My observations relate to no one company in particular nor to every company I have come across. I don’t think I was particularly surprised to find that levels of personal ability and skill are still no higher even in the best companies than they are at equivalent levels in the public service. But how long can that last, given the huge and increasing difference in remuneration levels between the two sectors? Clearly companies must offer levels of reward which will attract and retain people capable of running them, and that means rewards on an international scale. I have no problem with that, provided that the rewards are related to performance. But, given the extent to which, in business, it is remuneration which is the prime motivator, and the prime way of establishing a person’s status, it does seem to me very unhealthy that such a huge difference exists between the public and private sector. How can company bosses take seriously, for example, Permanent Secretaries who are content to work for remuneration similar to that received by comparatively low level staff in their companies? The truth is that in many cases they don’t. One Chairman of a company said to me, ‘We don’t want an ex-Permanent Secretary on our Board. After all, all they do is what they are told’ – a breathtakingly inaccurate version of the job of the head of a government department. Nor do many senior people in business understand the motivation of those whose satisfaction comes, as it still overwhelmingly does in the public service, from a sense of personal achievement or of service to the public. I am sure many cynics will sneer at that characterisation of the senior civil service, but it is still largely true.
I was surprised to find a very inadequate understanding in business of the value which is available, free, from the government machine. I am not talking only about the deep understanding which exists in the Foreign Office about foreign governments, about key personalities and the issues which are likely to affect events in different parts of the world. There is also the information and assessments of the Home Office and the police, to say nothing of the Security Service about domestic issues, tensions, and pressures, all of which are very relevant to long term business planning and can be accessed. But there are other things too. Various parts of the public service know a great deal about balancing complex pressures, managing risks, assessing information and how an organisation can know what it knows by the effective storage and accessing of information. All these skills are vital to businesses, some of which, in my observation, are not particularly good at them. But, as far as I have seen, many business leaders have little understanding of what is available, or any real understanding about how to access it. If any attempt is made to do so, it is either delegated to a fairly low level in the company or done at second hand, through consultants. As a result, it is not used to the best advantage in the formulation of business strategies, to the disadvantage of UK plc.
Of course, I was not surprised by the dominance of men in British boardrooms. It is a well-known fact and it is changing; though it is changing very slowly. But, given the journey through life I had already made, I was surprised by the extent to which in 1996, there was still an issue about women on Boards. It was quite a few years since I had been aware of being regarded as an oddity, as a female in the public service. Even my European colleagues, the Heads of the European Security Services, had come to accept me as one of them. And although there were not large numbers of women at the top of the civil service, those that were there were certainly not there for politically correct reasons. They were neither patronised nor discriminated against, but treated just like the men. So I was frankly amazed to be told by the Chairmen of several companies, ‘We need a woman on the Board.’ It was clear that those Chairmen did not much care what woman, nor did they perceive that ‘a woman’ might have just as much to contribute as ‘a man’, and that she would certainly be just as different from another woman as two men would be from each other. And I was astounded when the Chairman of one British plc said to me, ‘I think we need a woman on the Board, but I am afraid I would not be able to persuade my fellow Directors of that.’ It was an unexpected, and unwelcome flashback to find myself addressed as ‘dear’ by the distinguished Chairman of another. Needless to say those were not companies I wished to have anything to do with.
I was also very surprised, perhaps I shouldn’t have been, by the style of some of the men who run British business today. In the early part of the century great businesses were built by giants of men. Such men had imagination, drive and conviction and could inspire the thousands who worked for them, all of whom knew exactly who was the boss and would follow him. Their style was autocratic, and based on a conviction of their own rightness. And those who were right built very successful businesses indeed. But that style will no longer cut the mustard in the much more complicated and fast-moving circumstances of the new century. Yet a significant part of the British corporate world seems to me still to be hankering after such men. A new model has not yet emerged. So there are still too many around who appear to believe that in order to lead, it is necessary to know the answers to all questions immediately; that listening is a sign of weakness. Such people have little idea how to lead by delegation, how to place power and responsibility at the appropriate level or how to use the skills of the frequently very talented and enthusiastic teams they have assembled around them. As a result, those talented people, if they stay, gradually lose their ability to take decisions appropriate to their level of pay and responsibility, and look upwards instead for someone to tell them what to do. I was struck too by the focus on day-to-day management of crises, the absence of long-term strategic planning or the ability to recognise or manage complex issues in some of the companies I came across.
This probably struck me all the more forcibly because it is quite a different pattern from what I had been used to. The public service has not bred ‘great men’ in the same mould. Instead it has organised itself to try to make the best use of all its talents and to manage complicated public business through distributed power centres. The potential weakness of that system is delay, turf battles, passing the buck. One of its strengths is the ability intelligently to apply the corporate memory to new situations. Of course, business and the public service have quite different jobs to do and it will be a disaster if either slavishly apes the other. But it is a big mistake to think that business has a monopoly of wisdom.
