Shawarma Karma

Karma Calls Your company has a new console. The investors have questions. The customers have blood. Welcome to Karma Inc., where you have been appointed as the liaison between your employer, its investors, its partners, its critics, and anyone else who thinks they deserve a seat at the table. Your mission is simple: Make the C Box dominate the market. There is only one small problem. The C Box runs on blood from its customers. The hardware is powerful. The backing is substantial. The market is ready. Selling a console powered by human blood is just slightly more complicated than your typical product launch. As Karma Inc.'s liaison, you'll spend your days fielding proposals, negotiating deals, managing crises, protecting, or sacrificing... customer trust, keeping investors happy, and trying to figure out how much damage the company can survive before someone decides you're the problem. Every decision has a price. YOUR QUARTER. YOUR CALL. Manage Karma Inc. through a full 13 week corporate quarter, making decisions under time pressure while juggling competing demands from the board, investors, customers, contractors, partners, and your increasingly unpredictable CEO, Shawarma. Balance: Cash Blood Yield Customer Trust Investor Confidence Shawarma's Mood Operational Risk Staff Strain Controversy Panic And of course, Corporate Expectations Keeping everyone happy is not the objective. Keeping the company alive might be. Keeping your job definitely is. EVERYONE WANTS SOMETHING A rotating cast of publishers, investors, platform holders, subscription executives, technology companies, contractors, public relations operatives, and other deeply trustworthy business partners will arrive with opportunities that sound increasingly reasonable the longer you stare at them. Launch new initiatives. Cut costs. Sell customer data. Expand the subscription model. Outsource your problems. Protect your staff. Protect your numbers. Spin the crisis. Tell the truth. Make a promise. Hope you can keep it. And when Friday arrives, face the board and discover what all those decisions actually cost you. THE LONG GAME Your choices don't simply disappear after you make them. Promises can come due. Relationships can change. Earlier decisions can trigger follow up negotiations, story events, crises, and new opportunities. Success can become an expectation, and today's solution can become next week's problem. Survive long enough and your career starts to develop an identity of its own. Or maybe you're simply the person who somehow made it to Friday again. MULTIPLE WAYS TO FAIL. MULTIPLE WAYS TO WIN. No two careers have to look the same. You can build investor confidence at the expense of customers. Protect the people working for you and take the hit on the quarterly numbers. Chase blood yield until the machine becomes impossible to control. Turn every crisis into a negotiation. Make promises you absolutely should not make. You can even get fired. You can even get acquired. And at the end of each quarter your corporate legacy is recorded, giving you another reason to start over and see what happens when you make different choices.