Pentex is dumb-But how is a mega corp actually structured?

[Prak]

I mean, I like the concept of Mega Evil Corp, and the entire reason I read up on Pentex is because I want to run a horror one shot about a group of normal people who get drawn into the horror Pentex works.

But... while conceptually promising, the actual words on paper are fucking stupid. You've got an evil mega corp that has destroying the world as an explicit goal. Like, as has been said many times before here, they are literally Captain Planet villains, and they talk about environmental destruction at board meetings. Not as in "The EPA is on our ass about the effects of our logging" but "Our total destruction of the world is ahead of schedule! Break out the scotch!"

I suppose it would work for an evil cult that is in control of a corporation, and I suppose you could look at Pentex that way, but it's... not presented that way, there isn't really much textual support for that. While the board members are direct servants of various evil cosmic beings, it's more like they're a bunch of different one-person cults trying to pilot Pentex, with one board member thinking the Wyrm is an alien, and another board member being an insane Nazi vampire (literally).

But also... Pentex is supposedly not well known of in world? And that's just bizarre to me. Reflecting upon it, it really seems like WW wrote a weird super powerful cult, and thought they were writing a company. Again, if you excised Pentex as a corporation, and replaced it with an evil cult that was composed of business men who collectively held a bunch of different companies, that would work a lot better. But that's a very different thing.

Corporate Restructuring
So, yes, Pentex as it's written would work better as a cult that happens to control a bunch of companies. But that's not what I'm interested in for the one shot I want to run. I want to put my players through, err, corporate body horror? Imagine if Kafka applied for a really good job, and when he went in for an interview, that's when he turned into a cockroach. That's what I'm aiming for.

I rewrote the corporate history and specific goal of Pentex (being directed by the Wyrm [or consider it the Devil if it stops you from going off on "the Triat is bad and dumb" tangeants] to destroy physical totems that bind it, without Pentex having any direct knowledge of what precisely will happen after that), and I'm not using any of the canon board members, because fuck that.

But beyond "Board of Directors>CEO>Some Divisions" I don't know how a mega corp is structured. I've got Acquisitions, PR, Project Coordination, Operations (which includes HR), and Security (which is basically Pentex's military). Would/Should there be a Special Projects Division that handles the Psychic and Fomori creation projects and reports directly to the Board? I have no fucking clue, and a lot of people here know way more about this kind of stuff than I do, so, help?

[deaddmwalking]

Corporations are tasked to deliver profits to shareholders quarterly. Senior leaders are rewarded not only for revenue but for exceeding analyst expectations. Finding a way to harvest the forest in September instead of October to post the revenue in Q3 before taking a job with another company for a huge salary increase is a recipe for evil.

Building a real Corp and making them horrifying is surprisingly easy. When your bank can foreclose on mortgages they don't even own the evil is there. But that's not body horror. Real corporations are great for the dawning horror that it's too late to turn back and you are a slave to the profit machine and can never escape. Great for real life, but not a one shot.

[tussock]

Roughly, mega-corps own other corps, which own other corps, which are composed of businesses of various sizes that do various things, or at least pretend to because they're still getting paid.

Like, Mike Mearls is running D&D, and has a budget to do that with, which is as detailed for him as he likes, but is represented as probably a single line in the Wizards parent company reports, and only presented with other things as an agglomerated activity on one line in the Hasbro reports.

But Hasbro doesn't run security for the D&D offices, or do anything else for them. Wizards maybe owns the building the D&D offices are in, or maybe leases it from someone they sold those buildings to, hardly matters.

Hasbro head offices doesn't do much of anything, aside from collate reports about "the games and toys industry" to predict future profits, and keep an eye out for potential competitors to squash start-ups to acquire, and hold a few rarely-needed experts like tort lawyers to share around. They just own a huge collection of fairly small businesses who can sort of share a few resources occasionally given the appropriate requisition forms (or friendly contact on an upper floor), and generally try to push a certain corporate culture down the line in regards who they want to keep happy (which might be shareholders, lawmakers, fox news, the CEO's 9-year-old daughter, a predatory creep that plays golf and poker with the board chair, customers, workers, minor executives, as a combination thereof which varies by circumstance).

