(no subject)
May. 24th, 2004 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerIf you've seen The Last Samurai then you may find the following amusing.
In the scathing inditement of modern company practice, Tom Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a company lawyer left emotionally scarred by his work on the Americorp's hostile takeover of several employee-owned companies and the subsequent stripping of their assets. His research into their outdated but humanistic methods meant that he empathised them them too much, leaving him appalled at the dodgy legal methods used by his corporate masters.
He develops a drug habit and moves onto the lecture circuit where earns a pittance expounding the wonders of various legal instruments used in the very takeovers that drove him from the industry, but just as his life falls entirely apart he's pulled back in by his old PA, who tells him that a Japanese corporation has heard of his work and wants to pay him a fortune to help them upgrade their business methods.
What he finds when he gets there is something far more unsettling - one of their subsidiaries is working with very similar community-led practices to the employee-owned groups he helped destroy before. His task is to train local lawyers in the methods necessary to strip this subsidiary of all of it's assets. He resigns himself to this, but before he can finish training the japanese lawyers they have to fight their first court case. Not only do they not win, but in a surprising turn of events Nathan finds his contract has been transferred to the subsidiary - he'll have to work with his erstwhile enemy and learn their ways for the next six months, when his contract will revert.
Will he be converted to their way of thinking? Will he synergistically link the high-morale old-fashioned ways of doing business with the high-profit methods of the new? Will he have his contract terminated or will he manage to bring his influence to bear on the CEO? Will evil eighties-style management practices be victorious, or can morally-reasonable business practices succeed?
I'll bet you never knew the world of business was so exciting!
In the scathing inditement of modern company practice, Tom Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a company lawyer left emotionally scarred by his work on the Americorp's hostile takeover of several employee-owned companies and the subsequent stripping of their assets. His research into their outdated but humanistic methods meant that he empathised them them too much, leaving him appalled at the dodgy legal methods used by his corporate masters.
He develops a drug habit and moves onto the lecture circuit where earns a pittance expounding the wonders of various legal instruments used in the very takeovers that drove him from the industry, but just as his life falls entirely apart he's pulled back in by his old PA, who tells him that a Japanese corporation has heard of his work and wants to pay him a fortune to help them upgrade their business methods.
What he finds when he gets there is something far more unsettling - one of their subsidiaries is working with very similar community-led practices to the employee-owned groups he helped destroy before. His task is to train local lawyers in the methods necessary to strip this subsidiary of all of it's assets. He resigns himself to this, but before he can finish training the japanese lawyers they have to fight their first court case. Not only do they not win, but in a surprising turn of events Nathan finds his contract has been transferred to the subsidiary - he'll have to work with his erstwhile enemy and learn their ways for the next six months, when his contract will revert.
Will he be converted to their way of thinking? Will he synergistically link the high-morale old-fashioned ways of doing business with the high-profit methods of the new? Will he have his contract terminated or will he manage to bring his influence to bear on the CEO? Will evil eighties-style management practices be victorious, or can morally-reasonable business practices succeed?
I'll bet you never knew the world of business was so exciting!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-05-24 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-24 05:13 pm (UTC)