Zero-One MonoCorporation

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Zero-One Monocorporation (01MC)
01mc_logo_small.jpg
Headquarters: Rhea
Nationality: Zero-One
Specialty: Information Technology Products, Consumer Goods, Weaponry, Personal Vehicles, Commercial Goods, Engineering Consultation, Environmental Maintenance Technology, Architecture, Foodstuffs, Luxuries, Chemicals, Genetics, Robotics
Storefront: None

A large multinational corporation headquartered in the Queendom of Zero-One, Zero-One Monocorporation (01MC or "The MonoCorporation" for short) is the largest business interest in Zero-One, employing nearly 95% of all minds in the Queendom, and one of the largest businesses in the Triumvirate of Yut along with KarmaCorp TechSystems, IngolfTech, the Feanor Holdings Group, and TME Industries. Besides being a major defense contractor for the Triumvirate of Yut Combined Services and the sole manufacturer of Queendom Armed Conflict Force materiel, 01MC also has divisions covering almost every imaginable kind of product from forks and spoons to luxury civilian spacecraft an custom cybernetic augments. It has branch offices in nearly every Triumvirate of Yut nation and market reach far beyond that, including essentially designing The Freethinkers' spacy and its infamous "as is" arms trade with The United States of Allanea immediately prior to the One Day War (and military sales to The Federation of Sentient Peoples during its occupation of Allanea after the war).

Services

Zero-One MonoCorporation, as essentially the sole trade entity in the Queendom, does not and can not specialize in products as a normal corporation would and instead trades in an extremely broad range more akin to an industrialized nation with a major post-industrial sector. In addition to simply selling goods or production licenses to foreign firms (something it does only in the rarest of times), the MonoCorporation will often sell the time of its individual workers to solve some particular challenge or develop a new product for a customer, with the intellectual property ownership negotiated between the customer and 01MC.

Common goods and services include:

