Writing on a Corporation

[Mankoi]

I have a piece I'm working on that relies heavily on a corporation known as Nex Tech. The only problem is, I know very little about how corporations actually work and I have no idea where to start. If anyone has any suggestions on where to start research on such a complicated topic, it'd be extremely helpful.

For context, the world in which the story takes place contains a minority population of people with various super powers. In order to actually be paid for their work, or because they don't have the required secondary powers to use their ability without technological augmentation, most of them work for the mega corporation Nex Tech, which is attempting to find ways to incorporate the biological mechanisms of the super powers into their technology, while also using their employed "super heroes" for industrial espionage.

One of the larger problems here is the legal issues with a company employing a set of individuals to operate in a way similar to any form of superhero, unless in reality they're simply over hyped bounty hunters, which is possible.

[Velvet D'Coolette]

I've been working for a corporation for 18 months. So, let's see... if they did superheroes instead of what they really do...

- the legal stuff around superheroes (insurance, health & safety, limits on what they are and are not allowed to do, etc.) would be paramount.
- Nex Tech would have a call centre, an IT department, a sales/technical team, possibly a legal team, possibly an actuarial team, although I'm not absolutely sure about that, a marketing team, possibly salespeople who worked out on the road, and a team (perhaps several, if the superpowers are quite varied?) who did the admin part of whatever it is the superheroes do.
- the marketing team would be keen to get as much marketing as they could for free, so you'd be seeing their ads in newspaper clippings and they'd come up with ways of drawing their target customers' attention to Nex Tech (competitions, regular calls or mailouts, that kind of thing).
- they'd have a tightly-controlled corporate image: a mascot, perhaps; a chosen font; chosen corporate colours; a particular style of presentation (on letters, billboards, that kind of thing).
- they'd take a rigorous approach to being as efficient and productive as possible. No laughing at the back, please. There'd likely be a kind of hypocrisy about being efficient and smooth-running that came about as a result of being large and unwieldy, but that's another story. The workers at the bottom might well be forced to prove that they're efficient, perhaps by having to clock in, sign into a computerised call centre system, even report on how many pieces of work they do per day. If it can be measured so that managers can see who's pulling their weight and who isn't, it's measured. They would, however, largely have a lot in common: similar attitudes and life philosophies and tastes and preferences for how to live life generally. It would be quite a friendly and lighthearted general personality, as nobody really wants to fall out with the others, especially if the corporate environment is quite tense at times. The middle management might be superficially friendly but perfectly able to crack the whip when required (and sometimes when not; the occasional one would be scared of what would happen to his job if he had a slack team. In my experience, managers often want to be friendly to their staff but feel a pressing need to make sure these people are very productive, which leads to a rather Jekyll and Hyde approach to their staff. Hassled, but ultimately good person people. The top managers will become more benevolent and 'political' as you go up the strata - they can afford to be, and their main job is to keep the right people happy. That includes the bottom-level workers.

Phew! That's all I can think of for now; if you have any other questions please don't hesitate to ask. There's more where that came from if you want to know about anything specific.

[Mach]

Id agree with most of that, but disagree with middle managers. In my experience the bulk of them are jobsworths - the type of people who deserve a punch in the face. They can also be unnecessarily bureaucratic. The remaining ones are usually ace in that they tend to be really laid back and dont really care about what you do or how you do things, as long as the work gets done at some point.