But its share-price slid, more slowly than many but downwards none the less, with obvious consequences for the balance sheet. At the same time, clients and potential clients came under pressure from the general downturn. Discretionary spending on consultancy, strategic IT and long-term “vision” projects was quickly cut back - especially by the blue-chip clients who now provided such a large part of the company’s business. And although the market would no doubt recover soon, it was hard to see where short-term growth would come from.
Then the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 dealt a new blow to global business confidence, and the company’s seemingly unstoppable upward momentum went into reverse. In 2000-2001, profits were down to £3.5m (from an underlying £27m - excluding acquisitions - the previous year). In 2001-2002 a staggering £507.8m loss was reported. (Some £497m of this was an impairment charge to write down the value of its £725m purchase of Druid, which now seemed seriously overpriced; but the underlying trend was unhealthy too.) To make matters worse, a major contract with HBOS (the First Banking Systems co-venture with what used to be Bank of Scotland) was terminated 18 months early in June 2002, leading to a loss of £91m of contracted revenue. The share price plummeted. At one point in September 2002 shares were trading at 37.5p, valuing the company at just £125m; they later settled at around 90p - still roughly 90 per cent down from their peak.
In August 2002, Hilary Cropper stood down as chief executive. Her 17 years in the post had seen the company’s turnover rise from £7m to (at its 2000 peak) £450m - an increase of more than 6,000 per cent. For two of those years she had been the UK’s highest-paid businesswoman, and few would have disputed that she deserved it. The final 12 months of her tenure had taken some of the gloss off her achievements, but she would, plainly, be a hard act to follow.
Hilary remained as chairman, working three days a week. Alistair Cox, recruited from the building materials group, Lafarge, replaced her as chief executive. Then, in 2003, Hilary stepped down as chairman as well - and shocked her many admirers with the announcement that she had been suffering from ovarian cancer since 2001. She had, it seemed, told no one at the company about her illness, undergoing chemotherapy at weekends and on short holidays. But no one, not even a superwoman, is indestructible, and she had finally had to admit defeat.
She died late the following year, aged 63. I was saddened by her death, despite the tensions in our relationship. She had been a formidable and positive force, principled and tireless, and in financial terms she had taken my company to heights that were, literally, beyond my wildest dreams for it.
Her successors were competent but lacked her Midas touch. The company performed respectably but uninspiringly, shrinking slowly in the face of economic forces beyond its control. The losses were stemmed and reversed: Xansa reported a £27.7m pre-tax profit in 2002-3, a £24m profit in 2003-4, a £12.5m profit in 2004-5 and a £13.3m profit in 2005-6. But the basic narrative, as these figures suggest, was one of contraction. Overheads were cut and sights were lowered. No one talked about conquering the world any more. The share price remained depressed.
I had hardly anything to do with Xansa at this stage in its history, but what I did see left me with the impression that it was no longer particularly different from any other multi-national, profit-driven, publicly quoted corporation. The ethos of employee ownership continued: there was a company broker to facilitate share-trading; a company banker who lent money against the company’s shares; a company PEP, so that people could hold shares in a tax-effective way; loans to new staff to help them buy their first shares; and a variety of share option schemes. But the buzz of common enterprise had gone. It was as if the long-term downward trend of the share-price and revenues had taken the excitement out of shared ownership. Where once people had dreamed of making their fortunes by making the company’s fortune, they now seemed more concerned with keeping a firm foothold on the corporate ladder.
Perhaps I am being unjust. I was, as I say, an outsider by this stage. But, at any rate, the great adventure was coming to an end.
Alistair Cox remained chief executive until 2007, when he moved on to Hays, the recruitment firm. Bill Alexander, the group chairman, took over as interim chief executive. Then, in July that year, it was announced that the company was in advanced talks regarding a possible takeover. The bidder was a French company, Groupe Steria SCA, which specialised, like Xansa, in IT-driven consultancy services, notably (unlike Xansa) in the European public sector.
Their offer, of 130p per share, was accepted, and my remaining shareholding - nearly three per cent of the company - was exchanged for cash. The purchase was completed, for £470m, via a scheme of arrangement on 17 October 2007. Xansa was delisted from the Stock Exchange, and the company that I had founded 45 years earlier ceased to exist.
I mourned its passing, naturally. But the financial aspects of the story left me relatively indifferent. Somehow, in the space of seven years, my notional unspent fortune had declined by at least £70m. I barely noticed. I had never really thought of that money as real, anyway, and at least now I knew where I stood. As for the company itself, it had been a remarkable story - from that first £6 investment in 1962 - and I was glad that it had ultimately been a success story. Much good had come from it, from the many staff members whose lives had been changed through shared ownership to the many millions of pounds that it had allowed me to use for the benefit of those less fortunate than me.