  • Advanced information technology products. Perhaps the most predictable produce of a cyberspatial company, these products include servers, routers, switches, computers of all shapes and sizes, wirelessly networked consumer goods, and the like. 01MC's products are by default compatible with GLONET and the YutLink with some backwards compatibility to W3C standards for models sold to less advanced customers.
  • Agricultural Products. 01MC sells everything from tractors and prefabricated grain silos to food itself, especially around Mars. While seeming relatively recent, 01MC has been associated with the food industry since at least the introduction of the "Droidburger" automated fast-food restaurant chain. While most food produced by the MonoCorporation in the past was synthesized from basic chemical components, 01MC has, since The Volarian Impact, shifted towards naturally produced foods in response to market desires and recurring infrastructure costs as compared to per-unit profits.
  • Architecture and construction. Especially on Mars, 01MC has a considerable market presence in architectural design and construction for physical (usually organic) entities. Zero-One originally had (and still has) a good deal of organic habitat space, and the Zero-One territory of Sirenum is arguably almost mostly organic. It leverages these experiences and the rest of its engineering knowledge into producing structures both pre-fabricated and customized. It also provides construction services to build its own designs or foreign designs on contract.
  • Chemicals. Most modern industry requires chemicals in bulk to perform their various operations. 01MC takes advantage of its extremely broad resource base to sell these chemicals, in their requisite bulk, to whoever is willing to pay the cost of synthesis and shipping (like any other chemical supplier). Additionally, 01MC puts a great deal of money into research to find novel new chemicals that can make manufacturing processes more efficient, replace or augment petrochemical fuels, new plastics, or meet needs as yet unseen.
  • Consumer products. The MonoCorporation really does sell toasters, refrigerators, cutlery, furniture, and most anything else that people wouldn't reasonably expect to be shipped through space to a foreign country. Cognizant of this fact, however, 01MC always manufactures these products where it holds local industrial resources and requires them to be self-sufficient 'corporate colonies' so as to maintain a lean logistics chain.
  • Corporate products. Someone has to make office chairs, staplers, paperclips, and other such goods. 01MC happily makes these for companies which, by the MonoCorporation's broad nature, are probably competitors in another field. Their low cost and high quality emphasizes 01MC's "Play Fair 99% Of The Time" philosophy, however, and assists in building respect for the MonoCorporation at the grass-roots level of its competitors (a possible fifth columnist strategy).
  • Environment MRO technology. With growing concern over global warming and the environment, along with United Nations resolutions concerning keeping the environment clean, 01MC capitalizes on the inadequate state of most nations' environmental technologies by offering solutions to prevent and repair environmental damage, as well as maintain environmental health. Artificial life support systems are often included in this category, and as usual, the MonoCorporation has products for national, corporate, and consumer customers.
  • Finance. 01MC runs a series of banking and investment institutions for both consumer and corporate finance. While quite stable, their practices--directed solely towards wealth-generation and taking advantage of the capitalistic system's ability to generate 'phantom' capital through techniques such as speculation--lead some to be concerned on 01MC's impact on international markets.
  • Wikipedia:Freight. Besides its own goods, the MonoCorporation's robotic freighters also take on outside cargo. While freight is not one of the many emphases of 01MC, it does help to keep every robot freighter full and maintain logistic lines even to locations requiring relatively small levels of freight from major manufacturing centers, saving on draw-down/ramp-up costs associated with the usual practice of only shipping there 'at need.'
  • Industrial consulting. The MonoCorporation commonly sells its services as a consulting firm to other companies wanting to improve their efficiency or determine just how to produce a particular product.
  • Labor. As the MonoCorporation produces robots for internal Queendom use, it naturally sells similar robots to customers who want them to fill similar tasks. While the robot lines used by the Queendom are not only proprietary but also highly protected technologies, export robots are generally very similar with a few improvements removed.
  • Mass production of foreign-designed goods by contract. Due to high start up costs, 01MC only commonly offers this when the per-item-produced fee will generate profit and the ability to sell aftermarket spares improves long-term profitability somewhat. On the other hand, becoming a primary producer for a foreign good also allows 01MC to hold a great deal of power on that good, so occasionally a small loss can be accepted if the political dividend is great enough.
  • Medical technology. With many legacy patents from the long-since defunct TriOptimum Corporation and other places, 01MC is amongst the world leaders in genetics and medicine. It offers an extremely broad array of medical technologies, services, and goods: artificial replacement organs or augmentations (both cybernetic or organic), medicines, surgical hardware and procedures, nanological treatments, diagnosis aids, psychiatric diagnosis tables, medical training and textbooks, catalogs of the chemical effects of most known chemicals on various species.
  • Military hardware. International arms trade is highly profitable in the multiverse, and Zero-One is no exception to the broad rule that everyone who could export arms does. It offers various product lines under various brand names to appeal to a broad customer base.
  • Petrochemicals. While partially a misnomer as most of the hydrocarbons it sells are from carbonaceous asteroids and thermochemically treated waste both self-produced or bought from other companies and countries, 01MC does sell both oil and coal (or their analogues) as well as particular chemicals synthesized from them, such as petroleum.
  • Software development. Another 'natural' specialty, 01MC develops proprietary software both for direct sale to customers as well as shared-ownership software to meet specific needs. Perhaps surprisingly 01MC also develops large amounts of open-source software (as well as many proprietary programs for said software), although detractors argue this to be a strategy to establish standards and thus control over open-source computing that it can later profit on.

Structure

The MonoCorporation is in essence an extremely large and diversified private company controlled by conventional board of directors whose shares are legally limited to citizens of the Queendom. Below the board of directors and the shareholders is a series of hierarchies broadly categorized into Value Streams and Centers of Excellence, and below that is a relatively standard corporate hierarchy that transitions from a command-style structure to more of a democratic workplace at the bottom.

Board of Directors

The Board of Directors (generally shortened to "BoD") is the undisputed leadership of the MonoCorporation. While shareholders indeed have voting rights in some issues, primarily concerning acquisitions, very rarely do their various interests manage to make the simple majority required for even the most basic resolutions and so power reverts back to the BoD.

The BoD consists of the chief level officers of the MonoCorporation plus the single greatest non-officer shareholder, who is intended to represent the interests of the shareholders in general (an idea commonly criticized as absurd at best and impossible at worst). Several of the members of the board (but not a majority) are individual nodes of the S.H.O.D.A.N. gestalt that have specialized in their given tasks; this has generated a good deal of controversy both within and without 01MC. There are rumors that the other members of the BoD are merely personas of S.H.O.D.A.N., but there is no evidence to support this. Public record from within and without the Queendom tends to suggest that these rumors are indeed simply speculative.

