The Alamut Corporation has existed in its current form for close to two centuries. Its structure a closely guarded secret, its management and board of directors unknown to the public, its operations shrouded in mystery. Even its legal status is nebulous, protected from scrutiny by an ever-shifting whirlwind of legal maneuvers embedded in Alamut’s culture. The corporation’s organization, chaotic and fluid, only begins to exhibit deeper underlying patterns and logic upon the sort of close inspection and analysis that even skilled, dedicated and experienced observers have trouble decyphering. Because Alamut’s fundamental basis for existence is so unclear and discrete, no such inspections are ever motivated to start; investigation costs money, and Alamut functions so adaptably and flexibly that no organization, public or private, has ever seen the need for closely inspecting an entity that few people know exists in the first place.
Alamut Corp. is so heavily compartmentalized and diversely structured that the legions of executives, lawyers, managers, accountants, project leaders, engineers, secretaries and janitors in the employ of its various subsidiaries-registered-over-shell-companies-through-holding-firms-via-proxy-participation-in-majority-stakes throughout dozens of countries on six continents are usually not even aware of the existence of some broader institution.
Via its presence in over 120 different market segments, Alamut enjoys horizontal and vertical synergies between subordinate establishments. Within the syndicate, different companies belonging directly or indirectly to Alamut or its many divisions may compete viciously against each other in the same market space without ever having a clue that they are part of the same whole. Its stakes in so many interwoven enterprises mean that Alamut enjoys, essentially, a vast set of hedges against itself. It has survived wars, revolutions, depressions, natural disasters, cultural shifts, management trends and any other conceivable eventuality in human civilization’s recent evolution.
At times, without some grand master plan, Alamut’s tendrils have infiltrated churches, governments, schools. Always discrete, the attainment and brokering of influence have never suffered from the overt drive for power or domination that gave meteoric rise to and brought down companies, churches and empires. No employee of Alamut’s daughter companies is capable of seeing enough of the big picture behind the conglomerate to aspire to domination — promising, ambitious individuals rise through the ranks, are transferred, brought down, ensuring that the company exhibits an almost evolutionary, self-healing nature.
Alamut is truly too big to fail. It is also, ironically, too big to succeed, at least by modern business’ beat-the-market-at-all-costs definition of success. The roots of the group’s success lie in a combination of complete lack of aspiration — not by design, but by evolution. Alamut Corporation is unassailable precisely because it does what it needs to keep pace with affairs, to plan for any possible event and to survive. The fact that none of its employees have anything approaching an overview of its goals, strategies, scope or actions means that the entire corporation functions more as an organism than an organization. It is neither good nor evil, but rather completely amoral and impersonal — an economic behavioral scientist’s dream.
And I believe they are hiring. Don’t call them, though. They’ll be in touch.
