Writing my first novel - the how, the why and the when

Each generation has an era defining time. The summer of love of 1968, the Arab Spring, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Ours wasn't a summer of love though, more an autumn of fear. 

In 2008 it felt like the world was truly turning upside down. I can remember vividly the day when my savings account in a bank in Iceland was wiped out. How friends saw their businesses turn to dust. When our advertisers pulled plugs on everything.

I sat and watched it from the editor's chair, hearing stories of real drama, real fear and that feeling that this was a seismic, epoch changing time. This was our time and my novel, out now, is my attempt to tell this amazing tale.

I've always wanted to write creatively. Journalism is great, but sometimes news journalism doesn't give you that sense of perspective. As time went on and my job was more managerial, I had fewer and fewer outlets for that long form, investigative, exploratory story telling of human struggle. The kind of thing Michael Lewis is the absolute master at. And the kind of thing that if we managed to do three of them a year we'd enter them for awards, creating the illusion we do this all the time. 

But I also quite like comedy writing, but have never done anything about it, despite having always knocked out the funnies page. Way back when I was a student at the University of Manchester I used to contribute stories to the Mancunion diary page at the back - often about Derek Draper, if I remember rightly. Wherever I worked, I always fell into the "back page" role rather well. I also developed fictitious characters to tell truths: Arty Tosh, Corporate Raider and Lucretia De Bitch.

In the course of my time I also wrote a column called Roger Cashman. He was a grotesque caricature of a greedy and sexist Cheshire businessman. He became a minor sensation on Twitter, even finding a nemesis in his wife, Doris, which was absolutely nothing to do with me. 

For a while I kept it a secret that it was me. The chairman of the board highlighted it as his favourite part of the magazine and I had to come clean. We'd even get occasional letters of complaint, but more questions as to whether he was for real. My reply was always that he may or may not be real, but that everything he said was true. 

But Roger Cashman is dead. He disappeared over the edge of his boat off Puerto Banus in 2011, only for someone to try and scam his Twitter account for personal gain in 2013. He is dead. Long live Roger. Another truth about business, cowardice and crime.

And so it is with my first novel - 40 by 40. The premise is simple. Here's our guy, rich, bored, on the brink of greatness and huge wealth in order to stave off a mid-life crisis. Setting himself up for a life of reality TV stardom, more easy money, sex on the side and of course the dalliance with football club ownership. You know that moment in Goodfellas, at the end of act two, when Ray Liotta's character has it nailed: "We were wise guys, Goodfellas, we had it all." Well, that's my central character of Roger at the start.

WARNING. Roger Cashmore is appalling. A monster. From the first words - "You can't go wrong with sick white children" - the calculating cynicism of charitable giving writ large - to his dismissal of his wife's concerns, his self-centred avarice, lack of loyalty and the essential split personality - wanting to be taken seriously by those he fears most. All of it makes him hard to love. But I hope you will end up rooting for him, hoping for a redemption of some kind, even if he doesn't get what he wants. 

I know I did so with Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street, Steven Stelfox in Kill Your Friends and John Self in Money.

The jeopardy is the real world. This is 2008, we know what's going to happen in April when the tax rate changes. In September when Lehman Brothers crashes. In October when the UK government has to bail out RBS. And when Man United win the Champions League Final in Moscow in May, or when Manchester City get taken over by Arabs in September. That much we know, but where were you? How did those real events make you feel? Oh, and who do you think was behind Panacea in Alderley Edge getting burnt down?

I also wanted to weave in real people, real situations I witnessed - MIPIM, a conference where Jon Moulton spelled it out, a decadent birthday party I went to as the world crumbled. No real person in the book has words put in their mouth that they didn't say, or is placed in a situation that misrepresents them. They are as part of the physical backdrop as San Carlo Restaurant in Manchester, the Europa Hotel in Belfast and the Alderley Bar and Grill.

The one exception I ought to clarify is Simon Binns. Part of Manchester's business scene at the time was a spiky newspaper called Crains. To airbrush that from the picture of the year would be dishonest, much as I despised it at the time. With Simon's help I actually wrote a scene with him in it, having lunch and interviewing the main character. Although Roger is phenomenally rude about Simon, I think I know him well enough to know he'd take the confected affront at his nosiness and contrary opinions as a compliment. It was certainly intended as one.

The book isn't just a ramble through the archives either. I spent a bit of time talking to people who dealt with builders, helicopter leases, TV companies, banks, lawyers, phone hackers and football club owners. Explaining how quite complex financial instruments worked, but also how criminal gangs sometimes operated. I couldn't resist weaving in a reference to the Learning Journey I did to California.

