locked pretty squarely in one industry: Food - Major Diversified. A good example of a "we are in everything company" is Mitsui & Company (trades under MITSY) or Fortune Brands (FO). Korea chose to do this in Public-Private partnerships while developing their industry. Most companies focus on a specific industry, somtimes with some diversification in to realted industries. Some do well others make a complete mess of it (the best description of General Motors I've heard in a while calls them a Property Management and Finance Company that makes cars as a really expensive hobby).

[stevebugge]

[emo samurai]

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! The future is doomed!!!! Either that, or big companies will buy it in the face of neo-anarchy. If only the seething hordes of the fearful and talentless didn't demand so many useless and boring jobs.

[Aku]

Those two functions of Nestle were just two examples, iirc, they've got their hands in a lot more than food

[SL James]

[stevebugge]

http://www.nestle.com/Our_Brands/Our+Brands.htm

They really look to be pretty much just in to food type consumer products. I don't see them advertising any Shipping Services, Financial Services, High-Tech, or Heavy Industry.

[emo samurai]

[Calvin Hobbes]

Bear in mind that Boston Legal focuses on the partners of the firm, who I figure have a lot more fun than the paralegals.

[stevebugge]

[Aku]

perhaps i'm thinking of soe other company then, for some reason i thought they were also involved in the manufacturing of plastics, and a few other things, like cookware, i think.

[stevebugge]

Probably not in the manufacture, they might be doing something called "re-branding" where they write a contract with another company that manufactures whatever it is they want to put their name on, put their brand on the product and sells it as their own, with a large portion of the sale going back to the actual manufacturer. This is a really common practice in the Automotive Industry, and also with higher end office products (like high volume copy machines). Contract production is another scheme in common use, where a company will contract a production facility operating under capacity to produce product for them, typically to reduce transportation costs.

[SL James]

[emo samurai]

So either you're busy and you feel bored and useless, or you're REALLY busy and you're under tons of pressure.

Also, what the hell is a swordfish mustardball?

[PBTHHHHT]