The missions that runners perform are usually pretty varied, though the arch-typical shadowrun is something like a secure location B&E followed by theft, destruction or extraction.

In Corporate Shadowfiles, there was a quick mention of something that stuck in my head. I don't have the book now, so to paraphrase, it mentionned only a few business sectors would ever use Shadowrunners, because they're the only ones where the margins are literally worth killing your competitor over. I distinctly remember it mentionned Aerospace, as well as Computer Engineering. Probably a couple more.

But in this thread I want to pick up on that. Corp Shadowfiles has a point. Nobody is going to hire a shadowrunner for a business that isn't worth several millions. In the aerospace sector, it's true that the difference between getting a contract and not getting a contract is a big god damn deal. With a single contract, you stand to make millions, even billions. It's more than worth hiring high-end criminals to ensure you get the edge over the competition.

I thing other such sector are anything military related, computer engineering (especially in SR), finance and marketing.

So, while fixers are the ones that hire you, Mr Johnson is the one that hred the fixer - and thus ultimately, you. But each sector's Johnson is going to be different in background, motivation and in defining success.

In the finance sector, information is all that matters. Knowing something you're not supposed to know can net you millions. If that doesn't work, engineering the future is just as good. I read The Economist a lot - I don't understand half the shit in there, but that's not the point. I was reading an article a few days a go that talked about the whole financial mess, and they quoted some investment banker dude. He said that they had at one point overextended themselves on mortgage insurance. Competitors knew this, and so it became in their interest to destroy mortgages in order to exhaust the insurer... the exact quote is "The hurrican is not more or less likely to hit beause more hurricane insurance has been written. In the financial markets this is not true. The more people write financial insurance, the more likely it is that a disaster will happen, because those who know you have sold the insurance can make it happen."

The financial Johnson is perhaps the most crafty and immoral of all sectors, because in order to make money, he needs to shift entire markets one way or another. Runs for financial Johnsons - such as Brackhaven in Seattle or Citigroup in Manhattan, will most likely involve information rather than anything tangible. While the most obvious is to acquire well-protected information - such as where competitors have sandbagged themselves, it can also be to acquire blackmail on lawmakers to have certain laws passed, or it can be to modify the perception of reality - make a large company look in worse shape than it is to lower stock value. It can also simply be "defensive" - if a bank has assets in a corporation, and they suspect the corporation is lying about its financial health in a big way, sendin Shadowrunners to discover the truth can be very lucrative, as the bank can sell assets before shit hits the fan.

Financial Johnsons are ususally upper management, as shadowruns affect the corporations at the strategic level more than tactical. This means you're dealing with the meanest, smartest motherfuckers out there. These gys take everything personnally and image is everything - runners that fail or double cross them will suffer. It is also possible that grunt-level traders who grew up with the right contacts can make a play to boost their career without official corp approval. As a runner, you probably wouldn't be aware of this situation. However, it'd pay to find out.

Enough babbling for now. Anyone else has thoughts on this?

Check out Hardwired, in which the 1st part of the book is all about a corporate datasteal/misinformation job.

Economic warfare, misinformation and subterfuge are the real weapons of inter-company warfare.

You're forgetting about something. Companies seeking to screw over their competition aren't the only people hiring runners. Here are some other runs I've done across a few campaigns. Granted, most of them were done when we were still starting out, but the fact remains, they were shadowruns not involving cooperate espionage

1) Dude's daughter was kidnapped, and the ransom was information that would have killed thousands. We were hired to find and rescue her.

2)Small time freelance Matrix News service called us in safekeep a journalist targeted for assassination.

3)Our fixer hired us to get our hands on some Lone-Star certified stuff for a different (and more high-end) runner team.

4)A sizeable street gang hired us augment a street war.

5)Doc Wagon hired us to find and expose someone selling patient's Medical Data.

I'm not forgetting that. I didn't make it explicit, but this is more about the Corporate end of shadowrunning

There has to be an acceptable rate of illicit gain vs. detection chance * cost of being caught. If you team earns several 100k , the gizmo has to be worth a million. Delays in large projects can be worth that. Returning a large mass-production facility into a working state can cost much more than a few millions, even not producing for a few days can run into that kind of numbers.