Meanwhile, the knowledge that my remaining stock of disposable wealth was finite and unlikely to grow significantly helped me to think more clearly about my philanthropic aims. (I say “philanthropic” rather than “charitable” because, increasingly, I am conscious of a difference. Charity repairs the immediate damage of social ills; philanthropy tries in a more preventive way to make society a better place to live in. For those who can afford to give large sums, philanthropy is a more productive investment.)
I knew that I wanted - and want - to give away all that remains of my wealth before I die. (Should I fail to do so, my will and the Shirley Foundation are set up to dispose of the rest within five years of my death.) But I do not want to scatter it thoughtlessly: the traumas of my early life have left me with a horror of waste. Instead, I want to combine everything left to me - money, time, business sense, connections, vision - and give it together, in such a way as to make the greatest possible difference.
I was 74 when Xansa ceased to exist, and my reserves of energy are, like my money, depleted. But I am happy to spend whatever time I have left working to make a few lives happier. I have worked hard all my life, and I see little point in changing my habits now.
My last non-executive directorship - as “general inspector” for John Lewis - finished in 2001; I had finished with AEA Technology the previous year. But there has rarely been a weekday since then when I have not ended the day feeling tired out by hard work. Until recently, this may have been a life-style choice as much as a necessity. Better to work myself to exhaustion than to sit quietly on long, empty evenings, thinking about Giles. But even now, when I can look back on the highs and lows of my life with slightly more equanimity, I see little attraction in just waiting limply for the clock of my life to run down. I would rather be doing my best to achieve something, trying to make a difference.
There was a point, at the beginning of 2009, when things appeared to be getting quieter. I stood down from the chair of Autistica - in keeping both with good corporate governance and with my policy of leaving the organisations I create to stand on their own feet - and noted with pleasure that my diary was looking empty. All my big projects were largely running themselves, and a number of lesser ones were either approaching their conclusions or were ticking along nicely with little ongoing contribution from me. These included: a book that I commissioned in 2007 - written by Adam Feinstein and recently published by Wiley/Blackwell as A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers; a £1m challenge gran
t to Balliol in 2007 for a Historic Collections Centre in St Cross Church in Oxford (the architect made a super job of the conversion: a tiny part remained consecrated, and the first service in the beautifully restored space was held in 2012); some work in 2008 to bring the UK’s autism charities closer together; and an attempt on behalf of Autistica to promote the study of autism in Saudi Arabia, where the frequency of marriage between close family members could yield priceless statistical information about autism’s genetic components.
So I found myself looking forward to spending more time at home, seeing Derek, catching up with friends, going swimming, going to galleries and restaurants, and so on. It seemed a rather tempting (and novel) prospect.
Then, in March 2009, I received a telephone call from the Cabinet Office. The Office of the Third Sector (now the Office for Civil Society) was appointing the UK’s first ever Ambassador for Philanthropy, and I had been suggested as a suitable candidate for the role. It took me all of five minutes to consider the matter before I agreed to take it on. I took up the post, for a one-year term, in May 2009.
It was a great honour. It was also a challenge, not least because the brief was open. My broad aim was to give philanthropists “a voice”, and to encourage a culture of philanthropic giving both in and beyond the UK. I was given access to a room in Admiralty Arch and some office support staff. Apart from that it was up to me. I provided my own funding, and set my own agenda, committing myself in an early press release “to act as the voice of philanthropy as well as championing innovative and effective forms of giving; and to make recommendations to Government about how to encourage and facilitate giving”.
The need for such a voice seemed self-evident. There are 26 million people in the UK who make charitable or philanthropic donations of one kind or another - by which measure we are Europe’s most generous country, outstripped globally only by the US. But that is just one way of looking at it. An alternative analysis would be that we lag shamefully behind the US, particularly in terms of major donations. The average Briton gives £225 a year; the average American £600. And whereas the top 30 givers in the UK (as calculated by the Sunday Times Rich List) give just 1.2 per cent of their wealth, the equivalent top donors in the US give 13 per cent. So there is, plainly, room for improvement.
I set myself the mission of giving existing philanthropists a voice and a visible presence in national and international life - in the hope that others might discover, through them, the rewards of philanthropy.
Part of the problem, I was certain, was the old idea among well-off Britons that “We don’t talk about money.” I felt that the key to achieving American levels of generosity was to encourage American levels of openness: so that people are proud of giving, and enjoy giving, and are even - if they like - a little competitive about giving. I don’t mean that competition should be the point of philanthropy: just that the wealthy should feel comfortable enthusing about their donations and the projects that they support, in the same way that many of them already enthuse happily about their yachts, cars, racehorses, fine wines and holiday homes.
With this in mind I focused on promoting the idea that it is a pleasure to give, not a duty. I appointed a chief of staff: a US entrepreneur with excellent connections in philanthropic circles called Roberta d’Eustachio. Heaven knows how I would have managed without her. We put a lot of effort into the creation of a website, www.ambassadorforphilanthropy.com, which allowed existing philanthropists a platform to talk about why they gave and what they got from it. And I published an Ambassador’s Pledge:
“I pledge to inspire the idea that giving is a pleasurable act of desire and compassion to help, change or challenge any aspect of society by raising the bar on our capacity to be generous.”
