SOUNDING OFFICIAL IS EASY. BEING EFFECTIVE IS HARDER.

Some people rise through competence. Crispin had a different strategy.

Crispin Lockwood-Fetch never set out to become a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). He simply discovered, quite early on, that he was exceptionally good at one thing: sounding official.

From helpdesk hero to boardroom favourite, Crispin charts his accidental ascent through the world of cybersecurity, armed with little more than a sharp suit, an impressive collection of cybersecurity jargon and executive buzzwords, and an unshakable belief that most problems can be solved by clearing the cache and delivering a confident PowerPoint.

Interspersed with the increasingly exasperated logs of his Head of Security Operations, Lauren Barnell, this is the painfully plausible story of how one man mastered the art of looking like he knew what he was doing... right up until the ransomware hit.

Packed with governance theatre, risk registers, maturity assessments, strategic dashboards and increasingly creative forms of organisational reassurance, Certified in Sounding Official is a satirical workplace novel for anyone who has ever worked in technology, cybersecurity, compliance, audit, project management or corporate life in general.

If you've ever sat through a security briefing and wondered whether confidence was doing more work than evidence, this is the book for you.