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.

-- Riko Radojcic