People say travel broadens the mind, but simply being somewhere else is not enough. You need an interpreter, not just to speak to the locals, but to explain what it is you are seeing and hearing. This is to tell you "What is Really Going On Here" (an invisible item on the bottom of the agenda of many a business meeting). That's why travel books accompany travel.

One such book is The Nudist on the Late Shift - and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley. You could say this is a business travel book, taking you well beyond the appearance and statistics at the heart of the high-tech industry in northern California.

It tells the stories of some very unusual lives in the high-tech industry, but with a passion to interpret what is really going on. Author, Po Bronson, says Silicon Valley has "recircuited" the trade-off between pursuing a career and pursuing wild adventures. Both can happen simultaneously at work.

The book was published last year, before the technology market correction this spring. But it is not dated, because it is not about a temporary state of affairs in markets. It is about people and their lives.

They include rare young billionaires, programmers, investment bankers, salespeople, hopeful new arrivals, engineers in IPOs, and a very strange "dropout" from the speed of it all, a man who invented the fastest super-computer of the 1980s but who is now working on building a clock that will last 10,000 years.

There is the nudist, of course. The existence of a programmer who used to work through the night naked in his cubicle seemed all urban legend: no one knew quite who it was, but in a world where anything was possible, people were sure it was true. So Bronson tried to see if there was a real nudist, and relates the awkward task of finally asking a contact if he was the man, the urban legend itself.

There, he found a story illustrating the difference between the free-for-all, output-driven programmer culture and the rules and regulations of corporate and union interaction.

There is the brilliant tale of the last days and minutes of the IPO of Actuate Software. Its programmer chief executive, Mr Nico Nierenberg, was coached by Goldman Sachs to do something very unfamiliar - to address a roomful of investment analysts and stock salespeople, to make eye contact and sound like "this is a man you would give $30 million [€31.1 million] to".

On the other hand, Nierenberg's decisiveness served him well as, at the last minute, he traded off 10 per cent of the IPO price against getting the issue out before the market fell.

Bronson tells the apparent fairytale success of Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail, who arrived as a 19-year-old scholarship student at Cal Tech in 1988 with $250 in cash and a brilliant maths aptitude in his head. His idea of free Internet e-mail addresses was simple and explosive. Hotmail's user base grew faster than any in history, with 125,000 new accounts per day being signed up in summer 1998.

It is not the facts and figures of the story that are most important. What counts is the mind and attitude of the young Indian immigrant with a small company who negotiated both venture capitalists and ultimately, Microsoft, brilliantly to his advantage, to the point of a $400 million price tag for Hotmail.

What makes this not simply a fairytale is what is important.

"In the official history of this industry, there is no chapter on selling," says Bronson. "Most people scurry around this industry totally in denial of the fact that one day, the Grim Reaper will be at their company's door."

The Grim Reaper is the need to move units, to sell. Salespeople and salemanship perform this grim function, not purist engineers or sophisticated i-bankers. The sales function is often viewed as a poor relation in other industries too, and it is well to be reminded of its essential role.

After the fascination of tales of extreme lives told well, there is a question as to whether we should or could replicate some of the features of Silicon Valley. Simply using the term "Silicon Glen" or any variation doesn't do it. Simply having a lot of high-tech manufacturing plants doesn't create a culture.

There was always something essential to California, to the US itself, of re-creation and re-invention. This context for rapid product and business development cycles was, and is, a huge advantage.

What can be learned from this type of business travel book is less about policy than attitude of mind, the habit of thinking out of size, and allowing commercial, technological and even personal ferment to happen without becoming over-protective or sentimental.

If we each have something to learn from other's lives, there is plenty of education in the stories recounted in this book.

Oliver O'Connor is editor of the monthly publication, Finance.

Email: ooconnor@indigo.ie