And what of the role, which I currently play, Non-Executive Director? It’s a role about which there is almost as much confusion as there is about my former career. There have been Non-Executive or independent Directors on the Boards of companies for years but it was only with the Report of the Cadbury Committee in 1992, following some spectacular corporate failures and frauds in the late 1980s, that their role became clearly associated with ensuring proper control of the way companies are run, ‘corporate governance’ to use the jargon.
Since then, other Committees have sat and made other recommendations about the running of companies, many of which have given further specific responsibilities to the Non-Executive Directors – for setting appropriate remuneration for the executive Directors, for monitoring the audit arrangements of the company and for making recommendations on appointments to the Board, to say nothing of monitoring the strategic direction of the company, ensuring there are effective policies in place and that resources are properly allocated. All this to be done in a volatile and uncertain environment where change is continuous and in an increasingly transparent environment, where the names of Non-Executive Directors appear regularly in the newspapers, accompanied by accusations of incompetence, fat-cattery and of acting as though their position carries only benefits and not responsibilities, particularly when anything seems to be going wrong in a company.
Non-Executive Directors, the informed outsiders, have become the linchpins of the system as the private sector moves from the days of the great autocrats, when it was run without any effective accountability, and tries to develop some appropriate system of oversight. Indeed, so much responsibility has now been piled on Non-Executive Directors
that not surprisingly, there seems to be little agreement about anything to do with them. Armies of consultants hold innumerable conferences, breakfasts, dinners, to discuss the role of the Non-Executive Director, the qualifications and skills required, where they should be found, how they should be appointed, how much they should be paid. It is a burgeoning industry.
The job has certainly moved on a lot from the early days of Non-Executive Directors, when anecdotal information relates that they were appointed by the Chairman largely as people he could rely on to support him. I suspect that in those days the job in many companies consisted largely of glancing through a few papers, going to a meeting, saying ‘Jolly good show, Chairman,’ and going off for a good lunch. But it has now swung so far the other way that it is beginning to look unrealistic to place all those different responsibilities on a small group of people, particularly as many of them sit on or chair the Boards of three, four or as many as eight different companies. It may just be possible to do that when everything is going well, but when things get complicated it clearly is not. But it is not easy to find people with the necessary skills who will take on these roles as the responsibilities increase.
So is it possible to be an effective Non-Executive Director or are you just there to blame when things go wrong? Not so much fat cat as fall guy. I learned a lot from observing how the eminent judges who were the first outside scrutineers of MI5 went about it. They arrived knowing nothing about the intelligence world or the people who worked in it, with the responsibility of investigating complaints. They started by asking for all the files relevant to every complaint they had to investigate. And all the files were given to them. In some cases that might mean thirty volumes stuffed with papers. It was clearly impossible, in the time they had available, to read everything in the thirty volumes, so eventually they settled for summaries of information. In other cases there might be no papers at all to see, if, as happened not infrequently, the complaint was from somebody who had never been investigated and was not known to the Service.
How were they to know if the summary was accurate, or, if no papers were produced, that there genuinely were none? Knowing they could not know everything, they had to work out some way of judging whether what they were being told was likely to be true. They did that by going round meeting people at all levels in the organisation on all sorts of occasions both formal and informal. They questioned and listened far more than they talked. They looked at the processes and the way things were done. They used their judgement and experience to weigh up what they heard, not only what was said, but also who was saying it and what that revealed about the ethos and state of the organisation. They managed with no difficulty to do that without in any sense compromising their independence of judgement. And that is what I have tried to do as a Non-Executive Director.
So I have attended recruitment days, talked to focus groups on this and that, flown to oil and gas platforms and visited many different parts of the companies I am now working with, and the companies who work with us. And, to my great surprise, I spent my sixty-fourth birthday abseiling off a ski lift in Norway, on a Change Management Course, and later in the same week playing Claudius in a production of Tom Stoppard’s Fifteen-Minute Hamlet in a barge theatre in Copenhagen. Many more traditional Non-Executive Directors would be surprised and shocked at that level of involvement, and it is far more than was envisaged when the system was first introduced but I don’t know how the job as it now is could be done effectively without it.
I spent many years working in an organisation which when I joined it had hardly any external regulation at all, except for Home Secretaries who, in those days, seem rarely if ever to have sought to find out what was happening. By the time I left, it was, in common with other parts of the public service, highly regulated, with a complex pattern of accountabilities and oversights – ministerial, judicial, administrative and parliamentary – as well as that of the media, with its long ears and very long purse. I contributed to the development of that regulation and worked under the system which resulted. I believe it was effective, though no system of regulation is perfect and like all healthy systems it will develop and change as time goes on. It is arguable, though it will never be a popular line of argument, that the public service as a whole is now over-accountable. It does seem to me to be a characteristic of contemporary thinking that when something goes wrong, rather than addressing ourselves to the reason for failure, we instinctively rush to add another layer of regulation and oversight. Over-regulation can be the enemy of imagination and inspiration. And perhaps even worse, by enforcing conformity to more and more rules, we give the impression that no more is required, and thus risk ultimately eroding honesty.
