Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  Since 1981, I had continued to transfer shares to the FI Shareholders’ Trust at a rate of about 4 per cent a year. I feared, however, that this might be too little, too slowly. After briefing headhunters to leave no stone unturned in finding the best possible successor to Alison, I moved the issue of staff ownership back to the top of my agenda.

  Meanwhile, I was pleased to see another project reach fruition. Some 18 months earlier, I had initiated the creation of a mission statement. This must have seemed an eccentric step at the time, and it took endless discussion, and input from most of the staff, before it was finalised. Finally, however, the F International Charter was agreed, printed, distributed to all our staff and displayed in all our offices. Every company has a mission statement these days, and most are full of weasel words and platitudes. Ours was among the first, and I doubt if there have been many since that have described so accurately the invisible forces that drive a particular enterprise forward.

  The F International Charter of 1984 reads as follows:

  F INTERNATIONAL CHARTER

  F International is a group of companies which have sprung from seeing an opportunity in a problem: one woman’s inability to work in an office has turned into hundreds of people’s opportunity to work in a non-office environment. Because of its unusual origin, F International has a clear sense of its mission, its strategy and its values.

  MISSION:

  F International’s mission is to stay a leader in the rapidly growing and highly profitable, knowledge-intensive software industry. It aims to achieve this by developing, through modern communications, the unutilised intellectual energy of individuals and groups unable to work in a conventional environment.

  STRATEGY:

  F International’s strategy is to maximise the value of its unusual asset base by establishing a competitive advantage over conventionally organised firms, and imitators of its approach, through cost and quality competitiveness. This occurs by the development of a methodology which ensures quality and by establishing a company ethos which binds people who work largely independently and often alone.

  VALUES:

  People are vital to any knowledge-intensive industry. The skills and loyalty of our workforce are our main asset. Equally important is the knowledge which comes from the exchange of ideas with our clients and their personnel. It follows that human and ethical values play a pivotal role in the way in which an organisation like F International conducts itself. This is even more true in a structure as open and free as F International. To maintain a high level of creativity, productivity and coherence in such an environment requires a set of high ethical values and professional standards that any member of the organization can identify with and see realised, and reinforced, in the organisation’s behaviour. F International has defined for itself such a charter of values:

  1. Professional excellence

  Our long-term aim is to improve our professional abilities so as to maintain a quality product for our clients. It is also our aim to develop fully our professional potential as people and to develop our organisation in a way which reflects our own individuality and special approach.

  2. Growth

  We aim to grow our organisation to its full potential, nationally and internationally. We aim to grow at least as rapidly as the software industry as a whole in order to maintain our own position as an attractive employer and a competitive supplier.

  3. Economic and psychological reward

  We also aim to realise and enjoy fully the economic and psychological rewards of our efforts resulting from the development of the unique competitive advantage of our structure and capabilities. We aim to achieve profits, reward our workforce, maintain the Employee Trust and provide an attractive return to our shareholders.

  4. Integrated diversity

  We have a commitment to consistent procedures worldwide as a means of lowering cost, but aim to conduct ourselves as a national of each country in which we operate.

  5. Universal ethics

  We respect local customs and laws, but see ourselves as members of a world society with respect for human dignity and ethical conduct beyond the profit motive and local circumstances.

  6. Goodwill

  An extension of our ethical view is a belief in the goodwill of others: colleagues, clients and vendors. We also believe that goodwill results in positive, long-term relationships.

  7. Enthusiasm

  Finally, we believe that enthusiasm for our people and our product, and the ability to engender that enthusiasm in others, is the most essential quality of leadership within the organisation. Enthusiasm promotes creativity, cooperation and profit.

  I quote this charter in full partly because I am proud of it, but also because it illustrates how intangible - and yet how vital - a service company’s assets can be. Without that defining set of ideas, F International would have been - well, not quite nothing, but nothing out of the ordinary: just one software company among many, loosely linked to a number of talented personnel but otherwise with no unique selling-point.

  Instead, with that set of ethical and practical ideas running through it like the words in a stick of rock, the company was able to sell a special something that no one else could offer.

  Given what the company would achieve over the next couple of decades, it is amusing to think that any of our competitors could at any time have discovered all the main points of our corporate strategy simply by looking at this publicly available document of - including my signature at the bottom - just 580 words. In most companies, the master plan is a closely guarded secret. Ours was there to be seen and copied by all who had eyes to see. Luckily, few of our rivals seemed interested. Instead, we used the charter to keep reminding ourselves and our clients what it was that we stood for; what we were aiming for; what it was that we were selling. It would have been hard to think of a better foundation for future prosperity.

  But that, in turn, was what made me worry and fuss about the long-term ownership of F International. I was reconciled to letting go of the company both managerially and financially. But - like a parent when a child leaves home - I could not bear to think of it letting go of its values.

