Between the Titans

This is a story of a regular immigrant engineer, encumbered with the fears and experiences from his old country, fending off large corporate entities pressuring him to sell a patent. And a story of employees of these large corporate entities graduating from the carrot to the stick approach. He feels that he cannot sell a patent for moral and sentimental reasons. They feel that they have to push the boundaries in order to achieve a win. The collision between the different personalities, with their conflicting intentions and worldviews, results in a series of unforeseen and unintended consequences that follow the interactions from California to Montenegro and back. A murder in Montenegro brings the story to a head ...

Theme

Standard management practice is to encourage team spirit and employee loyalty to the company. However, this often breeds the us-versus-them mentality, which could tempt some employees to go beyond the usual norms in order to ensure a victory for their corporate family. The temptation may be especially acute when the stakes are high: such as a corporate life or death situation. In such circumstances, some employees could be tempted to use unethical, immoral, or even illegal means to score a win for their team.

The high-profile legal war between Apple and Qualcomm that has dominated the tech-industry headlines between 2017 and 2019 serves as a backdrop for this fictional story. It was a situation with many billions of dollars at stake: an environment suitable for exploring the psychology of perfectly good people losing their moral compasses in order to achieve a corporate win. And it was also a case that emphasized the very important role that Intellectual Property plays in high-tech industry, and by extension, in modern life so dependent on devices like the ubiquitous smartphones.