Game Changers: A Life of Innovation and Disruption

Henning Stein:

I'm delighted to welcome as my guest today, Dame Stephanie Shirley, a genuine pioneer, who has broken the mold, both in business and in philanthropy. Dame Stephanie famously made a fortune and then gave it away again. Her achievements have earned worldwide acclaim, including being awarded the rare Order of the Companions of Honour in the U.K. and election to the National Women's Hall of Fame in the U.S. She's joining us to share her amazing story, to reflect on the power of, really, innovation and disruption, and to discuss her own lifelong ability to defy and redefine convention. Welcome to Invesco Game Changers.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

Thank you for inviting me.

Henning Stein:

Dame Stephanie, many thanks for joining us. Before we start, I have to tell you that your autobiography really moved me to tears. Like you, I'm German, Jewish, a child of the [inaudible 00:01:21]. In fact, I come from Essen, come from Dortmund-

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

You come from Dortmund?

Henning Stein:

Right, Dortmund. Is it Dortmund?

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

I come from Dortmund. Did I misunderstand?

Henning Stein:

Yes, I come from Essen, next to Dortmund.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

Oh, right, yes.

Henning Stein:

Yes, so your story, really, you changed how I look at life, so thank you for sharing it. You often said you resolved at an early age to make yours a life that was worth saving. Can you tell us about your formative years?

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

Well, you mentioned Essen. I mean, my life started in Dortmund, also in Western Germany. In 1933, shortly after my birth, my father got fired from his job, and the bad times began, and we started to move around Europe trying to find a safe place. All our family did eventually get out, but as far as I was concerned, it was a pretty traumatic start. We settled in Vienna for a bit, and then my parents did a very brave thing, I think. They organized for me to come to England on a Kindertransport. When I got to England, we arrived, a train load of a thousand children with just two adults. You can imagine how traumatic it was.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

It was the beginning of an enormous change for me, new language, new country, new nationality, because Hitler had taken nationality away from Jewish families, and in particular, new parents. I was very lucky. I was fostered by a loving couple in the Midlands of England with a rather reassuring name, very English, Smith, guy and Ruby Smith, bless them. They gave me a home and took me into their heart, really. I was with my older sister who was nine, and she had the dubious task of also looking after me at five years old. I've got something wrong with my foot, so I was pretty fractious. I think she did well to get me to England.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

But that I challenged in some detail, because that trauma has really driven my life, my business life, my family life, the person that I wanted to be, because I had survivor guilt. Why was I saved when so many died, including a million children at that time? How can I make the life that was saved, worth saving? I did, at a rather unhealthy early age, decide to try and live a life that was a good life. I don't complain at all, but it was a life of value.

Henning Stein:

Yeah. Later then in your life, you also encountered glass ceilings, I believe, in your education and then early in your career. How did that influence your thinking?

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

Well, I had trouble learning science. I mean, I'm basically a scientist, and the only science considered respectable for girls of my generation was the study of plants, and I wanted to be a mathematician. I really had to fight and change schools twice in order to get that tuition. Then suddenly, I realized that mathematics had led me into the very early computer industry. I started off as sort of junior mathematical clerk in a research station, working on graphs, doing little bits of coding, working on the big lottery machine for Britain called ERNIE. It was there, of course, that I met my husband. I fell in love with my husband, but I also fell in love with computing, and that really became the driving force.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

The more I was ambitious, the more implacably I was patronized by the male colleagues, because the research station had many, many handsome, young, intelligent men, but it did not have very many women at all. People would say, overtly, "I will never appoint a woman to a graduate position," or they would stand down from my interview appointments because they sort of said, "I would never appoint a woman, no matter how good she is." I don't think they even said that, "They would never appoint a woman." I began to feel that I'd come across that glass ceiling, we've learned to call it.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

Frankly, Henning, I was tired of being patronized as a Jew. I was tired of being patronized as a woman. Eventually, I decided to break away and do my own thing, so I became an entrepreneur. The first time somebody called me an entrepreneur, I didn't know what the term meant, but that's clearly what I am. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I like to start things. I like to do new things. I like to make new things happen, and sometimes in very new ways. Some of that comes from the fact that I didn't have a very good education, I think.

Henning Stein:

Maybe let's talk about that aspect. When you set up your company, that was very family-friendly for women. You employed women in a very family-friendly way. I should remind people that this all happened more than, I think, half a century ago. What you did then, I think, was really more progressive than what we see today in some businesses. As a member myself of a minority, I really see that as a milestone in that quest for workplace equality. You think of this as being innovative, disruptive, maybe a little bit defiant, or maybe a little of each?

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

It was a crusade, a crusade for women to actually provide the sort of work environment in which we could do science, all the arts, but in a way that fitted into women's lifestyles and women's patterns. By that, I mean, flexibility. My company targeted work patterns that were flexible to the extreme, part-time, full-time, summer-working, consultancy, winter-working, min-max contracts, zero-hour contracts, which are very unpopular in this country now. I started them all, including job shares. We paid people from a cafeteria of benefits so that they could choose how they were paid, whether it was by salary, or by a larger company car, or more holidays, early retirement, whatever they wanted. Flexibility was really what allowed women to have that work-life balance that fitted in with our child-rearing patterns of living.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

I started off in a little cottage working on my dining room table. I was almost inundated with requests. Can I come and work with you? Of course, we had not the work for them to do. I started off thinking that would allow me, also, to work from home, with my plans for a family. But in fact, I very soon found myself really having to do the marketing, having to do the recruitment, having to do the cash flow, which was really the critical thing as any company tries to start scaling up a bit. It was very amateur to begin with. We just learned on the job, really. If something worked, we'd do more of it. If it didn't work, we'd try something else.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

We had very much a family feeling, not just because the staff, and of the first 300 staff, 297 were women. It was very female-oriented. Not only that we all had our own families, but we worked like a family company. It was quite acceptable for me to help somebody in the morning, and in the afternoon ask for their help on something. Between us, we could actually get the work done. We built up a very solid reputation for developing tailor-made software. This was at a time when software was given away free with the hardware. "Nobody can sell software," they said.

