Joining such an up-and-coming company as the head of HR was a great opportunity for Adam, who was still quite young compared to most Head of HR in most large-scale companies. The driving atmosphere of Atari inspired Adam and he integrated very fast into the culture of the firm. Unfortunately for him, literally every head of any major department was after him from the very start. Everybody knew that Atari had large sums of liquidity lying on their bank accounts, but only Simon himself or the Head of HR could move this money, without going through a series of checks and balances.
Most of the time they had to face Simon, who would recklessly smash down their advancements, if they didn't seem it worthy enough. Except for Steve Wozniak and Gunpei Yokoi, everybody had a sad experience with getting thrown out of Simon's office.
This caused everybody else to focus on Adam instead. If they couldn't finance the projects they came up with, they could at least increase their available manpower, right?
After not trying to offend all the senior managers of Atari at once, he granted many of their proposals to increase manpower. He knew that their boss loved poaching talents and increasing reserves before they were needed. Simon explained his philosophy of talent acquisition to him in detail, especially in the field of technical reserves.
Sadly, Adam signed off on hiring many people in design, marketing, and business administration. They were very needed for the company, but not at this stage. It would have been fine to hire them a year or even two later. The current work pressure and effectivity of the management of Atari decreased by a large amount due to those signings.
Even though Simon approved of most of these new employees, which proved Adam's skill in finding talents for Atari, but he was not satisfied with the amount of people hired, and that his new Head of HR got pressured into hiring on such a large scale.
Because he couldn't fire those newfound talents, to not hurt the image of Atari towards the market of new talents, he had to put some of people inside the company on fire. Most department heads received a serious scolding for hiring over their needed capacity and indirectly forcing Simon to speed up the development of Atari.
The biggest backlash was received by Adam himself. After being the first high level manager to literally get yelled at by Simon himself, he left the office of the chairman with his head down and anger within his chest. From that point onwards Adam changed his manners completely. He would strip any department of their underwear if they wanted to hire new talents. Since this event happened, he only agreed to hire four additional employees, all of them belonging to the hardware department. They studied in famous American universities and belong to the top of their fields and were great help for Gunpei Yokoi and his up to this point fully Japanese team.
This decision caused his relationship with many department heads to plummet, but he gained the respect of most of them and regained the affirmation of Simon, Dennis, and Tanja.
When most people left the conference room, Simon turned to his two most important and capable helpers in Atari.
"Okay, let's stop with the formalities. Spending such a long time in a serious meeting is really exhausting", Simon said, while throwing away his jacket and just lying on his chair, leaning back as much as possible.
Tanja was giggling at this side, while Dennis had a rather helpless smile on his face. Both were already used to their boss and his shenanigans when he was tired and didn't bother anymore. After circling around in his chair a few times, he regained his serious composure and gave a few warnings.
"Tanja, I need you to finish the acquisition by the end of Mai at the latest. I don't care whether it costs a few more million, get the negotiation done. Do you understand?"
Seeing her get serious and just responding with a slight nod, Simon was already satisfied. After getting to know the businesswoman in front of her for a year, he was very relieved with any project she handled during this time. His brother, Alexander, assured him that the negotiations would be completed in one or two months at the latest as well.
After figuring out the business of the Los Angeles Lakers he turned his head towards Dennis Watson.
"Dennis, my condolences, you must fix the mess your subordinates caused me and Adam Baldwin in recent weeks. Not only do you have to deal with the commissioner of the NBA, Mr. Kennedy, but you also need to handle the additional working force Adam hired for Atari. To put those people to appropriate use we will need to start a new project I wanted to start a year or two later."
When the two top managers heard this, they both got excited. While Tanja was mostly just excited and full of expectations, Dennis was already treading the immense workload that would hit him up next. They were very serious and continued to listen:
"We will continue to create new games and new IPs in the future, each with its own distinct characters and storylines, maybe even their own worlds and items.
This will upon us many possibilities we can figure out in the future, among them the large market of toys. I always wanted to acquire our own toy factory and not outsource this business, thus losing a lot of the profits. Now we are not quite ready and not in need of this factory, but not using the designers, business talents and marketing power we acquired would be a waste as well.
Therefore, you will have to acquire a new small-scale factory in New Jersey, maybe even close to the Red Bull production base. We will use this as the American Headquarters of the future toy company. There we will mainly design and test new toys and do trial production. Most of the bulk of our future toys will be produced in low wage countries somewhere in Asia. Anybody that offers the suggestion to produce large scale in the United States will get fired, don't even ask me for an opinion."
Dennis breathed a sigh of relief. In the near future this toy company would only do preliminary work and not instantly become an important part of Atari. He was glad he could slowly build the foundation instead of having to rush this toy factory a year or two later and instantly put it in working mode, but he would never voice this opinion out loud and contradict his boss.