  15: The Great Escape

  While the company I had given birth to was growing and changing and learning to make its own way in the world, with all the excitement and occasional pain that such developments generally involve, my son remained as dependent as ever, locked - metaphorically and literally - in a closed, unchanging world where there seemed to be neither progress nor hope of progress.

  Giles remained a handsome man despite various cuts and bruises over the years and the medication which seemed to coarsen his face.

  The bitter irony was not lost on us; but what could we do about it? Derek and I spent much of the early 1980s fretting about what we should do for Giles, without finding a satisfactory answer. Derek had even taken early retirement, in order to devote more time to the issue. It was a big sacrifice for such a brilliant man, at the age of just 57, but he was determined that Giles should come first. Unfortunately, his extra input didn’t initially do much good. Derek’s first innovation was to start visiting Giles on Wednesdays, in addition to our regular weekend visits. Giles reacted with fury at the disruption to his routine, lashing out, roaring and throwing things across the room. I remember Derek returning home ashen-faced after each of his first few midweek visits.

  He kept at it grimly, however, and, after a few months, Giles began to show signs that he had learnt to expect and accept these visits. Yet the effect on our peace of mind was minimal. Most of Giles’s life continued to be lived behind locked doors, far from his parents’ oversight or love. These short snatches of extra contact did little to alter this sad fact; they merely encouraged us to worry about what Giles was going through the rest of the time.

  It was hard to point to any specific failing in his car
e at Borocourt, beyond what the head of West Berkshire’s mental handicap service would later call the results of “years of neglect”. There were so few staff - typically just two nurses for a ward of around a dozen unruly youths - that nearly all their energy necessarily went into preventing major incidents of violence, self-harm or escape.

  Derek and I each independently concluded that the staff had more or less abandoned hope of bettering their patients’ lives and had become almost entirely reactive to whatever problems their charges might throw at them, rather than aspiring proactively to help them deal better with the world. I used to telephone the hospital most days, just to check with the staff how Giles had been getting on. More often than not, the question “What have you been doing today?” elicited the answer, “We have been hoping to go out” - the subtext being that at no point had they been able to get the patients sufficiently controlled and motivated actually to leave the ward. Sometimes I thought that they seemed more like prison warders than nurses; indeed, one nurse later admitted to a journalist that it was “like a concentration camp”. The residents were kept alive and physically safe, but they had been deprived of most of their human rights.

  Even West Berkshire health authority, which owned Borocourt, was losing faith in it. In 1983 it drew up plans to close the hospital and move its residents into “care in the community”. Such transitions were widely mooted at the time, and widely criticised as mere money-saving exercises, but I have no doubt that, for children like Giles, such care is (where practical) infinitely preferable to segregation and incarceration among fellow-sufferers. It allows stimulation and thus the hope of development. (It does not, however, save money.)

  But in the short-term this weakening of official support for Borocourt added to the sense of it being an institution that had lost its way. Staffing levels were in long-term decline: the number of nurses would fall by nearly 25 per cent between 1983 and 1990. As for management objectives, Borocourt’s main ambition, it seemed to us, was to serve as a repository for troubled souls whose families and communities wanted to wash their hands of them. This “out of sight, out of mind” approach had become central to its approach to its patients. Such staff as there were on the ward welcomed the active interest that Derek and I took in Giles’s wellbeing, but I wasn’t convinced that the management felt the same.

  One Saturday, we turned up to find that a big programme of redecoration had been embarked upon, initiated by a new member of the management team. Our spirits rose: perhaps this signified a new, more positive approach. Then, some weeks later, we realised that it was only the staff areas that were being spruced up. Decorating the areas the patients lived in was considered a waste of money; indeed, their area was actually being made smaller to allow more room for the staff.

  Another time, we turned up to find that Giles had been moved. He had had a particularly violent tantrum a few days earlier, and had been transferred temporarily to an extra-secure ward, where 17 of the hospital’s most intractable cases were kept in conditions even starker than those of Laburnums ward. The staff’s initial reaction to our arrival was to refuse to let us see Giles. They said it was for our own safety, but we soon realised that their real concern was to protect us from what we might see there.

  In fact, the special ward was scarcely bleaker than Laburnums ward. It was, like Laburnums, devoid of anything that could possibly be considered warm or stimulating. Many of the patients (several of whom carried signs of recent violence) were obviously sedated; Giles seemed much lower than usual. And that was it: no horrors per se; just a bare room full of bruised, bewildered youths, each groping blindly through his own emotional fog, guarded by nurses who maintained a semblance of order without seeming remotely interested in what their charges were feeling.

  It wasn’t that the nurses lacked human sympathy. On the contrary, they seemed very sensitive to what Derek and I might be feeling. It was just that the question of the patients’ feelings didn’t seem to be on the agenda. There were probably zoos in Britain where the quality of the inmates’ lives was a higher policy priority. And, in the meantime, what else might the staff be keeping from us?

  By 1984, we were both resolute: things could not go on like this. Yet the old impasse remained: what could we do instead?

  Then fate intervened.

