Traveller Vignette 052

LSP's subsector Chief Executive was a hard-driving son-of-a-bitch called Wallace. He announced when he took the post that he'd fire the lowest performing 10% of his regional and divisional managers every year, because “there's no place at LSP for underperformance” and he'd kept his promise.

The strategy had delivered short term gains, as his subordinates doubled their efforts to stay out of the bottom of the pack, and Wallace apparently got an enormous ego trip from displaying his power through the high-profile firings. Living in constant anxiety was bad for morale, however, and his division was having real problems recruiting the best up-and-coming talent. It didn't do much to develop corporate loyalty, either, which is why I was able to buy complete schematics of the installation for a surprisingly reasonable price from one of the execs he'd fired the previous year


(Author's note - This can be a useful plot idea, explaining how characters can get access to corporate data networks or plans of facilities, sold by disgruntled staff. Mr Wallace is also likely to have made a lot of enemies who might want to see him dead or at least humiliated. As a senior executive, he'd have extensive personal security, but ironically it might be compromised by the very problems above, in a kind of poetic justice)

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