The only question is target size. If the target is smaller, employing runners at SR4 suggested rates is possible for people that want to get rid of their small-scale competitor in the next village. (Crossing into organised crime territory.)

Working in the financial sector myself, no, your J. won't be upper management. Your J. is attached to the Global/Domestic Credits Restructuring department's company man (this department is likely to employ multiple company men, probapply on a 2-3:1 ratio).

If you're holding back information they won't send him (or a team for that matter) after you. They will however send their lawyers...

Why? Why that department?

I would assume that they "restructure" enough credits to make competitors go out of business, as per your opening post.

Since they're basically the department which deals with problem loans. Of course there's nothing to say about 3rd-5th echelon management which is trying to improve their promotion chances.

Hmm, yes and no. You can't bleed a rock dry. If you made a bad loan, there's not necessarely a point sending a team of hitmen to do something about it. What are they going to do? Shoot everyone? At that point, you try to recover whatever you can. Saving a dying investment isn't going to net the kind of money you'd use black ops for.

Rather, you'd want to find out beforehand the secrets of the company you loaned to, to figure out if they're going to be a problem. Or find out their secrets before you even make an investment. It's all about knowing stuff before everyone else.

Nope, not hitmen. But intelligence gatherers to monitor communications, prove a company is in breach of it's loan covenants etc. (always a good excuse to increase margins... or otherwise re-negotiate an agreement).

I guess it really depends on the company's culture, if it's highly centralized, or if inter-departement rivalry is the norm, etc.

Johnsons' work may not be just about meeting runners. For instance, they'd keep track of all the major issue the company's facing. Then find if those can be solved using shadowrunners. They'd have to give the management an estimate of the financial, industrial, legal and PR outcomes of blowing this factory or that one, extracting or killing this executive or those two engineers instead, blackmailing this shareholder, or performing a datasteal to make new estimates. And compare those to more legal options, like buying out a supplier or releasing a better product. Such estimates require the Johnson, or his assistants, to know the field of activites is dealing with. Choosing the fixer and/or the runners could be done before proposing submitting options to the management (so as to avoid cancelling a run after the big boss approved it because none of the available runners have decent chances of succeding).

Well, you could imagine that in some really big corps, there really are Johnsons who spend their time meeting runners, having read the mision briefing half an hour before, and heading to another meeting on the other side of the continent right after they finished.

Some corporations might allow department heads to decide on their own if a shadowrun is neded and what will be the target, leaving to the Johnson department only the practical end of it. Such organization would be faster, but they would face other problems ("Boss, the Sanitation Products Dpt. head is requiring for the third time this month the urgent abduction of Dr. Akhmed Al-Waziri, known location : Deadalus space station. And he said he did not manage to get in touch with this M. Phelps you send him to last time.").

Actually, this is leading to another point I've been pondering -

Who exactly decides to hire Shadowrunner?

I mean, to do the actual hiring of a fixer, it takes someone with a background in the streets. He's gotta have contacts. Not just a single fixer - he's gotta know a couple, and he's gotta have his ear to the ground. That's a full time job in itself. BUT, he has to be "behaved" enough to be hireable by a corporation.

So if you've got this one guy who's a full time Johnson, then he's not making any decisions himself. His job is to hire runners. He doesn't know what problems need fixing. So that means someone's gotta tell him.

So who tells him? This is some highly illegal shit, so it's not like anyone even knows this Johnson exists. Anyone that knows the company hies runners is a liability, should something go wrong and he blabs to he cops or journalists. There's no procedure, like, after a team meeting you leave with an action point on your list that says "get Johnson to hire 4 runners to raid rival's datavault". Fundamentally, the decision to hire runners cannot be openly discussed. It has to be an individual's innitiative.

Which brings back my point that only upper management can hire runners, cause they are the only ones that know how. Or, the other alternativ, is you do have this one ambitious dude that happens to have grown up in a tough place and he still has a fixer friend, so he can take it upon himself to do some hiring to benefit his own career.