Henning Stein:

You tricked them. You basically called yourself, Steve, right, when you do contracts, basically, instead of Stephanie, I remember reading in the book?

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

I was writing sales promotion letters by the dozen, really. This was before the days of word processing. They were beautifully typed on a portable typewriter. My secretary came in Tuesday afternoons always, and she churned out these standard letters to people who were advertising for programming. I would contact them and sort of say, "I'm not applying for that job, but I can get programming done for you."

Henning Stein:

Right.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

Nobody bothered to reply at all, Henning. Then my dear husband, actually, suggested that I start signing letters, not that double feminine of Stephanie Shirley, but rather, Steve Shirley, which is a family nickname. Surprise, surprise, we began to get some responses to my letters. I began to get some interviews, and I had a good story to tell as I began to get some work.

Henning Stein:

Yeah. I think you also empowered your employees, motivating them by putting the company in their hands, so creating a sort of unlisted partnership, incorporated model in the U.K., you called that. What made you take that course?

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

I think somebody like me is always interested in making the world a fairer place. In the early days of the company, although we paid our staff reliably, we didn't pay them particularly well, and we asked a great deal of them. In particular, we paid them slowly in order to deal with the cash flow, so that most staff were only paid when the work that they had been involved in was paid for by our customer. If the customer hadn't paid for three months, then we would pay anyway, but enormously slow rate of payment. So, it seemed right and proper that they should share in any potential wealth creation, as well. I was inspired by another share-owning organization in the retail area in the U.K. I wanted, actually, that family feeling to turn into a sort of collegiate working together.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

It took me 11 years, I think it was, to make it happen. Not easy, because you're trying to give away a company of some value, but not much, without having any other wealth to pay the taxation that was involved in that transaction. It was pretty slow, but I'm enormously proud of it. It made a lot of difference. For reasons I can talk about, I suppose, I didn't get the 100% staff ownership that I wanted, but I did get it up to 62% staff control at one time, and 25% staff ownership. That went up to 30% the year after I left, actually. It's a wonderful way to grow a company.

Henning Stein:

What I found particularly fascinating when I read your book, your first book, autobiography, at the end where you really take the same sort of innovative thinking and outlook to philanthropy. Charity plays a big part in my life, too, but I never really met anyone who deliberately set out fall off the Sunday Times Rich List through philanthropy... that's pretty amazing... also, in terms of your worldview. What decision-making processes do you go through when you contribute to a cause?

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

Well, I tried to use my business skill and have head and heart working together. After a few years, two, three years, I really sat down and worked out a mission statement, which is the sort of thing that we did in business, but it hadn't occurred to me to do in philanthropy. That was quite simple, to concentrate on the things that I know and care about. There're really only two, information technology, my professional discipline, and autism, which is my late son's condition. I concentrate on those two. I only do strategic projects. I only support strategic projects, because I always felt that I had worked very hard for that money, and I really wanted it to work. I was not going to fritter that away, either.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

I look for projects that make a real difference in the sea of need. I mean, there's so much there. If it's just helping these five or these 50, or even these 500, that wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to make a sectional, structural change to how people looked at autism, at new computer systems. What happened, Henning, was that after a few years, I realized that other people were starting to support computer systems, computers in schools, computers in darkest Africa, but nobody was really supporting autism. In about 2002, I think, we decided... and I had a trustee board... we decided to focus entirely on autism. I've been the major charitable funder for autism in the U.K. for some time. That allows me to see things that need doing and set up projects, or even set up a charity to solve that problem. I always take a charity. I start it myself. It starts on my desk. It gradually grows. I stay with it until it's sustainable, and then I back away, because I want to do the next thing.

Henning Stein:

Contributing money is only one element, as you say in your book. It's bringing your strategic thinking into that relationship and really try to move that forward. The question here, really, does your appetite for innovation really drive that aspect that you're doing philanthropy?

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

I have a very low boredom threshold, and I like to do new things. I feel that in the charitable world, there are a lot of small charities, worthy that they are, doing much as happened somewhere else, a little bit better, a little bit cheaper, but they're not really making a difference.

Henning Stein:

Do you think you will ever grow tired of innovating and disrupting? Probably not.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

No, I think that's part of my character now, Henning-

Henning Stein:

Right, right.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

... what I do. I want to make a difference in the world. I want to, again, come back to... Still, I'm 87 years old. It's over 80 years since I arrived as a five-year-old refugee, and I still have that driving force to make each day worthwhile. I'm not going to fritter it away. I'm going to do something that makes a difference to people.

Henning Stein:

That's fascinating. We have heard how Dame Stephanie has devoted her post-business life to philanthropy. We also heard about issues, especially close to our heart, which is autism. All the proceeds from sales of Dame Stephanie's new book entitled, So To Speak, will go to Autistica, the charity she founded 16 years ago. You can find out more about Dame Stephanie's work in this field and how to order a copy of the book, actually, by visiting the webpage that's now on the screen, that's steveshirley.com. So To Speak is a collection of some of your favorite speeches, Dame Stephanie, from the past 40 years.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

40 years, yes.

Henning Stein:

I already ordered my copy, so can't wait to read it.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

I hope it inspires you.

Henning Stein:

Yeah, I'm sure. I would, really, sincerely recommend these books for anyone looking for a truly inspirational read. Dame Stephanie, thank you so much.

Dame Stephanie Shirley:

It's been a real pleasure.

Henning Stein:

Thank you.