The current Board of Directors consists of:

Shareholders

Shares are generally seen more as a statement of voting interest than an actual method of investment, and are traded between citizen-holders more or less freely. Those citizens with income sources external to the MonoCorporation can of course buy more shares, which gives them considerable power to counter or command the various voting blocs of the populace. All MonoCorporation employees (which make up most of the Queendom's citizenry) are given shares in the MonoCorporation as well as the usual processing power and computer storage space as pay (as Zero-One actually lacks an internal currency), but most trade a large portion of theirs to trusted representatives. Just in case they never get those shares back, however, it is a fair trade in creative product.

Centers of Excellence

The MonoCorporation is broadly organized into Centers of Excellence, or CoE for short. These centers are organized around the core competencies of the corporation, such as Software Engineering, Accounting, and Marketing. The CoE are organized more akin to a meritocratic guild than a conventional corporate command hierarchy, with senior and more skilled employees having greater authority. However, the purpose of these CoEs is to support the value streams by maintaining standards, and sharing and applying professional knowledge, not to act as some sort of command and control system. 01MC's business model often shuffles personnel from one project to another in short order, so it is vital that an electrical engineer working on a starship can communicate effectively with and thus receive continuity information from electrical engineers working on a clock radio should he be transferred.

While general standing in a Center of Excellence is based primarily on public opinion of one's skills, titles are obtained through successfully meeting certification requirements for lesser levels and success in 'challenges' for higher levels. For example, a Marketing Specialist II may simply have to acquire certification to implement a marketing strategy in a particular location, but a mind looking to become a Senior Marketing Expert V (the highest 'rank' in the Marketing CoE) would have had to have beaten all the other SrMktngExpt4s in a competition for "best marketing campaign" for some region as demanded by the Chief Marketing Officer.

Value Streams

Value Streams are the organizations actually responsible for making and managing the MonoCorporation's assets. Every good or service makes up its own Value Stream, and this Value Stream calls on members of the Centers of Excellence at need to fulfill its requirements. A personal groundcar Value Stream would require support from the Planning, Quality, Systems Engineering, Propulsion Engineering, Structural Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Automotive Engineering, Ergonomic Engineering, Environment Engineering CoEs, to name a few. The Value Streams make up the actual mid-level command-and-control of the MonoCorporation, with only a small amount of organizational overhead above.

Several Value Streams, such as Personnel Management and Internal Auditing support the entire MonoCorporation rather than a single product. While technically umbrella groups over the Value Streams, they are generally considered equal to the Value Streams in terms of organizational structure as their umbrella role, by 01MC corporate philosophy, should emphasize 'support' rather than 'command.'

Upper Management

Upper management are always senior members of at least one Center of Excellence, one of which is always Management. Upper managers select new upper managers based on consensus, and these new upper managers are vetted in by the Chief Officer responsible for that particular Value Stream. This is essentially the conventional mode of corporate ascension and of course has the usual politics related to it (but the CoE seniority requirement generally prevents the rise of ineffective managers).

Middle Management

Middle managers are elected by team supervisors and vetted by upper management, retaining their positions until voted out of them or raised to upper management, creating an 'up or out' performance atmosphere. While it is possible for a middle manager to remain sufficiently popular with his subordinate supervisors to retain her position, the fact that supervisors themselves are elected makes this an unstable solution at best. Middle management in 01MC serves primarily two roles: first, it acts as the lowest level of the 'command' system, theoretically putting them far enough away from disputes to arbitrate on them successfully while preventing micromanagement due to the same distance; second, it acts as a politicized testing ground where those with leadership skills and potential become upper managers and those who do not return to the team level.

Supervisor and Worker Level

Supervisors of teams are elected democratically by their employees and primarily serve as a liaison between management (which the supervisors help install and maintain) and the workers. In terms of conventional managerial tasks they act primarily as facilitators, generally leaving the team to organize itself by distributing tasks as needed to achieve the schedules handed down from management. Most decisions on the team level are made democratically in order to allow supervisors to actually supervise work rather than dictate it. One weakness is that the supervisor is unable to arbitrate in disputes, but she can ask middle management to do so: a politically risky move for both the supervisor (in case the decision disgruntles one side of the argument) and the middle manager (should he decide not to step in). This generally causes supervisors to use middle management diktat as a matter of last resort--the middle manager may very well make a decision that will lead to the supervisor being voted out--and the middle manager will usually respond to such a request--as being reticent to do so could easily engender negative sentiments amongst the supervisors and lead to the middle manager being voted out.

