Conglomerates/Boardroom and Curia

[Alonsua]

Hi there,

how do you manage characters who own/run several organizations with different wealth levels and activities? Multiple ranks or just one for all of them?

Thank you.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Hi there,

how do you manage characters who own/run several organizations with different wealth levels and activities? Multiple ranks or just one for all of them?

I don't consider a character who owns an organization as having a rank within that organization. Or not necessarily. Rather, the organization serves that person. This is one case of a more general principle. For example, the president of the United States is the commander in chief of the armed forces, but does not (necessarily) hold Military Rank; Jesus was the founder of the Christian churches, but was not a pope or prelate; and similarly, a very wealthy man might own (or own controlling stock in) a huge corporation, but not be a manager or any kind of employee within it.

Also, an organization that is neither authorized to serve the state or society as a whole, nor unique, nor the dominant embodiment of its particular function (as a church might be in a society where nearly everyone belonged to one faith and confession), does not grant Rank in the standard GURPS sense. You can construct lower-cost variants of Rank using the rules in GURPS Social Engineering, worth maybe two points/level, but that's a variant rule. The examples of Rank under the standard rules are all for organizations that monopolize or dominate their fields of endeavor: the armed forces, the civil service, an established church, and so on.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Hi there,

how do you manage characters who own/run several organizations with different wealth levels and activities? Multiple ranks or just one for all of them?

Thank you.

That depends on whether the organizations are truly separate or merely different divisions of your holdings.

[Phantasm]

I tend to treat the CEO and other officers of a corporation or multinational conglomerate of corporations as having a 5/level Merchant Rank, up to Rank 9 for multinational corps. I think a majority shareholder who is fairly hands-off (letting the CEO, CFO, and board of directors run the company for him) would have a Courtesy Merchant Rank; they'd defer to him but be in a position to overrule him on practical matters. A hands-on majority shareholder would probably be the CEO or operate at the same level of Merchant Rank.

It's also possible to take a page from Social Engineering: Pulling Rank and have the Rank indicate the Assistance Roll needed for getting help from the company in some form.

[AlexanderHowl]

The CEO rarely owns a significant percentage of most corporations before they are hired (stock options are a standard form of compensation on the erroneous idea that it incentives CEO performance). Individual people being majority shareholders in multinational corporations are vanishing rare, and the largest shareholders own controlling shares instead (~10% or more of the shares). In reality, the majority of CEOs of multinational companies seem to be con men who loot the companies that hire them through excessive compensation and through short-term strategies that inflate stock values just long enough for the CEO to cash out.

In the majority of corporations, no one person will own a majority of shares, even if they are executive officers. Even in a family owned corporation, it makes sense for a married couple to divide the ownership equally (or for multiple children to divide the ownership equally). In any case, I would think that it would require a company worth trillions of dollars, with hundreds of billions of dollars of annual revenue, to justify Rank 9 for the executive officers.