Post by Yeager on Aug 3, 2011 19:39:34 GMT -5
"A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart."
~Jonathan Swift
Name: Kaufman
Gender: Female
Age: 35
Height: 5'7
Weight: 136 lbs
Appearance: Kaufman is a sturdily built, fairly curvaceous woman. She has a diamond-shaped face with thin, sloping brows and brown eyes set behind oval-lensed glasses. She wears her dark pink hair simply, hanging long and loose with some side-swept bangs to frame her face. Her use of cosmetics is fairly minimal, though she is fond of lipstick in various shades of red and pink. Clothes-wise, she follows established guild styles—long, loose shirts; belted vests, coats or stoles; trousers tucked into boots and gauntlet gloves. She prefers conservative colors, such as earth tones, black, white and gray. As she is a well-known figure, she tends not to bother wearing the symbol of her guild.
She has a generally forthcoming, straightforward manner, quick and concise in her movements and her speech.
Personality: Kaufman is very much a born and bred guildsman, operating under the philosophies that sparked and fed the flames of the guilds’ rebellion from the empire. She believes that businesses—and by association, guilds—have an obligation to provide for their employees and customers, offering multiple employee benefits and low prices and refraining from excessive greed. Wealth is not something to be concentrated among the few but to be used to help the many. Rules and regulations should protect the activities of those administering such aid and keep them from corruption, because there are right ways and wrong, dishonest, egocentric ways to do things, and people are far too prone to slipping into the wrong. More often than not, they need to be corrected, reprimanded, forced back into the right path.
Personally, Kaufman has few qualms about the reprimanding part.
Much of her reputation as a fine leader comes from her sheer directness—her ability to take action without delay. She is a pragmatic, practical person with little tolerance for beating around the bush when it comes to confronting others and fixing problems. Indecisiveness is weakness in her eyes and she’d much rather follow an unsatisfactory solution from the outset than juggle possibilities for long. In this way, she has been accused of being reckless, but her perceptiveness and foresight have ensured that her failures are rarely very damaging. She is detail-oriented in thinking, a quick learner that’s good at grasping the consequences of various plans but who becomes uneasy vacillating between them. She is most content when making solid, material progress in her work—ideas, to her, are only worth something if they can be applied.
She has a keen eye when it comes to reading people, determining whether they’re concealing or being outward about their intentions. With customers and those outside of her business dealings, she makes an effort to be calm, complimentary and charming while still honest and upfront. If someone is attempting to deceive her, she will not necessarily call them on it but she won’t try to mislead them in kind. With her guildsmen and associates she is more blunt, sparing little patience for those that subvert her rules or fail to carry out her orders. She can be a demanding taskmaster with high regard for getting things done in a timely and orderly fashion, picking her battles mainly with lower management and acting more diplomatically with her upper staff. For this reason, she isn’t always well-liked and often considered intimidating, but she is generally respected for her dedication.
When something upsets her, her sentiments typically come across through anger or frustration rather than grief. Sadness is something she considers damaging to her image, while rage—and the vengeance that accompanies it—is oft-seen and more socially acceptable in guild society in general. She doesn’t subscribe to eye-for-an-eye revenge, but she does believe that wrongdoers require punishment to deter them from their ways. If someone harms her business or its members, or simply commits what she sees as an obvious crime, she will call them on it. Indeed, she is known for refusing to do business with guilds that she considers corrupt and for dragging more than a few to Union courts for their actions.
That said, she prefers to settle disagreements in nonviolent ways. She recognizes fighting as sometimes being a necessity, but has seen enough inter-guild disputes in her lifetime to realize it often results in more harm than good. Personally, she is not the best negotiator in matters where she believes she has been wronged or disrespected, as she tends to be set in her views and will only be comfortable changing them in the face of ample evidence to the contrary. When it comes to defects in products or mistakes on contracts, though, she will generally swallow her pride and side with the supplier or customer, promising that her guild will do better to serve them in the future.
In regards to her personal life, she does have a solid group of friends, mainly gained through her family’s connections and associations at work. Her concerns about being perceived as a strong, effective leader lend her some caution when it comes to trusting others, but once she has determined that someone won’t badmouth her for whatever reason, she tends to open up to them. She likes having the freedom to express her opinions and judgments, as well as some of her own weaknesses, though those come forth more reluctantly. Romance—in spite of numerous rumors and a few relationships she had before attaining the presidency—is not something she particularly wishes to seek. She has enough obligations and stress through her work, she figures.
Overall, she is very much a career woman. Her job comes first to her, bolstered by the ideas of social justice that she can promote through her practices. She can hold her own against her subordinates and fellow leaders with her frank, straight-talking, results-demanding attitude, resilient in her principles and capable of challenging the biggest and burliest of men without fear. She is sometimes liked, sometimes hated, but always recognized as a force not to be taken lightly.
Likes:
~Expanding her business
~Rules and laws (insofar as they coincide with her principles and aren’t excessive)
~Charity work (she’s had Fortune’s Market donate to a number of charitable causes in the past)
~Coffee
~Spicy food (she’s one of those people that can dump hot sauce all over her food and be barely affected by it)
~Cake (secretly. She’s not all that fond of ice cream or sweets, but she does like certain kinds of cake, though she tries to avoid it)
~Travelling
~Bathing and swimming (being in the water relaxes her)
~Repairing things (she’s good at fixing a variety of household items, including some blastia-powered devices)
Dislikes:
~Criminals/rulebreakers/people that harm others through selfishness
~Being belittled or ignored
~Unnecessary fighting or having to fight
~Having to wait for long (she likes to get things done as quickly as possible)
~Immoderate displays of wealth (a bit of showing off is fine, but she finds huge homes, expensive jewelry, and the like grossly wasteful)
Strengths:
~She’s straightforward. She can tell it like it is whether the subject is something she’s trying to sell or a difficult problem most would rather ignore. She inspires a great amount of trust this way—people know she isn’t trying to trick or scam them and that she can face tough situations realistically.