Evil mega-corps are just those that own a lot of businesses (who employ many smaller contractors) who all do terrible things that hurt a lot of people. They have good lawyers shared around to keep any repercussions of that suitably quiet, and fund the right politicians to stay free of further binding regulations, and maybe the odd problem solver that basically just fires people until the press stops talking about it (and then promotes them somewhere else). The culture is problems do not move up the chain, ever, lawsuits get stalled until the sub-company can be folded cheaply. Officially not knowing anything about what's going on in that other office building in that other city is why you can never put the big CEOs in prison, and their financial structure is always able to cast off anything that gets in trouble without actually losing any money.

--

Like, when a BP oil platform fails and destroys tens of thousands of people's lives, and that only happened because minor BP executives forced unsafe practices down the chain, it turned out they didn't own that problem, and the POTUS himself was nice enough to ban the media from recording most of the adverse events outside some carefully choreographed white sand dumps (very generous of the govt. to escort the media around the potentially life threatening environment, don't you know). Because it turns out BP don't own anything, they just profit from everything in a way that is not legally accountable (but also you have to do everything they tell you). Also doctors had to be forbidden from counting the extra deaths, but they were mostly poor people anyway.

BP is a great model for an evil mega-corp, because they are an evil mega-corp. Right now they are bringing a swift end to the Holocene climate optimum, which we all need to live, but which you can't warn people about as a government agent because the POTUS has said the state can't talk about climate change! On behalf of BP, and their buddies.

Your game is probably small biscuits compared to BP. I mean, they probably won't kill everything bigger than a chicken, if we stop them in the next ten years.

[OPG]

How about throwing the horror shit under some company that Pentex acquired a decade or so back as a startup? I'm not too familiar with most of the WW canon, but I'm chuckling at the idea of a megacorp buying some promising young medical transplant/artificial organ company and turning it into a little factory of horrors that's also an allegory for Skype.

[Prak]

I mean... That's canonically what Pentex does. Pentex is a megacorp that serves the cosmic embodiment of entropy by twirling their mustaches and diddling little boys while dumping toxic waste in the ocean, and they recruit and train mercenary teams that are partially composed of people they've used spirits of negative emotions to give super powers.

Acquiring a biotech start up and using it to perform horrific experiments and churn out evil mutants is literally something that Pentex does in the Canon.

[kzt]

Well, you could have some massively profitable hugely valuable company that poses as the advocate off freedom and free speech with a motto like "Don't be evil" that secretly has a project to make enormous money by reporting citizens engaging in WrongThink to their government; said government routinely disappears people who engage in WrongThink when not running them over with tanks.

[Dogbert]

Pentex is a very large corp, just not a megacorp.

Megacorps as a cyberpunk creation require more than money or even ubiquitousness: Extraterritoriality.

A Megacorp is by definition a sovereign nation with its own laws that trump any nation's. It's not just about economic power, it's about -literal- power within its territory. Within a megacorp's corporate building, if the corporate rules say your boss can shoot you for refusing to take unpaid overtime and the building is in, say, U.S' soil, the corp's rules trump U.S "no murder" laws.

(Which, while an extreme example, is exactly the way the TPP was written)

For further references on a step-by-step guide to building a megacorp, read the TPP papers.

P.S: No, I'm not saying the rise of the 4th Reich is any better, we were already fucked from the moment the world's choices for a future were reduced to either Wolfenstein: The New Order or Gunnm.

[Hicks]

Speaking as a former member of management of the largest retail corporation on the planet, it isn't really body horror so much as dehumanization.

Like, in stores there were the associates at the bottom, team leads above, and zone supervisors above that... each with a level of powere over the other.

Then for salaried members of management there were:

Assistant managers
Co-Managers
Store Managers

Regional Department Heads
Regional Managers

Divisional department heads
Divisional department managers

Assistant directors
Directors on the board
CEO

Every level of higher management abstracts away people to be metrics in service of profit; when I was a supervisor and got my first taste of power I joked I had a heart-ectomy, but when I became a salaried member of management it really feal like a soul-ectomy. These are people's lives, and yet it was ultimately my job to do, "what is best for the company," and it was a real struggle to treat those people under me with dignity and humanity when I had a 9 layer cake of bosses demanding results to metrics to increase profitability regardless of humanity.

The true corporate horror is not the body horror of getting a tentacle grafted to you, but rather to be so drained of humanity that those around and under you are disposable numbers, and of realizing too late that *you* are the souless zombie in service to an alien intelligence bent on world conquest where people are as incidental as ants to a bulldozer.

[Dogbert]

Addendum.

As an extention to extra-territoriality: Being a sovereign nation, a megacorp always has its own army. Monsanto landed a foot here when they bought Blackwater (by whichever name they're going today).

