I tried to persuade him - and part of him accepted - that, when someone is as big, strong, violent and irrational as Giles was, love alone simply isn’t enough: that person needs to be contained in some way. Borocourt was highly spoken of, and there was no reason to believe that Giles would not be well cared for there. Perhaps the most loving thing we could do for him was to let him go.
Derek had little to offer in the way of counter-arguments, beyond a gut feeling that he didn’t like the look of Borocourt. When I was eventually well enough to visit it, I could see why. It was an old-fashioned “subnormality” hospital: a big, gothic Victorian building of the kind that most people probably imagine when they encounter the phrase “lunatic asylum”. Formerly a manor house, it had been bought by Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire County Councils in 1930 to be an institute for “mental defectives”. But by the mid-1970s it had acquired a more modern focus, with an emphasis on training and rehabilitation and an aspiration to “enable patients to move on to sheltered accommodation or independent living”. Its various wards and buildings included occupational therapy centres for day patients, accommodation for more than 300 long-term patients, and educational facilities for younger patients.
With heavy hearts (but reminding ourselves that “asylum” originally meant a place of sanctuary or safety), we agreed that Giles should be transferred from his temporary ward in Borocourt to a permanent, secure ward there called Laburnums Ward. This was in a two-storey modern block adjoining the main house and seemed at least to have been built with patients like Giles in mind. It was bleak and bare inside - but then how could it be otherwise, when the dozen or so young men it housed were all, like Giles, prone to acts of irrational destruction?
It was agreed that we would take him out every weekend, picking him up every Saturday morning and returning him on Sunday afternoon. The first time we took him back, it felt as if we were going to die of sadness on the lonely homeward journey. We had done all we could for him, and all we could do had turned out to be. . . nothing.
And yet, as I tried to explain to Derek, there had been no alternative. We had tried doing it all within the family, and had more or less destroyed the family in the process. We had to accept expert help, in whatever form it came.
Looking back now, I still shudder at the recollection of having let Giles go into Borocourt (although good would come of it in the end). But I recognise that it was, literally, a question of survival. If Giles had not been institutionalised then, I would have been. It was him or me. And although I will never feel entirely comfortable at having chosen my own survival, I also know that it was never really an option to choose for him to survive while I went under. (This principle also explains why airlines advise parents, in emergencies, to put their own oxygen mask on first before trying to do the same for their children.)
The fact was that Giles could not survive unaided. To have any hope for a tolerable existence, he needed me to survive and thrive. If I broke down again, I could do nothing for him. If I became strong again - and ideally if I could derive some financial security from my business talents - then the possibility remained that I might yet be able to give him a better life than any of us imagined possible.
13: Common Ground
RETURNING to work must rank among the two or three hardest things I have ever done. On my first morning back, I had to decline a much-needed cup of tea, rather than risk drawing attention to the wild shaking of my hands.
It wasn’t the prospect of the work itself that worried me: it was the fear of what people would be thinking. I had been used to being seen as Superwoman. Now, surely, people would see me as weak, damaged - a victim instead of a champion. The very fact of having been proved to be vulnerable increased my vulnerability.
In fact, my colleagues couldn’t have been kinder. They were supportive and tactful and gave me space to rebuild my confidence. But those first few weeks still felt alarmingly similar to the last few weeks before my breakdown. My world seemed brittle, as though it might shatter at any moment.
There was, however, a difference. Each day, instead of feeling like a little bit more of a struggle than the one before, felt a little bit easier. I gritted my teeth and told myself that, if I could just keep going, all this would become second nature to me again. So it proved.
Before I knew it, I was forgetting to think about the nightmare behind me and was thinking instead about the day-to-day challenges in front of me: decisions, proposals, meetings, plans, ideas. Within a week or two I was looking back in the evening with satisfaction on what I had accomplished that day. It seemed that, contrary to my worst fears, I still had my intellect, my focus, my vision, my technical skills. Perhaps, in short, I was still the person I had been before.
When self-doubt troubled me, I boosted my determination by focusing on a private sense of anger - at those in the outside world who had been watching my company’s progress sceptically for years and who would, I knew, have treated my breakdown as a gender issue. Of course, they’d have said, she’s a woman; of course she can’t cope. The thought of them saying this maddened me. Yes, it was true: for a while I hadn’t coped - but not because I was a woman. Rather, it had been because of an intolerable personal situation, of a kind which few men ever even attempt to cope with. How dare anyone patronise me in such an unfair, ignorant, sexist way? I fanned my resentment into a flame of motivation. The best way to refute this slur on my gender was to get back in the saddle and make the company even more successful than it had been before.
Then I thought about how to do so, and my spirits rose. There was still much in my business to get excited about.
