Exec

EXEC — Lead From The Back

With Fierce Style

Where most people in Night City live in what can best be called 'consumerist squalor' the Corpos get beaverville apartments and Corner offices. Not that these are safer or less violent. The corner office just comes with better catering. Corporate Executives can come from any walk of life. Sure not as many come from slum rats but the ones that do are doggedly loyal bastards who will do anything to support the corporation. While the Exec's born into corporate comfort are also raised on a diet of propaganda and paranoia, So they know what cost of failure and the perks of success.

Every Exec climbed, is climbing, or got thrown off the ladder trying, and at every rung of it there's someone below willing to kill for the job and someone above willing to kill to keep them from getting it. Literally. Welcome to Corporate. Don't get comfortable, have a doughnut.

History

The Corporations ran everything before the War, and they never really stopped, they just got more honest about it. When the largest Megacorps on the planet fought a war on par with anything a real government could throw down, the old fiction that Corporate leadership floated above consequence stopped holding water. What replaced it, at least on paper, is the Rule of the Faces: every Corporation legally filing in the EuroTheatre, China, the Free States, or the New United States has to name a single living person, its largest shareholder, as the Face who takes the fall if the company's malfeasance ever gets proven. Prison, ruin, or worse, depending on how bad it was. The Corporation survives. The Face is who pays for it.

That single rule reshaped what it means to be an Exec. Underneath the Face, the Corporate ladder still runs the way it always has: junior executive, Manager, Assistant Vice President, Vice President, all the way up to an Executive Vice President who actually runs the place day to day while the Face handles the optics and the liability. Advancement is supposed to be about merit. In practice it runs on nepotism, backroom deals, drugs, blackmail, the occasional Assassination, and every rung of that ladder is exactly as dangerous as the one below it, just with better security detail.

The Corner Office

What actually separates an Exec from everyone else grinding away at a desk job is the Team. Almost every Corporate Exec above a certain rank keeps a personal cadre of covert operatives on the books, on paper a secretary or a driver, off the books a Netrunner, a bodyguard, or worse. Building and keeping that Team is the whole game. Team members work for an Exec out of Loyalty rather than blind obedience, and Loyalty has to be earned constantly: a compliment here, a bonus there, actually looking out for them when a job goes bad. Let it slip and a Team member won't just underperform, they'll refuse a job outright, botch it on purpose, or, if it slips far enough, turn on the Exec who let them down and sell them out to whoever's paying better.

The perks that come with the job are real, and they're also a leash. A Corporation hands a new Exec a signing bonus of proper Businesswear, access to a Corporate Conapt rent-free for as long as they stay on payroll, and eventually Trauma Team coverage paid straight out of the company account. All of it disappears the moment an Exec walks, unless they walk straight into another Corporation willing to match the offer. Most Employment Contracts make sure that walking isn't a casual decision in the first place, locking an Exec in for a set term before they're free to jump firms, which is exactly why so few Execs actually leave clean. They get fired, they get replaced, or they get promoted far enough that leaving stops sounding like freedom and starts sounding like a demotion.

While this generously assumes an Exec can handle most jobs on their own(plus their team) in reality things are much more complicated than that. Sure an exec might have a netrunner on their payroll from the company but what happens when you need a job done off the books? Or you know for a fact that the corp netrunner wont commit a serious crime no matter what you pay? What happens when you cant bring corp security in for an assassination because it might look bad for the company? That's when the Exec needs some outside help. That's when they need a real crew.

Different Departments

Not every corporate ladder-climber is wearing the same suit. In fact every corps background and character changes how the Exec might be dressed and acts. An Arasaka Exec will usually lean into Black suits with Red accents and try to be perfect with everything they do, while a Militech Exec will very likely keep green on them or the NUSA colors in a tie or pin while wearing a more durable and less sleek looking suit to make themselves appear more rugged than they are.

• Junior Executives — Fresh into the Corporation, ambitious, and still naive enough to believe the job is about the work rather than the survival. Most of what they do is prove they can be trusted with a real Team before someone above them decides they're a threat instead of an asset. Junior Execs can be easily identified by their excitement and loyalty to the company line. Very few of them will have had the time to be jaded about the reality of their jobs.

• Information Officer — The spy department(no matter what they try to tell you). These Execs are the James Bond (in their own mind) of the office and they work hard to keep up on that image. This means that everyone else in the office is scared of them when they are doing well, and making fun of them behind their backs when they aren't.

• Independent Founders — The rare Exec who walks away from Corporate structure entirely to build something of their own, usually funded by exactly the kind of connections and capital only a former Corporate insider would have access to. These Execs are in a constant state of low tier panic as they try to get their tiny start up off the ground. One of the rarest type of Exec since things do tend to crash and burn for them.

• The Old Hat — The tough old meat of the office. These people have been in the corp for years. They are good at their jobs, able to weave their way through corporate politics through a mix of not giving a shit and a resting bitch face. These Execs don't get into the edgerunning game out of need, they get into it out of boredom. They no longer buy the company line and know what the real is all about. They are tougher than old boots and usually have enough brainware pumping drugs into them to keep that smile going to kill an elephant.

• The Wannabe — Barely an Exec at all, Wannabes are the corporate no namer's who real title is probably something like 'Intern' or 'Waste Disposal Officer'. These are the ones trying to get to becoming a junior exec and then claw their way even higher. Do they buy the company line? Probably but not always. These are usually ghetto snobs, slum rats with high ideas of themselves, and that snitchy kid on the block who everyone hated because they insisted on reminding the teacher that they needed to give out homework.

• The Corp Kiddy — People raised into the corporate environment, usually in one of the corporate academies. These kids were weened on propaganda and privilege and they see it as an honor to join the corporation. The kind of office suck up who always says Saburo Arasaka's name with breathy reverence and whose parents are probably upper ranked directors or something. They always know someone and their team is probably the gang they formed at the Academy since they can probably trust them further than they can throw them... for now.

Famous Execs

• Hanako Arasaka — Saburo's eldest daughter and current Chief Officer of Arasaka, leading the Kiji Faction with a preference for her own Netrunning research over the spotlight. Quiet, recessive, and reportedly the only person alive who really gets her Fathers long term plans and can lead Arasaka into the future.

• Michiko Sanderson (née Arasaka) — Kei Arasaka's daughter and, by the Rule of the Faces, the reluctant figurehead of the Hato Faction, though she's built her own name running Danger Gal, a private investigation and security firm, and wants nothing to do with the family business that made her famous in the first place.

• Artyom Sokolov — Founder and CEO of Zhirafa, a self-made ex-Edgerunner who built a robotics empire out of a Neo-Soviet arcology upbringing and a talent for making rivals disappear without ever leaving a fingerprint on it. Casual, eccentric, and considerably more dangerous than the streetwear and gold-plated cyberoptics suggest.

• General Donald Lundee — The hard-nosed ex-Marine CEO who ran Militech through the worst of the 4th Corporate War, and the man President Elizabeth Kress reactivated by force when she nationalized the company outright. Proof that even an Exec's retirement is negotiable if you still live in their housing.

See Also

• Cheat Sheet — Skill Checks and Reputation rules.
• Megacorporations — full corporate profiles for Arasaka, Militech, and the rest of the Big Players.

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"You know the old saying, 'lead from the front'? That's bullshit. The best place to lead from is the back. That way you can shoot an underling if they betray you. Or if they're just not useful anymore." — Overseer Steele, Petrochem Production Manager