Many of my clients online here will doubtless recognize my name (or at least the name they
know me by, anyway). What they would not know is my "daylight" business (you really didn't
think all fixers had no legitimate interests, did you?): I advise 3 variety of clients about integrating magic into their business, and on issues they will have to consider involving magic for their business. I am well qualified as a consultant in that field, as I have a BA in C)ccillt Studies along with a Masters of Business Administration. That is why I have been asked to inform you about the state of magic in the modern business world.
To put it bluntly, magic is something that most modern corporations really wished didn't exist. Don't get me wrong: the corporations, especially the megacorps, use magic well and have magical resources that would make the average street mage deep green with envy, but overall, most of them wish they didn't have to deal with it at all. Magic is unpredictable, subjective and difficult to control. Its practitioners tend to be strong-willed eccentrics with, shall we say, "defined" personality traits and beliefs. They are also rare and fairly unique. Magic is an art, and big business and artists have rarely gotten along well together.
Consider the business of magic. Magic is a commodity, a service. Like all commodities it has value and can be bought and sold. There are businesses based around the buying and selling of magical commodities, too, but there are several important factors that make these businesses what they are.
Art
First off, magic is not an assembly-line procedure, it is an art, and therefore relies on the talents of an artist. If someone decides to open a beauty salon and they are wildly successful, they can expand and open new stores, maybe start a franchise, and expand the business. If a magician decides to go into business doing exclusive makeovers by magic and is wildly successful, they're going to be hard-pressed to find enough magicians interested in beauty makeovers to make a franchise work. The business is hinged on the talents of a very important individual: the magician.
That means thar most magically-oriented businesses are small-scale and exclusive. There are beauty salons run by magicians who do makeovers by magic, but very few that offer that service exclusively. Most offer more "mundane" service and have the magical service as a premium or gimmick. The few businesses that do only magic makeovers are very exclusive and cater to a small and very wealthy clientele.
Some of the most exclusive salons will even hold on to a lock of your hair so that you can call them up from across town -- or even across the country -- and have them do a make-over on you remotely so that you look perfect for that special occasion.
Yeah, and just imagine the other uses that all those ritual samples from various wealthy
and importent people could be put to. Hope that salon spends a little money on security.
The same is true for businesses that cater to magicians: themselves a generally small and wealthy clientele. There are talismongers, lore stores, etc. that all offer goods and services the magicians need. They tend to be small, exclusive and expensive because of the small customer base that they have. If there were any profit in a nationwide chain of talisman stores selling to magicians, tmst me, I would have already started one. But there simply isn't enough demand keep a venture like that in business. That's the second important point: the magical market is very small one, but lucrative for the right small businessperson.
The corporations are another matter altogether. Even the most successful small business is nothing but pocket change to a mega-corp, especially one of the AAA corps. The corporations are, as a rule, not interested in the magical marketplace, but are content to leave that to small businesses that are better suited to it. The corporations prefer instead to integrate magic and magical services when possible into their other offerings in order to cover all of their bases, since magic is a factor of 2056 life that can't be ignored (as much as some people might like to).
The major exceptions to Nemo's comments about megacorps not getting much into magical services are Saeder-Krupp and Aztechnology. I mean, S-K's CEO is a fraggin' dragon!
Both corps are good examples of how far ruthlessness and some carefully applied magical talent can take you. They owe their success to applying their magical resources to things other than marketing, that's for sure.
Take for example, the average corporation. If they are involved in providing security, such as Eagle Security, Lone Star or Knight Errant, they obviously need to consider magical security services, which are much in demand from corporate and private clients of all types. If the company is involved in aquaculture, they need parabiologists and magical specialists who can help improve the yield of krill farming. If the company is in entertainment, they can use magicians for special effects work and as story fodder for tri-Ds and sims. And if the company is a true mega-corp, they use magicians for all of these things and more.
The status of magicians in major corporations is somewhat akin to the status of skilled technical personnel in companies in the mid- to late twentieth century. These so-called "gurus" held an almost mystical knowledge (usually about computers) that helped their division or department run smoothly. They were valuable based on their unique talents in the same way that magicians are valuable as a unique commodity these days. This is why magician employees are usually given considerably more leeway than many other corporate employees: their rarity.
That's pretty hard to believe; seems to me like you can't throw a fragging bnck without hitting a magician these days.
That's because magicians are heavily concentrated in two areas the corps and the shadows, both of which we interact with a lot. So it just seems to be a lot more than average. Plenty
of good sararimen go their whole life without ever seeing a magician (or at least someone they know is a magician).
In the corps, magicians are pnmanly concentrated in R&D and Security. Then Technical
Services Entertainment and General Management, in order of frequency. After corporate service,
magicians are found in (in order of frequency) the government, the military, schools and universities, small business and private contractors or independent consultants. Tough to say how many magicians there are in the shadows, but I'd say that it's a pretty fair number; probably including some of those "independent consultants.'
There are three kinds of lies, chummers: lies, damn lies and statistics. The kid's figures also don't include the SINless; just some ballpark estimates from the gov't that are almost always too low by a factor of ten.
Yeah, but SINless magicians are almost always so by choice. If you're a SINless kid in the
Barrens and you have the Talent, there'll be half a dozen corps willing to get you a SIN and put you through school if you'll sign a contract to be a good little mage for them forever when it's all said and done.
More Magic
Back to Shadis #32 Table of Contents
Back to Shadis List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Master List of Magazines
© Copyright 1998 by Alderac Entertainment Group
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com