  My mother was in her eighties, and had been growing frailer. With Renate still in Australia, Derek and I had been devoting an increasing amount of time to looking after her. Now, without warning but not unexpectedly, she died, from a heart attack in her sleep.

  I don’t remember shedding a tear. We had been reconciled in later years, but had never become close. I had never lost the feeling that she disapproved of me, and, although I had looked after her attentively, I was always a dutiful daughter to her rather than a loving one. I respected her, but I was not distraught to lose her. (By contrast, when Uncle died, a few years later, I was inconsolable.)

  But I did weep, a few months after my mother’s death, when I learnt that she had cut me out of her will, dividing her estate instead between Renate and Giles. These were tears of pure self-pity, but they were no less bitter for that. It was not the money that mattered - it was not a huge estate - but the injustice, the rejection, the cold, deliberate snub. The will had been written some years ago, but she had updated it quite recently, and I had been excluded from both versions. My mother must have been conscious of this, even as I was shouldering the burden of her support, and must have known the effect that the rejection would be likely to have on me when I discovered it. And yet still... The thought of what must have been going on in her heart makes me flush with defensive indignation even now. I am sure that I was at fault in our relationship in many ways, and I daresay I had no right to expect anything from her. Yet that final message from mother to daughter still feels like a cruel, spiteful rebuke from an angry adult to a little girl who doesn’t know what she has done wrong. And that still hurts.

  Yet much good would ultimately come of this episode. Some months later, wondering how we could spend the money that had been left to Giles for his benefit, we had the idea of buying a cottage near Borocourt. We had seen one for sale - a plain but cosy two-up-two-down called Redcot, within walking distance of the hospital - and Giles’s legacy (around £40,000) was just about enough to cover it.

  All sorts of legal niceties had to be observed: we had to be scrupulous in spending the money for Giles’s benefit and not ours. But, in brief, we bought the cottage, on Giles’s behalf, and weekends were immediately transformed for all three of us. We could take Giles there as part of our Saturday excursions - a welcome alternative to shivering picnics in the rain - and could even stay there the night before to maximise the time we could spend with him. He needed close supervision: the cottage could hardly have been less fit for purpose in terms of being bare and indestructible. But despite its awkward beams and rickety stairs, it did allow us a few more precious hours as a family each week. And if things did get too wild or difficult, it was only a short walk back to the hospital.

  It is hard to over-state the difference that this made. The fact of having a base exclusively for Giles, combined with the security of having the hospital so close by, allowed us to approach our time with him in a completely different way. Instead of having half an eye always on travel logistics, we were able to focus entirely on him. The big question of the weekend ceased to be “Will we get him safely out and back again?” and became instead “What can we do with him this time to help him to respond more positively to the world?” It also allowed me to grab some sleep after returning from the US on the “red-eye” shuttle, leaving Derek in charge until (inevitably) things got dicey.

  It was a lovely place, serenely quiet. There were plenty of disasters, from banged heads to smashed furniture, but it always felt - as it hadn’t felt for years - as though we were doing the best for Giles that could be done.

  Yet however much things improved at
weekends, the fact remained that the rest of the time he was locked in Borocourt. And if his quality of life seemed better when he was with us, it was hard not to suppose that he must notice the difference when he was locked back into Laburnums.

  Then things took a turn for the worse. We had been concerned for many months - perhaps even years - with Giles’s propensity to mouth ulcers. Derek took a close interest in Giles’s dental health (nightly teeth-cleaning was one of the few little rituals of normal family life that had always run smoothly in Giles’s life, and helping him with it whenever possible had been one of Derek’s few opportunities for normal father-son bonding); and he had come to see the state of Giles’s mouth as a kind of barometer for his wider well-being. So Derek would check Giles’s mouth on every visit and regularly quizzed staff about medication, oral hygiene and so forth. Then, in one such conversation, at some point in 1985, one of the nurses said something rather startling: “Of course,” he said, in a half-whisper, “it would be better if he didn’t drink from the toilet.”

  It took a few supplementary questions, and a few minutes’ thought, before we understood what this implied. Once we did so - and understood that the staff had known that he was drinking from the toilet bowl for years, and had not thought to mention it - we agreed, instantly and irrevocably, that we could no longer meekly accept the situation.

  We fired off a formal complaint to West Berkshire health authority, agonising far into the night about the precise wording. The final draft (the seventeenth) itemised nine different shortcomings in Borocourt’s practices, from the general to the particular. We wrote it with a heavy heart, because there were one or two individual members of staff of whom we thought highly - and it was not their fault that recent changes on the ward had denied patients access to the kitchen, reducing their access to water. But we could hardly let the matter lie, and the health authority, having received our complaint, had no alternative but to investigate. Before long we were summoned to a meeting, where our complaint was discussed by representatives of the health authority and members of the hospital management and staff, including the very people we were complaining about. It would be hard to imagine a more stressful situation, and I suspect that we did not press our case as convincingly as we might have done. At any rate, the outcome was inconclusive, and the investigation dragged on for months.