Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  And yet, just as I evolved from entrepreneur into philanthropist, so I think I may now be evolving into a fundraiser. There is a limit to the money I can give, but there is scarcely any limit to the money that other people can give. And if my work can persuade 50 people to give £1m each, that is a more worthwhile achievement than simply giving away £1m of my own money.

  Philanthropy will, I think, be one of the key megatrends of the next 50 years. Governments everywhere are paring back the welfare state, and the societies that do not wither as a result will be those in which philanthropists step forward to contribute as they see fit. They cannot replace the state, but they can, if they choose, acquire a significance comparable to that which they had in Victorian times. If my current work - including this book - can help persuade those who have something to give that it is worth their while to give it, my ambassadorial efforts will not have been wasted.

  25: Letting Go

  IT TURNED out that the story of Freelance Programmers didn’t quite finish when Xansa was acquired by Groupe Steria in 2007. The soul of the company lives on.

  I learnt this in February 2008, when I was invited to Evian, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, for a conference organised by the French company for 100 of its leading executives. The purpose of the conference was to celebrate Steria’s distinctive corporate culture: a culture that takes pride in its inclusiveness, flexibility and corporate and social responsibility - and that bears a startling resemblance to the ethos I once tried to create for my own company.

  The company that I set up in 1962 ceased to exist after 45 years when it was acquired by Steria. Early in 2008, together with Jean Carterton – Steria’s founder in 1969 – I was invited to join Chief Executive Francois Enaud for its top management conference in Evian.

  I was vaguely aware of this already, but in Evian I realised for the first time just how close the resemblance was. Established in 1969 by a French telecom engineer and computer pioneer called Jean Carteron, Steria was founded, according to Carteron, “on my conviction that economic and ethical interests are not mutually exclusive, and that financial performance follows from employees’ direction of and dedication to a company in whose future they have a stake.” It listed its core principles as creativity, independence, international ambition - and employee ownership.

  Like Xansa, Steria had been a technological and conceptual innovator, breaking new ground in such fields as word-processing, calculators, interactive information systems, flight simulation, cash-dispensing networks, Metro systems and identity cards. And Carteron, like me, was convinced that there was a relationship between such creativity and the fact that employees had a stake in the company.

  Like Xansa, Steria has never achieved total employee ownership. It is a publicly quoted company, first listed on the Paris stock exchange in 1999. But 20 per cent of the company is still owned by or on behalf of staff shareholders, who not only share the benefits of the company’s success but have the power to influence decision-making. Under French company law Steria is a “partnership limited by shares”. Soderi, the company representing the employee shareholders, is the sole General Partner - with the right to “debate, approve and reject” strategic decisions (such as acquisitions) made by the chief executive. Around 4,000 of the company’s 20,000 employees (spread over 16 countries) own shares.

  As with Xansa, Steria is an imperfect realisation of a noble ideal. But it seems to work well - the company had a turnover of €1.7bn in 2010 - and it is clear that this is an organisation with a sense of values as well as a profit motive. There is, for example, a Steria Foundation, which supports projects that use IT to benefit disadvantaged people (another cause close to my heart).

  Jean Carteron is retired now, but he, like me, had been invited to the Evian conference, and I was moved beyond words when François Enaud, the chief executive, invited both of us on to the podium before explaining to those present that the unique culture they were celebrating was our creation. Perhaps he was merely being gracious (a habit that had been markedly absent from Xansa’s boardroom in its later years), but I took his words to heart. It felt as though, for the first time since I had been edged out of FI Group as an irrelevance in the early 1990s, my original ideal for the company was being partially validated again. It also brought home to me that such ideals are often more resilient than we imagine. Xansa the corporate giant was dead; but the spirit of common enterprise that had animated F International was alive and well.

  I returned to England full of hope. It is easy to look back on a life of material success and mourn the fact that so much of what once seemed solid has drifted away on the tides of time. But I realised clearly now that the things that matter are often more substantial than they seem.

  The company that I began in 1962 generated, over the years, hundreds of millions of pounds: in sales, in revenue, in profits - however you like to measure it. That company no longer exists, and nearly all of that money has gone. What have endured are the good things: the friendships; the memories; the worthwhile projects that some of that money created (the Kingwood homes, Prior’s Court, the Oxford Internet Institute); and, scarcely less important, the original ideal of the company: the idea that ownership, like money, is more effective and empowering if it is shared.

  That idea is demonstrably true in material terms. Employee-owned companies consistently outperform listed companies, according to the UK Employee Ownership Index, which since 1992 has measured the performance of companies that are more than 10 per cent owned by employees. An investment of £100 in the FTSE All-Share Index in 1992 would at the end of June 2011 have been worth £242. The same investment in the EOI would have been worth £767.