Relationship to the Queendom

Populace

Government

Corporate Philosophy

The MonoCorporation exists, by the admission of more than one of its head executives, to generate wealth, no more and no less. Its mission to achieve this end is to sell practically everything to practically everybody, only declining to make a sale when it would be politically inconvenient for the Queendom or its allies. Additionally, its pricing strategies and payment options are highly flexible to ensure the greatest number of customers and greatest possible revenue. To prevent garnering the image of a completely soulless megacorporation with no interest beyond its own profits, 01MC invests heavily in marketing, branding, and public relations to portray itself in a positive light.

End User License Agreement

One of the less conventional ways it has found to do this is through the use of End User License Agreements, extremely flexible legal documents attached to nearly everything they sell and more often than not coded holographically in the actual structure of the product. EULAs for products sold to unreliable or untrustworthy customers are lengthy, intentionally convoluted, and designed to essentially give the MonoCorporation the right to refuse service (including the continued use of the product) for any reason whatsoever. This allows 01MC to hold tremendous power over customers it does not trust but can keep through predatory pricing strategies.

For most customers, the EULA is a formality that essentially constitutes a hold harmless agreement for 01MC in all things except clearly faulty design or engineering (as opposed to labeling). 01MC has a solid record of 'never' changing these agreements without warning the consumer ahead of time, and only rarely does it ever change the agreement without the end user's consent. However, it is also widely known that those customers the MonoCorporation considers dangerous, risky, or untrustworthy are given no quarter. Beyond that, though, there is a special class of customer to which it will intentionally sell shoddy goods or misleading services.

M4|2K Customers

The M4|2K ("Mark", see definition 16) customer is a "special consumer category" in which the MonoCorporation places all of its least-trusted customers (for a time, the architypical M4|2K customer was Allanea). While ostensibly a "preferred buyer" club with access to exclusive goods, most of the things 01MC sells to these customers are thinly disguised shams or shoddy goods, all thoroughly protected by a EULA that practically ensures that the customer has no legal recourse when the good inevitably (and sometimes intentionally) fails dramatically. The kinds of products 01MC sells to these customers are generally marked, almost obviously so, as to highlight the perceived idiocy of the customer. They would almost classify as practical jokes if their results were not usually fatal. Examples of products offered only to M4|2K customers are:

  • 80M8 Nucleonic Omnidirectional Thrust System: Sold as an advanced fusion propulsion system for fighters to Allanea and subsequently called the "Kazansky Drive," the 80M8 was actually, as suggested by its alphanumeric code, a bomb. Fusion based, each 80M8 had approximately a ten megaton yield and were linked together by quantum entanglement ansibles. The result was the destruction of Allanea's Liberty space station.[1]
  • Biochemical Petroleum Extraction Enzymes: Sold to Allanea as a method to simplify the extraction of oil as well make it cleaner to the environment, these otherwise unnamed enzymes actually decomposed any oil contaminated with them into chemically inert and incombustable compounds.[2]
  • Tarugo Light Air Superiority Fighter: A perfectly conventional jet fighter[3] except for its use of:
    • Pressed FibroCellulose Armor (PFCA): cardboard, used to skin the aircraft and supposedly armor it.
    • Transparent Polyurethane Enhanced Durability and Airflow Layer (TPEDAL): plastic varnish to go over the cardboard.
    • Lamellor-Arrangement Data Input-Output Memory Storage System: a notepad, spiral-bound according to the marketing line "a central steel helical structural member for lamellor component support" and with a cardboard cover. It was intended to be the aircraft's avionics system.
    • Quantized Mechanical Computation System: an abacus. Marketed as "the only onboard computation system to date which can be manipulated in three dimensions"
    • High-Density Braided Aluminum Force Transferral Systems in Polycarbonate Insulator Sheaths: aluminum wires in plastic sheaths, acting as physical linkages between the control column and the control surfaces.
  • Rube-class Troop Transport / Utility Ship: standard QACF "DRAB" utility DropShips that had exceeded their operational lifespan and had been scrapped due to the presence of stress fractures in their hulls, emptied out of any useful technology, refitted with "whatever junk was handy," and sold for fifty billion dollars. Also sold to Allanea.
  • Mark-class Insystem Cruiser: several Rubes "crudely bolted together" and sold to Allanea.

01MC only sold these items to nations well outside the good favor of the international community and thus maintained its corporate credibility with its primary trade partners. It has served, however, as a more-or-less successful warning to potentially gullible customers to beware offending the MonoCorporation's sensibilities.

Recent Projects

Martian Military Sales

Martian FoodSats

The Elsani City-States Habitat

Zkasa Environmental Engineering and Construction

Martian Atmospheric Converter

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