In the credits I do thank the following fine folk for helping me with the research: Nick Carter, Alec Craig, Andy Shaw, Steve Hoyles and Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5. But there are many many more.

There will be inevitable speculation about who the characters are based on. None of them are a direct lift. None. Some are just inventions, some are amalgams of at least two or three people. An acquisitive Indian food conglomerate called Chunky's doesn't leave much to the imagination. But it's a work of fiction - a way of telling a truth through invention.

I would say it's one of the most incredibly exhilarating and challenging things I've ever done. But then I said that about being part of an MBO, setting up a new business and standing as a parliamentary candidate. It's all true.

I'm now working on the follow up. It's called We're All In It Together, set in 2010, and Roger is standing for parliament in a challenging seat. Not that I'd know anything about that.

If you fancy coming to the launch on Friday, click below and reserve your personalised copy.

A cool video from the Learning Journey event

Learning Journey at Bridge Bank

There are a few videos from the places we visited in Silicon Valley. This is one I did at Bridge Bank in Palo Alto. You can view the others if you click through to my video page.

Contextual intelligence - how it works in Silicon Valley

So, there we were on the 25^th floor of a corporate law firm's offices on Market Street in the heart of San Francisco's Financial District, listening and taking notes in a meeting with Judith Iglehart from the Keiretsu Forum when the door flung open and in burst Randy Williams, the founder and CEO of the angel investing network.

He'd just dropped in to see us after taking a quick break from a screening committee on the floor above, where he'd been chairing a group of 12 heavy hitters and investors from some of Silicon Valley's brightest and best known businesses. He invited us into the room to watch him work. We lined the wall and stood transfixed as they first passed verdict on an entrepreneurial business that had just been in to present a pitch for funding – not clear, said one. Poor presentation said another. They all scribbled down their points on a slip, which would have decided whether the guy had a chance to come back and present.

Next up was a very confident and polished business owner punting his pitch for a modest amount of funding to get his business to the next level. To cut to the chase he had a slick and fast paced presentation but he rambled. He ran way over his time and you could sense the frustration around the table. He performed even worse in the Q&A, he couldn't explain what he needed the money for, or what his exit strategy was, nor could he articulate the differentiating factor in his business.

The discussion, after the pitchee left the room, reflected the obvious frustration they all felt. There was a business idea there, they agreed, but the presentation and failure to answer questions concerned them all. Get him back for some advice – sharpen the idea, said one of the investors. And here's the thing, Randy Williams reckons they'll get the funding from somewhere else. No idea is perfect, no pitch a sure fire winner – do you stick, or twist? That's the risk, this is what angels have to do.

And so this is how business angel financing in the Valley works. This is quickfire, brutal and unforgiving - you can't waste time. You get to the point, you get it across. And if you can't do that in front of a panel of people who want to give you money, what chance would you have with customers. But it's not the structured reality of Dragon's Den, there was a theatricality about it, an energy, a sense of urgency. Another incredible insight.

The last visit of the trip was to Plantronic, a 50 year old company that started making the telephonist head sets the receptionists may wear in Mad Men. What was fascinating about this tour de force was the thought that has gone into how voice technology will change – and how work patterns have changed too. The chief executive Ken Kannappan described it as contextual intelligence – understanding the waves of innovation and social change and being there.

It's been amazing how many themes keeping cropping up again and again with these successful companies – creating an emotional connection between product and consumer, often through design.  

What's the story? Silicon Valley glory

It's difficult to know where to start with summing up our visit to Google's funky downtown San Francisco offices – so I'll follow the money. The business makes 95 per cent of its profits and revenues from advertising. They also give a large number of their 25,000 global workforce tough and aggressive targets – they hire the best people with a gruelling interview process. That's a hard and commercial facet of this powerful expanding business that is disrupting and dismantling the traditional media channels and processes. And they measure absolutely everything, most notably their people through Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

I bet you weren't expecting to hear that. Certainly the Google presentation and discussion was mainly about the development of their fun creative culture and the strategy in all of their markets ranging from YouTube to Gmail and back through to Adwords and Adsense. Yes, the company give everyone 20 per cent time to work on their own projects. In reality that though is 120 per cent time. Yes, they innovate through accessibility. And yes, genuinely Google stays true to its mantra of making the world's information accessible and organised for everyone. They are tactics that ultimately serve the strategy – all the time, relentlessly. They provide relevance, they innovate to take advertisers ever closer to real opportunities. None of it is an accident.

It is an awesome organisation.

So Jerry Engel starts telling us all a story about the conversation at his book club the night before. There were a few VCs, some entrepreneurs, and him of course a guru of innovation and entrepreneurship and an adjunct Professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. You know, he says, your typical crew. Wow.