EPILOGUE
Since I was turned into a public figure by the government in 1991, I have had to balance secrecy and openness in my public and private life in a way that has been difficult to get right and often uncomfortable both for me and my family. Much has been written since then about me and the job I did, frequently by people who have never met me, but until now I have said little publicly about myself and written less. This book is me in a way that most of the rest has not been. I am not and never was ‘Housewife Superspy’, but a 20th-century woman who by chance found herself at the centre of some great national events and some big social changes. My story illustrates, in a sometimes extreme form, the balancing act that many modern women have to perform between the requirements of home, career and family. Most women don’t resolve the conflict to their own satisfaction and neither have I.
In telling my story, I also hoped to cast some light on a part of what is called the ‘secret state’ from a different, more down-to-earth angle than the usual breathless, conspiratorial one. I wanted to show what it was really like to work in one of these much fictionalised organisations through a period of great change and modernisation. For me, it has made for an active life, in some ways a stressful life, but a life full of interest and I have never been bored. I hope that alongside the serious issues, some of the fun of it all comes out in this book.
I shall be very sorry indeed if my publishing my autobiography has permanently damaged my relationship with the Service I worked in for twenty-seven years and for which I have a very high regard. Some of those who are working for it now are my former colleagues. Many others will know little or nothing about me or the period I have described, when much of what they now take for granted was being developed. If they are, as I expect they are, the same sort of balanced, sane and sensible people I spoke of at the beginning, with a well-developed sense of humour and a down-to-earth approach to difficult issues, they will be getting on with the job they have to do, and not spending much time worrying about this book. That is certainly how I would want it to be.
AFTERWORD
This is a straightforward and honest account of my life so far, as I remember it. That life includes some twenty-seven years spent working in the Security Service (MI5). But I have not set out to write a history of British counter-espionage or counter-terrorism during that period, just a recollection of what now, in retrospect, seem to me to be the personal highlights. It has been written without access to any papers or official information and I have never kept a diary.
As the first publicly named Director-General of MI5 and the first woman to hold that post, my career has generated much interest, particularly among other women. It was in response to that interest that I decided to try to write an autobiography, though I realised that it would be difficult to strike the balance between readability and the necessary discretion when I came to write about my time in MI5. I did not know what the reaction would be when, as I was obliged to do, I submitted my first fairly raw draft to the official clearance process. Although I had written it very carefully, acutely aware of the needs of secrecy, I did not expect it to be received with enthusiasm. It goes without saying that those in charge of the intelligence community at any given moment will feel that the less former members say, the better. If everyone goes off and ke
eps quiet it is much easier to keep things under control. No doubt Prime Ministers feel the same about their predecessors and former Cabinet colleagues. But I did hope that when they saw the sort of thing I wanted to write, they would not think it damaging. I certainly did not expect the ferocity of the reaction I received. Perhaps I was too out of touch by then and not sufficiently aware of the other fish various parts of the intelligence community were trying to fry – the whistle-blowers, the leakers and those accused of breaking the Official Secrets Act.
I started the book in August 1998, and the writing of the first draft took until Christmas 1999. Then, on 14 February 2000, in truly covert style, I handed my manuscript in a black briefcase to a former colleague, after a pleasant lunch at the Orrery Restaurant in Marylebone High Street. The manuscript was accompanied by a letter asking what omissions would need to be made before it could be published. Looking rather startled, she disappeared with it in her car. Then, apart from a brief letter of acknowledgement, I heard nothing at all for two months.
I now know that during that period Whitehall went into full damage-limitation mode. The draft was sent to the Cabinet Office and circulated to everyone who could have any angle on it. No-one will ever know how many copies were made. Not surprisingly in the circumstances, everyone did have an angle – mostly, so far as I have gathered, hostile, negative and worried. After enquiries on my part as to what was happening, I was summoned down to Whitehall to see the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson. His brief was to deter me and he fulfilled it very well. By the end of an hour or so of being bullied, threatened and cajoled in the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger way the Establishment behaves to its recalcitrant sons and, as I now know, daughters, I was very shaken. My protests that at that stage I had done nothing except submit a draft manuscript for clearance in the proper way seemed to fall on deaf ears. I felt that I had become an outsider, a threat to the established order. I tried to keep my end up, while I waited to see what his fall-back position was, and eventually I was told that if I co-operated on the content (something I had always intended to do) and if we could agree, he would recommend that the book could be published, though he could give me no guarantee what ministers would decide. When at the end of it all he walked me to the door of the building, patted me kindly on the shoulder and said, ‘Never mind, Stella, go off and buy something,’ I did not feel any better.
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