  What I cannot demonstrate with figures are the non-material advantages of shared ownership. Yet these are considerable too. It is fairer. It spreads the strains of work as well as its rewards. And when it works well it creates a sense of community that makes the whole business of earning a living more enjoyable and rewarding. I remember an auditor for the Ministry of Defence carrying out a quality audit at F International (as it then was) in 1985 and saying: “I have to tell you that this is one of the best software houses I have ever seen. But the other thing is, it is obvious that you all have such a lot of fun.” The person who cannot look back on their career and remember a reasonable amount of fun is truly impoverished, irrespective of how much they have earned.

  Shared ownership is not a universal panacea. Some employee-owned concerns work badly; many public or privately-owned companies work well. But the co-operative approach is not the cranky ideal that some boardroom “realists” like to make it out to be. It works. Few British retail companies have weathered the latest economic downturn so robustly as John Lewis. No wonder all three main political parties have talked recently about using “John Lewis style partnerships” to run key public services. In an age when capitalism is in danger of becoming as discredited as communism, the ideals of co-operatism have more to offer than many people assume.

  But employee ownership is not just about sharing. It is also, in practice, often about giving. Such schemes depend on someone, usually the proprietor, deciding at some point to transfer ownership of some or all of a company to its employees. And it is this aspect of the ideal, I think, that has the greatest significance for my story.

  Of all the things I have given, it is arguable that the shares in my company that I gave away had the greatest financial value. In fact, I have rarely thought of this transfer of ownership as a gift, and I would be wrong if I did. The staff had a right to share in the company. Without them, the company would not have been so prosperous (and I am certain that Xansa would never have reached anything like the financial heights it eventually did if it hadn’t been powered by the fuel of staff ownership). But while I never doubted that aspect of the transfer, I did sometimes struggle with a more abstract issue: the fact that transferring ownership also means, ultimately, transferring
control.

  That was the real challenge: surrendering power. Anyone can adjust to having a bit less money; ceding control of an enterprise that really matters to you is, by contrast, painfully counterintuitive. Who in their right mind would entrust an organisation that they have built up against all the odds, through years of tears, toil and sweat, to someone else? What if they mess it up? What if they don’t really understand what it is that you have created? What if they take it in some dangerous new direction, or manage it in a less idealistic way?

  Yet without that surrender, the most important part of the transaction is lost. A feudal grandee can be as generous as he likes with his wealth and property, but as long as he remains the grandee then his dependants are not empowered: they are merely well-fed. Empowering them means letting go: in other words, ceasing to be the grandee.

  I have struggled all my life with an instinct to hang on to the things that matter most to me, to control and protect them myself. Yet the art of surrender is, I am convinced, a key to many kinds of success - and fulfilment. And many lives are limited by a failure to master it.

  There is a well-known (anonymous) saying in the world of emotional self-help literature: “If you love something, let it go. If it is yours, it will come back to you; if not, it never really belonged to you in the first place.” It’s a slightly glib formula, rendered trite by over-use; but it expresses a useful truth about love, jealousy and possessiveness. It could also be adapted, with a little distortion, to many other fields.

  One of the reasons why Freelance Programmers thrived in its early days - where so many new enterprises fail - was that, simply by allowing our programmers and project managers to perform their duties when and where they pleased, I had surrendered a significant part of the control that employers traditionally exercise over those who work for them. Our competitors were still insisting that their staff worked for fixed hours, in fixed places, clocking in and clocking out and having to account for what they were doing throughout each shift. I trusted mine to manage their own time, as long as the work got done. The result? Not the anarchy and idleness that a traditionalist manager would have predicted but, instead, unrivalled productivity.

  Later, my gradual, painful handover of the company to its workforce and my successors led first to a culture of sustained motivation and ultimately to a great leap in profitability that, paradoxically, generated far more wealth for me after I had let go of it than it ever had before. My instincts had told me that no one else could match my passion, perfectionism and strategic insights; my intellect told me otherwise, and was proved right.

  I was quicker to manage succession with the Kingwood Trust, with Prior’s Court, and with Autistica. None of the handovers was entirely painless, but I always knew, in each case, that letting go was the right thing to do. And each organisation has thrived without me - not despite my absence but because of it. Those running the organisations are empowered to give the best of themselves precisely because the organisations are theirs to run.

  The older I get the clearer it becomes to me that empowerment is the key to business success: not the blind surrender of power and responsibility to whoever wants it, but targeted empowerment, where those to whom power and responsibility are given have been painstakingly selected and, where appropriate, nurtured. The wise manager or proprietor invests in that targeting above all else. It is people, not assets, that make the modern business world go round. It is their creative drive that sparks new enterprise and innovation, their professionalism and dedication that ensures quality, their energy that makes things happen - and, always, it is teamwork that carries forward the vision. Yes, by all means lead from the front, if that is your style, but always remember that leadership is nothing unless those who are led give the best of themselves. Like love, leadership is, at its best, about giving, not taking. The people you lead need to recognise that they too have power - and responsibility. And if this then causes them to claim credit for your collective successes, so what? What matters is that they are successes and not failures. Lao Tse observed more than 2,500 years ago that “When the best leader’s work is done, the people say: ‘We did it all ourselves.’” The best leaders enjoy hearing them do so, rather than worrying that “their” glory has been misappropriated.

