The World

Seventy years ago, the business world was taken by storm by the appearance of a self-help book. The first people to unlock its secrets gained immense power, and the face of business changed forever. The appearance of the book is now know as Fiscal Year Zero.

The first few Fiscal Years were dark times. Gurus had barely begun to understood the Habits, and they wielded their power with erratic abandon. Entire markets collapsed, companies were downsized seemingly at random, people lived in constant fear of Redundancy and the water coolers were refilled less often. Those were dark times.

But from the ashes rose the first masters of the Habits. Gurus who understood the power they wielded. Who knew how to tap into Synergy and use it to maximise profits. As the years went by, a few gained legendary status, working miracles on behalf of their parent companies. Those corporations whose Gurus were weak or ineffectual were inevitably swallowed by their betters. Hostile takeovers became the norm.

A handful of corporations became titanic, such that they eclipsed all others and replaced entire governments. They waged a subtle shadow war amongst themselves for control of lesser industries and markets but, on the surface, an uneasy truce existed. Their Gurus had become too powerful to guarantee that any one corporation could escape unscathed should they start waging open war.

Now those Gurus are approaching retirement age, and a new generation of driven and ambitious employees prepare to climb the corporate ladder. The fate of the entire world rests on the shoulders of these hotshot new employees.

FY0 - The Five Habits of Highly Effective People is published to worldwide acclaim. Its author is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literanomics.

FY2 - The European Union goes bankrupt and is forced to sell Greece, Spain and Portugal to a Brazilian mining concern.

FY5 to FY7 - The format wars results in the melting of the polar ice caps, the largest refugee crisis in history and the adoption of Betamax by all major movie studios.

FY9 - China becomes the first nation to incorporate its government, rebranding itself the Red Star Trading Consortium.

FY12 - The World Trade Organisation is merged with NATO making it the largest financial institution in the world and the only one to possess a nuclear arsenal.

FY18 - Belgium is paved over, creating the first car-park visible from space.

FY21 - A patent infringement suit upon the concept of “cool” sparks the First Great Patent War, a conflict that consumes almost all established brands in an ever greater series of acquisitions into larger and larger companies.

FY34 - The United Nations defaults on a massive loan incurred while trying to promote the catastrophic 'International Bike To Work' day and is acquired by Global Dynamics Corp.

FY45 - The Eastern Seaboard of the USA is acquired in a hostile takeover by the Leonov Group.

FY49 - The Global Charter on Human Rights is rewritten as a binding employment contract.

FY53 - Canada vanishes in what is later described as the single largest embezzlement in corporate history. Due to the Vatican Bank's large holdings in maple syrup futures, organised religion is declared insolvent.

FY54 - Saturday and Sunday are replaced with Friday B and Friday B-2 as part of the fifth annual global productivity drive.

FY71 - Lagrange Financials Unlimited become the first corporation to put a stock exchange in space.

FY73 - Present Day

With the rise of the mega-corporations and the increasing demand for sovereign bonds the nations of the earth rapidly found themselves in debt to the increasingly powerful financial giants. Some countries, such as China, acted quickly and incorporated their governments pursuing an aggressive strategy of hostile takeovers of smaller stakeholders. Others were forced to mortgage their land and heritage to the megacorps to meet their obligations, beginning with Britain’s sale of its monarchy to the La Vita fashion chain ¹⁾ in FY3.

To raise capital to pay their debts the majority of UN members agreed to allow electoral votes to be traded on the NY and London stock exchanges in FY38. Three hours later democracy was declared ‘off-strategy’ by an overwhelming vote of nation-state stockholders and the majority of countries were rebranded as employee-housing developments.

A handful of countries maintained majority ownership of their electoral rolls and comprise some of the customers of the mega-corporations.

The last sovereign territory of the former USA, having seceded from the rest of the union after the inclusion of the 'No Sue' amendment to the US constitution. Most corporations have agreed to abide by its decisions when it comes to arbitrating disputes, which makes buying and selling politicians an important aspect of current-day business practices.

Initially created as tax dodge by Germany to avoid onerous international trade levees, Germany 2 was later spun out into an independent nation-state consisting of an artificial island bearing three small cities. The nation is constantly on the move around the world's oceans to maximise its time-zone utility and to avoid mooring fees.

The only remaining province of Canada. Declared independence after the Canadian-Australian war that resulted in the kangaroo being declared the national animal of Canada. Ruled over by His Royal Majesty Emperor Claude Le Strode XI, described by some as the greatest political mind of his generation and by others as a paranoid lunatic. The protectorate is the most heavily armed nation on earth with 98% of its GDP assigned to its defense budget.

Situated on the former site of the Swiss Confederation, the No-Man's Land is the direct result of the mass dumping of toxic financial assets into unprotected banks. It has now become a blighted, withered landscape devoid of investment opportunities. Corporate scientists have lately been highly interested in the crude new economies developing under these extreme conditions.

Mr. Park's New Kowloon is the best example of the new types of Distributed States that have sprung up in the wake of the dissolution of many nations. Franchise territories belonging to Mr. Park's New Kowloon are found all around the world as self-contained sovereign settlements, with greater security and quality of life than can be afforded by traditional states.

A tiny concrete platform off the coast of Orlando, Florida that has made a name for itself as a data/whale haven where no idea or document, no matter how salacious or brazenly against corporate policy, cannot be stored. Since people pay highly for this sort of service, it retains its independence with a fleet of high-tech battleships and darker things lurking in the depths.

The vast majority of computers are designed to maximise their users' productivity. To this end, they can do little more than run a text processor, spreadsheets, and have some way of accessing the corporate intranet. In FY60 the novel invention of electronic mail was abandoned in favour of memos delivered via pneumatic tube as it was found that this method of communication reduced the spread of amusing cat videos by 503%, tripling effective productivity, while boosting revenue at the company's pneumatic technology division.

Computer archives are used to store some data in the form of magnetic tape but every mega-corporation has learned to appreciate the power of the filing cabinet. Paper records allow for easy access, are difficult for auditors to locate and in the event of auditing may be rapidly destroyed.