~She’s determined. She has the self-confidence to try her hardest to resolve issues in the fastest and most complete way possible, even if it means making some enemies along the way.
~She’s well-educated—unlike some of the older leaders, she was able to literally take classes in business—and has a keen understanding of the way guild culture and law operates. She is good at determining who and who not to trust and how best to convey herself in order to maintain the loyalty of her guildsmen and customers.
~She’s not a bad salesman in her own right and comes across as a very courteous, pleasant person to potential customers.
~She has some basic fighting ability with defensive artes, blades and the rapier.
Weaknesses:
~She can be brutally honest towards people she doesn’t like. When someone is behaving in a way she thinks harmful to others, she can be positively scathing with them. She has a tendency to see her personal values as black and white, though she recognizes that she needs to work at acknowledging the existence of gray areas.
~She has a flaring temper that, while she can keep it well under check with customers, tends to go off on her guildsmen and competitors. Her patience is nearly nonexistent when it comes to crime and low when it comes to incompetence, and her anger has occasionally caused her to act rashly. She is known to be rather harsh and demanding, which can discourage some of her staff from communicating issues to her.
~She has a tendency to get involved in situations that ought not to be her problem. Some of the court cases she’s presented to the Union were relatively unrelated to herself and her guild and ended up being quite time-consuming on her part. She doesn’t always recognize when to let injustices lie, for the sake of her own pre-existing obligations.
~She’s somewhat of a workaholic. She has sacrificed sleep before in favor of getting things done and her eating habits aren’t the greatest. At the encouragement of her friends, she is trying to remedy this, however.
~While she can fight, her skills aren’t all that honed. She would not be able to hold her own against most mercenaries and has to rely on guards to keep her safe.
History: Kaufman is actually a last name—her full name is Jacquelyn Kaufman. The Kaufman family was one of the original families to leave the empire and through hard work, connections and reputation it achieved a prominence in Dahngrest’s society. Most members took positions as retailers, with a good number ending up in Fortune’s Market, which evolved early on from a group of small stores to a large general merchandise guild. Kaufman’s father was among the top bosses of the guild and she enjoyed a comfortable childhood through the money he and her mother, a sales manager, brought in.
She attended school mainly in Dahngrest, with some higher education completed there and the remainder in Nordopolica. Initially she sought to specialize in finance, but marketing proved more interesting. She did some secretarial work for Fortune’s Market in her last few years of school, then took an advertising job. She remained in that department, eventually being promoted to upper management, over the next couple of years.
Around the time she turned thirty, the current guild president’s term ended, leaving it up to the other bosses to elect a new leader. The choice was always based on nepotism and favoritism, and Kaufman’s father managed to convince the others to allow her to run. She based her campaign on promises of increasing sales, entering new markets and making Fortune’s Market a bastion of ethical business, promises that resonated with much of the staff. To her, she was a fresh and inspirational face, welcome after the chaos of some anti-Union riots that had happened not long prior. The lower staff petitioned the bosses, the bosses discussed her qualifications, and some bribery and coercion probably occurred—however it went, she ended up elected into office.
There, she came to the unfortunate realization that many of the bosses saw her as qualified, but capable of being manipulated due to her relative youth and her gender. Incensed by their disrespect, she worked on portraying herself as a candid, no-nonsense leader, unswayable by bribery or favors. In the following years she introduced many new projects, pursuing new sites around Dahngrest and elsewhere and setting up teams for market and product research. One of her well-known accomplishments was a code of regulations she set up to prevent information security-related crimes, limiting the authority representatives had and what documents could be shared between departments. When she did discover cases of corruption, she promptly fired or demoted those responsible—indeed, once her father retired and her popularity with the guild was certain, she did a near-complete overhaul of the board of bosses, choosing her own set of advisors.
Her most controversial act was without doubt her contract with the empire. The president before her had tried to secure such a contract but only managed to attain properties near the border, closing the negotiations once his approval ratings dropped dramatically. Kaufman opened negotiations again and her willingness to abide by imperial law made a huge territory available to Fortune’s Market for the first time. Her reasons, as she explained in a speech, were just—an offering of goods at reasonable prices to a society where prices were regularly fixed and corporations were tainted by greed. She still made a number of enemies through being, in their eyes, a collaborator with a corrupt order, but as the contract created many new jobs and brought in a substantial profit, it was largely put up with.
She did, of course, meet with some losses. Leviathan’s Claw, for instance, proved a stiff contender in the enormous market that was the arms trade. She met Yeager not long after his ascendancy to power and immediately disliked him, as he had tricked one of her representatives into selling him a warehouse that she hadn’t authorized for sale. The resulting court case was dismissed because her regulations were not all protected by Union law and Leviathan’s Claw, naturally, was outside of her guild’s own jurisdiction. In the coming years, Yeager continued to exploit legal loopholes to disadvantage Fortune’s Market, sometimes for his business, sometimes simply to mess with her. She grew to have a grudging respect for his talent, as well as a deep loathing.
Her achievements managed to overshadow her failures, though. She was re-elected to a second term with little surprise recently, vowing to promote continued prosperity. With Fortune’s Market firmly set as one of the largest guilds in Dahngrest, it seems that vow should not be difficult to carry out.
Did you read the rules? I will out-man your pow hammer through sheer force of will. XD