[Prak]

Pentex, canonically, has a ton of subsidiaries, and its own "security" force, called First Teams, typically comprised of fomori, Black Spiral Dancers, and just plain humans who are evil assholes, and may or may not have an assortment of other monsters on any given team.

Pentex Subsidiaries, for the record:

• Alliance Industries-- ???
• Ardus Enterprises-- waste management
• Avalon, Inc.-- Toy company
• Circinus Brands-- Cigarette company
• Consolidex Worldwide-- Investment firm
• Endron International-- Oil company (duh)
• Harold and Harold Mining, Inc
• Full Force Solutions-- Weapons manufacturer
• Gaia Research Co.-- An ostensibly independent research/PR company
• Good House International-- Paper company
• Hallahan Fish Co-- Fishing/Whaling company
• Herculean Firearms, Inc.-- Handgun manufacturer
• Harrick's-- Grocery/Retail chain
• Homogeneity, Inc-- Conversion Therapy
• King Breweries-- Beer and Liquor company, has its own sub companies for various products/markets
• Magadon, Inc.-- Pharmaceutical company
• NikNak Computing-- Electronics company
• Omni Television-- syndicated network
• O'Tolley's-- Fast Food franchise
• PCP (Politically Corrupt Politicians)-- Icelandic video game company. Yes, seriously. This is just an update of Black Dog, the RPG company that Pentex owned in older books that was a Take That, Me! of White Wolf. Black Dog itself owns Death Lord Games, which is the same for the Sword and Sorcery Studios imprint of White Wolf they used to publish D20 material
• Pentagon Industries-- ???
• DT Defence Ltd.-- No clue, but likely a defense company, a la Lockheed Martin.
• Rainbow, Inc.-- Plastic and rubber manufacturer
• RED-- 24/7 news and commentary. Basically Fox News.
• Shade, Inc-- Private intell company
• Siren Cosmetics
• Slaughterhouse Video-- Low budget horror studio, that produces whatever the super controversial/edgelordy horror of the day is
• Tellus Enterprises-- Computer company
• Vesuvius, Inc-- Magazine and book publisher
• Young and Smith, Inc-- Food and hygiene product company

And then there's their various projects involving bane spirits, and their security that's more a private military. I suppose you could argue they aren't sovereign, but take corporate legal bullshit from our world and make it worse. It's entirely reasonable to say that in the World of Darkness, corporations actually are, or at least border on, sovereign states.

[Hicks]

Addendum: seems relavent

https://www.behindthebastards.com/podca ... istory.htm

[Iduno]

Addendum: seems relavent

https://www.behindthebastards.com/podca ... istory.htm

I want to like that, but the hosts are literally worse than the people they are talking about.

Edit: it gets better after a few minutes.

[Chamomile]

I haven't listened to it yet, so maybe I'm just missing some important context, but I find it difficult to imagine the hosts of a podcast are worse than the people who ran an exploitative colonial proto-megacorp. Terrible enough to spoil the podcast they're hosting, sure, but not worse than slave traders.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I feel the big problem with Pentex is that corporations of that size are inherently terrifyingly evil; bolting on some Captain Planet anti-environmental agenda and other such conspiracies as an outright goal just makes it silly. Real world corporations pollute the environment, fuck over large sections of the populace, subvert the law (be it in the normal direct pursuit of their regular goals or to cover up shocking criminal acts of their important players) and even act in opposition to their own long-term interests all the time in the real world because it gets them a little extra money (often a shockingly small amount) in the short term.

[Nath]

As an extention to extra-territoriality: Being a sovereign nation, a megacorp always has its own army. Monsanto landed a foot here when they bought Blackwater (by whichever name they're going today).

I can't believe that story is still alive. The only source for Monsanto buying Blackwater was one sentence from an article on pravda.ru website, which was itself a translation of an article from Mexican newspaper La Jornada.

La Jornada's "Blackwater le vendió servicios clandestinos de espionaje a la trasnacional Monsanto" was translated by pravda.ru as "Blackwater clandestine intelligence services was (sic) sold to the multinational Monsanto" instead of "Blackwater sold clandestine intelligence services to the multinational Monsanto". Those were "services" as "non-material product", not "business unit", as the initial source, Jeremy Scahill article in The Nation, explained.