This man is a powerhouse of ideas, a real thinker. He pushed and prodded us all, tied his thoughts into what he knows about Manchester and the potential to create a Graphene Valley in our home city region.

Innovation happens he says when it collides with waves of change – what waves of change are you part of, he asked? Position yourself at the crossroads of innovation and exploration. He went a long way again, to describing how Silicon Valley works.

From the hallowed halls of Berkeley it was then a drive to the Valley past the prime premises of Facebook and Google and into the home of LinkedIn to meet one of the founder Allen Blue.

We signed non-disclosure agreements and so can't say too much about what we talked about. Suffice to say just this – what you see in LinkedIn now is just the beginning and there is so much more to come.

Allen told us the story and we debated the various ways we use the current LinkedIn, there were reasons for why it looks how it does – and if we had anything to say, then here was the guy who was ultimately responsible – so we were saying it to his face! Incredible – just another day on the Learning Journey.

The last stop of the day was at the post-industrial creative factory of ideas that is Obscura Digital, officially the coolest office in the world. where the strikingly handsome Shawn Biega, their VP of sales treated us to a demonstration of innovation and technology in action – how these awesome interactive video wall installation transform a retail experience, but also how they work in hotels, businesses and even as projected light shows on buildings. Yes, these guys have lit up the Coca Cola HQ in Atlanta, a mosque in the United Arab Emirates.

Their mission statement is 'If you can imagine it, we can create it.' They've even lit up the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas with an interactive display of music artefacts, we particularly liked playing with the Beatles and Oasis pieces.

Yes we know the way to San Jose

The team answered in the affirmative the question posed by Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick as we found our way to San Jose to meet Dan Harden of Whipsaw.

It was a damp and rainy day in the Valley, but our spirits were good and we all enjoyed another amazing day.

Whipsaw is a product design company that though small and perfectly formed – just 35 employees – it works on making a wide range of products that users will find lovableand tactile. “There can be glory in anything you can design,” is Dan's philosophy. It was this passion, his love of design that shone through everything he told the group in an illuminating and inspiringsession, but it was also what led him out of Frog Design in 1999 which had got too big, he felt.

Whipsaw is a funky name, he says that's essential in the Valley – a real dynamic intellectual environment – but it also embodies the team ethic –you need two people to pull a whipsaw from side to side.

He was remarkably candid about some of the ways he's worked with clients – even the ones he's been in dispute with – but he was tight lipped on what he's been doing for Google – that G is shaped like a noose for a reason.

But that Valley commitment to excellence has also driven him to embrace the social craft of what they can bring to a business. The world needs to improve so many everyday experiences – the flights we took to get here, driving, even hospital visits. Whipsaw even admitted an intern into hospital to observe the patient experience.

But the group were mesmerised by his retelling of his four experiences with the late great Steve Jobs. He sparked with energy and passion, it's not a surprise that he remains so hand's on in the business, clients want him involved in their projects.

Next stop for nourishment - both mental and gastronomic - was DPR Construction in Redwood City.

You don't get to the exalted heights of 13^th in the Fortune magazine ranking of the Best Companies to Work For by accident. You have to embed excellence into your organisation and be prepared to fire high performers who are jerks. That's what we learned at DPR Construction, a company that takes seriously the wider message of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Rights and the true value of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is all vital to understand how the company was formed and the ethics of the founders.

We were here to learn about the company from founder Pete Nosler and of this commitment to teamwork and how they are set up, but this is no hippy colony – DPR work on huge schemes for major customers and work with renowned architects.

But the business also operates at the industry profit margin of a wretched 2 per cent. They manage it, but it's through a large volume of work and through being in control of their projects – they don't do competitive tendering, for example.

But integrity lies at the centre of their world – on time, in full, no second chances. It's folksy, but tough, and a shining beacon deserving of all their glory.

Bridge Bank, our next visit was another stimulating charge. A fair few of the group have bad experiences with their banks – some have kinder words to say about theirs. But for better or for worse none of us have encountered a banker quite like Ed Lambert of Bridge Bank, a key figure in the technology sector in Silicon Valley, who we spent sometime with at his office in Palo Alto.

A tactile and warm hearted individual he embodies the values of the Valley and places a high importance on networks, gut feel, helping others and theValley's secret sauce.

I've never met a banker who manages to quote Roger Daltrey, Voltaire and the Chinese philosophy which decrees that a wise man knows almost everything, but a brilliant man knows everyone. He uses his network to understand the business processes and models of the changing world. He understands the challenges to the banking sector and its diversions into private equity and derivative trading by stressing the importance of a bank's true mission – old world banking in a new world order.