F International had flourished in my absence. Annual turnover for 1976-77 had grown to £738,671 (from £403,969 the previous year), with pre-tax profits more than doubled to £45,244. We had a regular workforce of around 340 and an expanding client list - including such prestigious names as ICI, Kleinwort Benson and the Department of the Environment. Our reputation for efficiency and reliability was as strong as ever. Nothing significant had changed, but nothing significant had gone wrong either. Instead, the company was continuing to re-establish itself, slowly but surely, as a long-term success story.
At one level, this was a disappointment. If you’re used to thinking of yourself as indispensable, it’s humbling to find that everything hasn’t gone to ruin in your absence. But I wasn’t foolish enough to take this response too seriously. Instead, I focused on what this development could mean for the future, and on the lessons I could learn from all that had happened.
Suzette Harold, who had replaced me as group managing director about a year before my breakdown, had been acting as what would now be called chief executive. Her approach to the job was quite different from mine. She had little interest in - or flair for - creativity or innovation, but she thrived on the less strategic aspects of running a business: that is, on making the right things happen day-to-day. She was organised, strong-minded, calm, principled, a good communicator and good at dealing with pressure. Unlike me, she enjoyed public speaking. If running the company made her stressed, she never showed it. As long as no big strategic innovation was required, she was the perfect chief executive.
With me, it had been the other way round. My talent is for being an entrepreneur, in the widest sense. I love thinking of new ideas, questioning first principles, sensing new opportunities, starting things, changing things, recruiting new teams, attacking new challenges. That kind of work, for me, is indistinguishable from pleasure.
But I had always resented the way that my company also flooded my time with business chores: administration, budget-balancing, tax and legal issues, personnel problems, trouble-shooting, making things happen. They all had to be done, and I was quite capable of doing them satisfactorily - now as before. But they were things that I made myself do. Only when I was exploring ways of doing things better did I fling myself into the work with joy.
This being the case, what was the point of taking back from Suzette those parts of the job that I disliked and that she did better than me? Why not leave things as they were? True, everyone expected me to take back control from her, and, true, that would have been the comfortable option, in the sense that it would have allowed us to go back to doing things as we had done them before.
But when did anyone, company or individual, achieve anything worthwhile by pursuing the comfortable option? And, in any case, look where doing things as we had done them before had got me last time...
I brushed aside my insecurities and announced that Suzette would remain in day-to-day charge, while I took a less hands-on role. Within days I was having second thoughts: had I just conceded publicly that Suzette was more able than I was? But it was too late for agonising. I stood by my decision and soon realised that this letting-go was one of the smartest things I could have done.
Every company needs the kind of firm, confident, hands-on management that ensures that it carries on performing its core functions well. Equally, no company can thrive for long without innovation, inspiration and strategic vision. My ceding of day-to-day control to Suzette gave F International the best of both worlds. And what was good for the company must ultimately be good for me.
I remained the public face of the company. I carried on using my strengths as a people person - inspiring excellence and identifying and developing the stars of the future. I trained myself to become a more confident public speaker. I carried on networking, stepping up my activities in professional bodies such as the British Computer Society and accepting invitations to serve on government committees such as the Computer Systems and Electronics Requirements Board (which advised the government on its future IT needs, and on which I served from 1979 to 1981).
Some people seem to feel that someone who didn’t need to “get a life” would have better things to do than to sit on such worthy bodies. All I can say is that, for me, this kind of networking was crucial to my professional development. It was, for a start, stimulating: the company of clever, high-achieving people generally is. It was sometimes reassuring, too. (I am thinking here of Forum, a personal and professional support network for successful women that I joined around this time, with members as various as Prue Leith, Katharine Whitehorn and Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. Each of us had made our way more or less alone as a woman in a man’s world, and we found that we had a lot to learn from one another.)
Above all, though, it was by mixing with business heavyweights outside the narrow context of my day-job that I learnt about such unfamiliar subjects as corporate governance, patents, company law, lobbying, demography, long-term strategic thinking, and so on; or simply what the next big thing in computing or regulation was likely to be, a few years down the line. Nobody teaches you these things, when you start your own business from scratch; nobody else is responsible for making sure that you are kept in the loop. But if you do not learn these things at some point it is hard to make the leap from cottage industry to substantial, established business; or, indeed, to keep your enterprise going at all. So I am glad to have spent so much time mixing with what might be semi-derisively called the great and the good. The more time I spent in such circles, the more I learnt to raise my eyes from the desk in front of me and to think again about long-term, global perspectives. You could almost say that I learnt to get out more.
It was also around this time that I took the significant step of persuading the board of F International to agree that from now on one per cent of all pre-tax profits would be given (with the encouragement of a now defunct organisation called the PerCent Club) to charity. This decision was little noticed at the time, but over subsequent decades it would do an enormous amount of good, both to the beneficiaries and, I think, to the culture of the company.