  But it is not just in business that the habit of letting go can yield dividends. It also works - or has worked for me - in more personal areas. I was only five when my weeping mother put me on a train full of 1,000 children and “let go”, entrusting me to the kindness of strangers. Her trust was repaid. I have seen many other mothers weep as they let their vulnerable children go, entrusting them to an unfamiliar environment - Prior’s Court - where they could receive care, therapy and education on a scale that no individual family, no matter how loving, could provide. And, further down that road, I have shared the nervous excitement (and tears) of parents and carers as many of those same children, their education completed, have been “let go” again, to take their first steps towards semi-independent living.

  No one thought of independence as a worthwhile goal for children with autism when Giles was growing up. People like him needed to be shut away, for their own safety and society’s convenience. Yet such lack of trust in the world and its most vulnerable members can be corrosive and, often, counter-productive. The period of Giles’s life when he had the greatest physical protection from the dangers of the outside world was the nightmare period he spent in the subnormality hospital at Borocourt: the time when he was least trusted and least able to make and learn from his own mistakes. The periods when he had the greatest quality of life were those when that safety-net had been replaced with a far looser one: in those happy early schooldays at The Walnuts, where he was given a degree of (supervised) freedom that no parent would have dared to allow at home; and, more visibly, in those last years at The Cuddy, when he was allowed (under supervision) to discover, by trial and error, his own version of adult life. Of course, he was never fully independent. But it was trust, not confinement, that allowed him to live.

  It never occurred to me when I set out to write this book that “letting go” might be the connecting theme of my life. Yet the more I think about it, the more obvious it seems. So many of my landmark breakthroughs seem to have involved some form of counter-instinctive loosening of my grip on something. In early adulthood, with the help of psychoanalysis, I was eventually able to let go of the traumas of my early childhood - and immediately began to thrive as a result. When I left FI Group, it was letting go of my accumulated resentment that allowed me to discover a rewarding new phase of my life, when I could so easily have wasted my retirement in backward-looking bitterness.

  Perhaps most significantly of all, learning to let go of my money has been absolutely central to what I now see as the most rewarding stage of my life. It would have been so easy to cling on to it: to subscribe to the old myth that looking after number one is all that matters, and that a fool and her money are soon parted. Yet it is hard from my current perspective to see how I could have gained anything like so much happiness and satisfaction from my wealth had I kept it for myself. What would I have done with it? Kept it in a bank? Frittered it away in shops? Spent it on racehorses and yachts?

  I don’t pretend to be totally indifferent to the comforts of wealth. Simply being free from financial worry is a luxury granted to few. I enjoy buying nice clothes, too, and occasional pieces of furniture or works of art for our apartment. But there is a limit to the number of possessions you can actually enjoy, or to the number of fine dinners you can eat or exotic holidays you can take; and there are drawbacks to extreme wealth (such as insincere would-be “friends”) as well as advantages.

  On balance, I have no doubt at all: the money I have let go has brought me infinitely more joy than the money I have hung on to. I say “let go” rather than “given away” because it is not, usually, a question of simply giving the money to someone as a present. Such gifts can be pa
tronising and produce limited benefits. Rather, I have tried to release my money in the form of empowering investments which allow other people to achieve things that lack of capital had previously preventing them from doing.

  That is when the process becomes truly rewarding for all concerned. The given money repays its value many times over. It is a bit like gardening, and, indeed, I have often thought of myself as a gardener: someone who “grows” people and enterprises. I have planted my financial gifts as seeds, renouncing my ownership of them as I did so; and, when I have planted wisely, they have been gloriously fruitful.

  I know that we live in an imperfect world. I know that people sometimes let you down or take advantage of you. But sometimes - often - they don’t; and I am grateful to have learnt this important truth, through force of circumstance, early in life. Most of us have well-developed instincts for fear, suspicion and cynicism. The instincts for trust and hope sometimes need a little encouragement.

  Perhaps that is the single message with which I should end this book: have faith in other people. No one is faultless, but nearly everyone has virtues (often hidden) and potential (often unrealised). I don’t think I have ever achieved anything of note that did not at some point require me to make a leap of faith in some other human being. If I have a talent, it is that: the ability to believe in what others can achieve. I recommend it. Trusting others is also about respecting yourself. The assumption that people will betray you or cheat you or let you down can all too often be self-fulfilling.

  I don’t know what else life has in store for me. But I believe more firmly than ever that I will get the most out of what remains to me by giving rather than receiving, and by having faith - in human nature, in my own nature, and in the world itself.

  I came close to annihilation at the outset of my life, and deep down I remain a refugee. I know that nothing lasts for ever; I know that tomorrow may well be quite different from today. All the more reason, then, to welcome the uncertainties of the future - and to see each unknown tomorrow as an opportunity, not a threat. We waste too much time being afraid, when what we should really fear is wasting time.