That being said, asking how megacorporation are actually structured is a tricky question, because the definition of a megacorporation is mostly based on fiction. First, actual corporation are heavily specialized. Investors dislike diversified conglomerates, which require to invest/divest in a set of different market trend, instead of cherrypicking the most profitable (the result is called the "conglomerate discount"). Corporation also outsource as much things as possible when it comes to support, including things like security, intelligence, communication and lobbying, which people would consider as attribute of a True Megacorporation. The reasoning is that outsourcing allows competition to drive cost down for those functions.

There were much more diversified companies in the first half of the 20th Century, when entering new markets was considered an acceptable use of excess cash instead of international growth of simply paying dividends.

There are exceptions, like when Amazon engineers promised they could handle infrastructure better than any existing companies and ended up establishing Amazon Web Services (on the other hand, don't believe for a second Google or Facebook are diversifying... their actual business is selling user data for advertisement and all they do is developping new data source).

[kzt]

Essentially, SR megacorps are pre-war Japaneses Zaibatsu on a global scale.

[DrPraetor]

the entire reason I read up on Pentex is because I want to run a horror one shot about a group of normal people who get drawn into the horror Pentex works.

...

Would/Should there be a Special Projects Division that handles the Psychic and Fomori creation projects and reports directly to the Board? I have no fucking clue, and a lot of people here know way more about this kind of stuff than I do, so, help?

When you say "should", do you mean "should there realistically be..." or do you mean "should there for the purposes of my plot be..."

Either way I would say yes. Many bits have been spilled above on the topic of megacorporations generally and I gather that your answer is, for any aspects that don't make good economic sense, to either blame Shai'tan or suspend your disbelief.

That taken care of, you need middle-management for the PCs to but up against but all you've done is revised the top of the org-chart? For a one-shot, I wouldn't expect our hapless heroes to be dragged before the grand council anyway.

Based on my experience with middle-management at pharmaceutical companies, I would start with a mashup of The Office and Scrubs, and then make them eeeeevil. The staff at the R&D division of a deeply unethical pharmaceutical company wouldn't be that different from the people in an office that sells paper, although their leader would (presumably) be a real evil genius who simply acts like the regional manager from The Office.

Does that help?

[kzt]

The manager of a division of a pharmacy company in a mega-corp would, at most report to the president or CEO of the pharmacy company. And probably would report to someone below the president. The president reports to a VP, who maybe reports to the CEO.

It's like D&D at Hasbro. Hasbro is a 5 billion dollar company employing 5000 people. Do you think Mearls reports to Brian Goldner? I suspect they have met, but I doubt they have ever talked 1:1.

[PrometheanVigil]

The manager of a division of a pharmacy company in a mega-corp would, at most report to the president or CEO of the pharmacy company. And probably would report to someone below the president. The president reports to a VP, who maybe reports to the CEO.

I think understand what you're saying but you said that the president of the pharma reports to the VP of the pharma...? Or did you mean the VP of the parent company of the pharma?

It's like D&D at Hasbro. Hasbro is a 5 billion dollar company employing 5000 people. Do you think Mearls reports to Brian Goldner? I suspect they have met, but I doubt they have ever talked 1:1.

Err, no. Just no. Mearls is just in a position in a sub-company two or more rungs down the corporate ladder. There's no reason they'd EVER meet. Mearls has no real financial influence on the decisions Hasbro makes for WOTC and D&D (which are the only ones that matter).

@all (but hicks and tussock particularly)

This thread is actually pretty good in terms of real-life applicable content. Talking about how things are realistically organized to make money is always more interesting than some fantasy shire where the term "reeve" gets thrown about.

[kzt]

The manager of a division of a pharmacy company in a mega-corp would, at most report to the president or CEO of the pharmacy company. And probably would report to someone below the president. The president reports to a VP, who maybe reports to the CEO.

I think understand what you're saying but you said that the president of the pharma reports to the VP of the pharma...? Or did you mean the VP of the parent company of the pharma?

VP of the parent company

It's like D&D at Hasbro. Hasbro is a 5 billion dollar company employing 5000 people. Do you think Mearls reports to Brian Goldner? I suspect they have met, but I doubt they have ever talked 1:1.

Err, no. Just no. Mearls is just in a position in a sub-company two or more rungs down the corporate ladder. There's no reason they'd EVER meet. Mearls has no real financial influence on the decisions Hasbro makes for WOTC and D&D (which are the only ones that matter).

I've met the CEO of the last three companies I've been part of over the last 18 years. I've talked to one of them, in a room full of people, for about 15 seconds. And at best they were my bosses bosses boss.

So I don't see it it as unlikely they they have met at some meeting or management retreat thing.