The website proved remarkably successful. Having tested out different models of how a global “social media” website might work, we developed it as a membership organisation along with sponsorship and advertising. The internet platform - mission driven - has a portfolio of benefits for members. The aim is for it to become self-supporting. Early contributors included James Caan, Stelio Stefanou, Simon Merchant, Alec Reed, Satish Modi, Frederick Mulder and many others. Each made a video presentation (still available on the website), discussing their philanthropic experiences and motives. What they had to say was, pretty much without exception, enlightening, thought-provoking and inspiring.
It was a natural extension of this to establish a network of British philanthropists to bring donors together on a regular basis to learn and share knowledge and put forward their views collectively to decision-makers in and beyond government. I also chaired a Philanthropy Advice Steering Group, to help develop a marketplace for philanthropic advice. And I participated in a number of events in the UK and abroad, from a policy forum on “Unleashing the Potential of e-Philanthropy” at the Oxford Internet Institute to meetings with the British Banking Association to help retail banks make giving easy, not to mention such exotic missions as an appearance at the 9th Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers’ Meeting in Barbados (to persuade other nations of the benefits of promoting philanthropy).
A change of government in 2010 made relatively little difference to this work. After some early talk of “expanding the philanthropy ambassadors programme begun by the previous government”, the new Coalition eventually decided not to renew state support (such as it was) for the experiment. My response was to carry on, privately and globally - with measurable effect. Ireland, Singapore, several eastern European countries and surprisingly, the United States were the earliest enthusiasts, but others have followed suit.
The over-riding objective in all this has been, simply, to encourage clearer thinking about what philanthropy is. It seems to me self-evident that any exercise that does this will inevitably encourage more philanthropy.
Human beings are born with an instinct to give. Our brains are hard-wired for sharing: brain scans show that the pleasure-centres in the brain are neurochemically stimulated when we act unselfishly. Yet although we are taught to share as children, most of us are somehow brainwashed later in life into thinking that sharing and giving are forms of self-harm: things to be practised, if at all, as painful duties.
I tried as Ambassador, and have tried since, to reverse this misconception. Giving may be a duty, but it is above all a pleasure. Look at the philanthropists’ testimonies at www.ambassadorforphilanthropy.com, and you will find no mention of any of them having been altruistic. Instead, they enthuse about how rewarding philanthropy has been for them: about how much more they have got from their money by using it for someone else’s benefit than they would have done by trying to enjoy it alone. This is a crucial concept. Philanthropy isn’t about letting someone else take your money and spend it as they, rather than you, see fit. (We call that “tax”.) Rather, it is about putting your money to uses you believe in, and taking pleasure from the process. Your money isn’t lost, just because someone else has it. It is simply realising its potential: wealth as numbers on a bank statement transformed into wealth that enriches the world - and, as a result, enriches you.
My own philanthropy - from my personal contributions to the autism and IT sectors to my broader campaigning as an ambassador for philanthropy - has given my life a breadth that makes me feel truly fortunate. As a social entrepreneur, I meet more interesting people, travel purposefully to more interesting places (in 2012, for example, I made two fascinating trips to Israel, which I would never otherwise have visited), and feel more fulfilled than I ever did in the years spent making my fortune. I must have given away well over £65m by now - more, if you wish to assign a notional value to the 24 per cent shareholding, in a company that at one point would be worth £2.6bn, that I put into the hands of the staff of F International; and more still, I suppose, if you also wish to include the one per cent of pre-tax profits that the company gave to charity every year for the last 30 years of its existence. Since 1994 I have been involved
in nearly 100 philanthropic projects, leaving me with less than a tenth of the wealth I once had. I have ring-fenced a little to ensure that Derek and I can live out the remainder of our lives without fear of poverty, but the rest I hope to give away, in my lifetime, to autism-related causes.
Perhaps it is a question of growing up. The older you get, the more you realise that the things that really matter in life are not the material things. In 1998, I had felt a frisson of slightly guilty pride when I was included for the first time on the Sunday Times Rich List (valued on that first appearance at £40m). I felt a much warmer glow of pride five years later when, as a result of my giving, I dropped off it again. Neither impulse was unselfish. It was merely a question of one form of pleasure being richer than the other.
This is what I have tried to emphasise in my work as an ambassador: giving is a pleasure, not a duty. It is also a social and cultural activity, not merely a financial transaction. I try always to remember how awful it was to accept charity and be expected to be grateful - grateful for not having been murdered like a million other Jewish children. So although I generally give in a business-like, strategic way, I try never to lose sight of the human side of the gift. I would never just write a cheque: that demeans both giver and recipient. Instead, I give with a warm heart - and a warm hand, too, because what’s the fun in writing gifts into my last will and testament? I want to give in my lifetime. Giving is what I do. It connects me to the future.
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 29