At the same time, I carried on selling, enthusiastically - because coming up with the right vision for potential clients was arguably the most creative thing we did, and was one of the things that I did best. But I had less input than before into the technical detail of our proposals - which increasingly tended to be beyond my competence anyway - and focused instead on the broader brushstrokes of our visions. (This self-limitation had three advantages. It meant that I understood what I was talking about. It prevented me from expressing our proposals in technical gobbledegook, which meant that clients, too, could understand what I was talking about. And, because I was talking clients’ language rather than ours, it forced me to see things from their point of view - something that the IT industry is notoriously bad at doing.)
That apart, I put my energy and enthusiasm into exploring strategic opportunities, in the UK and beyond. It was around this period, for example, that I wrote my first paper on the potential benefits to Western companies of outsourcing IT functions to India - an idea that would bear enormous fruit a couple of decades later but that seemed outlandish at the time.
I also looked at ways of expanding and invigorating our overseas operations, not just in Denmark and the Netherlands but also, following a chance encounter with an American consultant at a conference in Barcelona, in the USA. Heights Information Technology Systems Inc., a computer consultancy managed by and for Americans in New York and California, opened under licence from F International in 1978, using our work methods, working proformas, control techniques and recruitment expertise; five years later it would become a wholly owned subsidiary.
Such explorations had little immediate impact on our balance sheet (and little positive impact even in the medium term), yet I quickly became certain that this was the right kind of thing for me to be doing. The business as a whole was continuing to grow rapidly, with turnover for 1977-78 passing the magic £1m mark (to £1,330,819, to be precise). This meant that my old trick of saying airily that our revenues were “in six figures” - which people for some reason always took to mean over £1m rather than over £100,000 - would no longer be needed. It also meant healthy pre-tax profits of £83,246. It was almost as if, the less I concerned myself with the day-to-day running of the company, the more we achieved.
This was partly thanks to Suzette’s commercial good sense and calm, decisive management. I hope, too, that my own more symbolic leadership may have played a part. But it was also obvious - to me at least - that there was another crucial factor in play: the company itself was sound.
F International was thriving because of strengths that over a decade and a half had become embedded in its corporate DNA. Unlike its competitors, it was an enterprise founded on trust. Its workforce were not sullen, submissive employees. They were self-motivated self-starters who loved and understood what they did and took pride in and responsibility for their work.
In the late 1970s, much of British industry was held back by a debilitating “us and them” mentality that by the end of the decade would bring the economy to the brink of collapse. At F International, everyone was “us”. Our workforce had never had much in the way of job security: few of them even had jobs in the conventional sense. What they did have was a sense of ownership of their work and careers that encouraged each one of them to make the most of their professional potential.
This was of huge value, to both company and staff. Our people tended to be working not just to earn a living but to escape from the domestic obscurity and impotence that society had ordained for them. They knew that the company trusted them to make sensible use of their time: they were paid according to the work they accomplished, not the hours they clocked up. But many were also driven by the thought that, having been considered unemployable once, they might one day be considered unemployable again. This made them keen to develop their careers, to acquire new skills and to develop a reputation for excellence - just like the company as a whole. They generally cared as much as I did that a project should be completed on time and on budget, and that it should produce a satisfied customer. We were, by this stage, a large organisation, dispersed nationally, whose UK o
perations involved not just programmers and project managers but senior project managers, project directors and even regional directors. Roughly 500 people would probably have said, if asked, that they worked for F International. But I don’t think any of them felt that the company owed them a living. They thought of themselves as responsible, independent adults, and so did we.
The average employee in a traditional male-dominated company was (in those days) suspicious of change; for our staff, keeping abreast of new technological developments was part of the point of working. Many of our panellists had carried on going to conferences and courses even in the depths of the recession, describing themselves as representatives of the company despite the fact that we were not paying them at the time. No one had asked them to do so. It was their insurance against being relegated to the kitchen again.
In the same way, whereas employees in traditional companies tended to resent being monitored or criticised - and could barely comprehend the American notion that “the customer is always right” - collective self-criticism was part of our way of life. We were a learning organisation.
Right from the beginning, when we had written those software standards for Urwick Diebold, Freelance Programmers had made a selling-point of its ability to monitor objectively the quality of its work. Our early crisis with Castrol had taught us how important it was to incorporate rigorous quality control into our working practices. And my chronic naivety had made us simply oblivious to the common industry practice of producing two sets of reports when reviewing projects: one for internal consumption and one, toned down, for the client. We were brutally frank to everyone about our failings - and, as a result, had never settled into bad habits.
For much of the previous decade, meanwhile, our contracts had insisted on a formal post-project review to get feedback from the client after our system had been up-and-running for a while. (This had been Derek’s idea, and was intended partly as a means of getting us back inside the door to tout for new work.) So the idea that there is always scope for learning to do things better was central to our culture, as was the idea of listening to the customer.
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 16
