What if Big Tobacco knew the future of cannabis long before the rest of the world?
Now available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
London, 1971. As cultural and social change sweeps the world, big tobacco senses that the times may indeed be changing. The burning question: what business opportunities does this change represent? Does the counterculture and its new leaf, marijuana, pose an opportunity or a threat?
Michael Harrington is the man tasked by Carrington Tobacco International to ask the right question. What happens if it becomes legal?
His search takes him from panelled London offices to the advertising rooms of Madison Avenue and the sunburnt hills above Los Angeles. Along the way he learns the real business he is in: not cigarettes, not even cannabis, but the older and stranger trade in what people long to become.
Sky High is a novel about being right too early. About the quiet men who ask the dangerous questions decades before the world is ready to answer them, and about the difference between a thing that is wrong and a thing that is merely early.
When selling dreams. The trick is knowing which one.
Set against the changing social landscape of the early 1970s, and inspired by a real and little-known chapter of corporate history, the tobacco industry’s secret interest in cannabis, revealed decades later in millions of pages of internal documents, Sky High explores how ideas become strategy, how companies decide under uncertainty, and how the future is so often recognised long before the world is ready to accept it.
For readers who enjoy the boardroom strategy of The Big Short, the style and atmosphere of Mad Men, and the human stories behind great corporations, Sky High offers a fresh and compelling perspective.
Sky High by Matthew King – available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