And on the subject ofconnectivity and human understanding he got each of us to tell him who they were – the classic Silicon Valley 2 minute pitch. I don't know whether it was better or worse going next to last; it gave me a lot of time to gather my thoughts, but this incredible group of people are a tough act to follow.  

My Learning Journey in San Francisco

I'm in San Francisco on a Learning Journey, an organised tour around businesses and institutions in California with a group of entrepreneurs from around the UK. It is an incredible life changing experience.

We headed south first thing in the morning to Mountain View in Silicon Valley for the first appointment with Symantec with company evangelist Dale Zabriskie. The security software company is best known for consumer security software product Norton Utilities. The presentation was an expansive overview of the threats to data security and the constantly changing nature of those such perils – from hackers, activists, organised crime and even hostile states. They do this specifically through their three Security Operations Centres (SOC) – one is in Reading – which track what the bad guys do. But we learned too about how Symantec has embedded a culture of innovation into the business to make them able to provide the thought leadership that can maintain their business and on top of their sector and even acquire businesses that give them a strategic edge. And to innovate the key is to fail quickly, take heed, move on. This was evident in how business has started analysing the weight of data now being produced – had you ever heard of a Zeddobyte or a Yottabyte? Big numbers with 24 zeroes. We are a generation that is data rich but information poor, so much we have, but so much is also irrelevant, 75 per cent, Dale suggested. What matters is being able to understand which bits of data require a layer of information that make them intelligent and worth backing up and securing.

Then we headed back to the city to meet Salesforce.com.  It takes balls of steel to cull a chunk of your business at a time of maximum growth. Especially so when you grow by 40 per cent a year, every year, for 13 years. That was just one of the hundreds of anecdotes, insights, facts and spellbinding insights from a trio of presentations and discussions we were part of at Salesforce.com the most innovative company in the world. At the centre was the transformation of the business – essentially an internet based sales CRM management system - into a social enterprise – one that embraces and enhances the social networking revolution and places it at the centre of everything the company does. Woodson Martin kicked us off with his analysis of how the explosion in mobile devices is changing everything – his you can even read this here – 50 ways to become a social enterprise. Part of this is embedded in the ways in which Salesforce have implemented Chatter – essentially a bespoke secure internal communications network that edits out the noise we all suffer from with Facebook and Twitter. It's improved productivity, communication and the flow of ideas – indeed CEO Marc Benioff has tagged these the Chatterati – and radically flattened the whole organisation. Innovation is at the heart of Salesforce and Cloud computing and keeping that edge is what gives the business a premium. Clarence So, senior VP of strategy, spoke to us about how the business fought off various challenges over the years with a characteristic cheeky humour and attitude. One way they do this: how tactics dictate strategy that recognises how many of the best laid plans end up going wrong anyway – tactics and what we learn from them inform our strategy.

To understand the entrepreneurial mindset of Silicon Valley it's important to get your head around the contribution of the universties – in particular Stanford and Berkeley, our next stop off. We were hosted at Stanford by Tom Byers, the head of the technology ventures program. Though the university has a proud legacy of creating businesses in the technology field, the purpose of Tom had worked Symantec beforehand and so had some rubber on the entrepreneurial road. His talk included video presentations from a bunch of his friends – Jack Dorsey, one of the creators of Twitter, venture capital investor Marc Andressen, entrepreneur Steve Blank, evangelist Guy Kawsaki, and Randy Komiser author of Getting to Plan B. He capped it off with a clip of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO and a hot tip to be the first female President of the United States. The themes included business models and planning, as well as some of the the resources are here.

More tomorrow.

Shining a (City) light on a brave new world

Gareth, Nick, Jamie, Will and Jeff

Travelling around San Francisco and taking in the delights of this energetic diverse city has been a journey of discovery and rediscovery. I first walked the steep streets of San Francisco in 1986. One of the reasons I was drawn here as a 19 year old was the spirit of the Beat Poets like Alan Ginsberg and cult author Jack Kerouac. Both have an important cultural legacy here, held up at City Lights bookstore in North Beach.

I support independent retailers and love the curiosity and magic of a bookstore, but I was a little deflated by this visit to City Lights. Amongst the shelves of Anarchist poetry and rows of Noam Chomsky there was no place for two contempary and important books I would like to buy while I'm here - books by Richard Florida and Michael Lewis, both authors with something relevant to say about the world and modern America.

Anyway, ten minutes of browsing and I was off. Back over the road to have a chat to the rest of my party about other things that fascinate us - the new Raspberry Pi, University spin outs, satellite technology and IBM's re-invention. And City Lights wouldn't have any books that had anything to say about any of that. More's the pity.