Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley
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Meanwhile, what little warmth there had been in our relationship with the Borocourt management vanished abruptly, and a new fear gripped us: what if this hostility also expressed itself in the way Giles was looked after? There was, I hasten to add, absolutely no reason to suspect that any of the staff on the ward would maltreat him, yet it was impossible to eradicate that fear entirely from our minds. If nothing else, he was desperately vulnerable.
I’m not sure which of us first had the idea that we could take what we had done with Redcot a stage further. I think we had both voiced the vague wish “If only he could stay here all the time”; but neither of us had really thought it through. Then, gradually, we began to discuss it as a serious proposition.
We realised within minutes that it was an impractical idea. Looking after Giles in Redcot would be no easier than looking after him in our own home; harder, in fact, because Redcot was smaller and more hazardous. Why would it work now when it hadn’t worked before?
Derek pointed out that at least he was now retired; I pointed out that he was 62 and no match physically for Giles, who was 22 and strong as a bullock. The only way Giles could live full-time outside Borocourt was with full-time professional help. And how could we possibly afford that? We got as far as investigating some of the figures (official estimates at the time put the cost of the most basic “care in the community” at £30,000 per patient per year) before giving up in despair.
The only step forward was that Derek began to take Giles to Redcot during his Wednesday visits and - since Giles could be extraordinarily violent and destructive when the mood took him - began to pay an unemployed local nurse called Phil Bunce to come and help him. This caused further tensions in our relationship with the hospital, where Phil had once been an employee. He had left under a cloud after allegedly disregarding rules about taking patients into the local pub. But he was obviously competent, and experienced, and what he lacked in professional discipline he made up for in human warmth - which was what had been so painfully absent from Giles’s life over the past decade. We knew him from Borocourt, where we had been impressed by him and had been sorry to see him leave, and Derek, who is a good judge of character, felt comfortable working with him.
So Wednesdays, like weekends, began to see a distinct improvement in Giles’s situation. Unfortunately, the opposite was true of the rest of the week. Even before our complaint, not everyone in Borocourt seemed very enthusiastic about the active interest that Derek and I took in the details of our son’s care. I am certain (now) that they would never have harmed a patient in order to get back at his parents; but, equally, it was impossible (then) not to imagine that they might. Every time we gave Giles back into their care, we felt as though we were betraying him. And yet - to repeat yet again a question that we repeated to ourselves many times each day - what else could we do?
Some time later, a colleague, George Zahler, found me sitting alone, weeping, in the conservatory at The Bury, the office that FI still retained in Chesham. (Our headquarters were in Berkhamsted by then.) George asked what the matter was, and I explained that I was at my wits’ end, trying to work out how I could save Giles from spending the rest of his life in his prison-like subnormality hospital whose staff hated the Shirley family. We talked it through for a bit, and then he said: “But what about the company?”
I didn’t understand at first, but gradually he pressed the point home. Over the past few years F International had grown from a liability into a valuable asset. The value was still all locked up in the company; but what was to stop me selling some shares in it?
I don’t think the idea had even occurred to me. I was dimly aware that, as profits had grown in recent years, so the value of the company had increased; I had even vaguely contemplated the implications of that rising value for my personal paper fortune - laughingly wondering if an extra nought or two had been accidentally added to the figures. But until this moment I had never considered that I might turn some of this notional value into hard cash, here and now.
The obvious reason for not doing so was that, once some of the company was owned by outside investors, there would no longer be any possibility of transferring ownership of the company in its entirety to the workforce. My colleague countered this by asking which dream was most important to me. My dream of a staff-owned company? Or my dream of finding Giles a future outside Borocourt?
It was a painful question, and it took me some time to come to terms with the obvious answer. But subsequent discussions with Derek left me in no doubt that Giles’s needs had to come first, and in due course I set in motion the process of selling part of my stake in F International to institutional investors. It was a long-drawn-out business, but by the end of that year - 1985 - some 13 per cent of the company was in outside hands, and Derek and I had enough ready cash to change Giles’s life.
It was, even then, a slow process. It would be more than two years before we were able to remove Giles from Borocourt altogether. There were endless meetings to be had: with hospital staff, with social services staff, and with any number of representatives of local authorities (for both health and social services and - through a quirk of geography - for both Oxfordshire and Berkshire). There were questions to be resolved about his future medical care, about his financial entitlements, and about our ability to provide care to a standard that the authorities deemed acceptable - all discussed in the shadow of our ongoing complaint against Borocourt. But at least we were moving, slowly, in the right direction.
In due course our aspiration to give Giles a future outside Borocourt crystallised into a firm plan. We would install him permanently at Redcot, while maintaining a formal but reduced link with the hospital, on which we could fall back in emergencies. This required further months of fraught negotiations, but, in the meantime, we took the crucial step of hiring Phil Bunce to be Giles’s full-time, live-in carer. We did so with trepidation. Ideally, my son’s carer would have been less coarse in his language and less fond of pubs, and perhaps a bit more educated too. Yet in some obscure way Derek and I both knew that it would work. We had seen Phil’s faults at Borocourt, but we had also seen his strengths. A big, strong, plain-spoken man, he had - unlike many of his colleagues - seemed unafraid of the residents, talking to them as if they were human beings. He might not have been the model professional, but he was caring, relaxed and respectful, and he had a kind of charisma that patients responded to. We felt sure that this was what Giles needed most.
Phil agreed to work for us full-time and to use his professional connections to hire other carers to work shifts when he was off-duty, so that Giles would have someone keeping an eye on him 24 hours a day. I tried not to think too much about the financial implications. The money I had realised through my sale of shares would not support such an arrangement for long - but with a bit of luck we would be able to recover from the state some of the money it was currently paying to keep Giles at Borocourt. The aforementioned discussions with the relevant local authorities led us to believe that such funding should eventually be forthcoming, but it was clear that it could take many months to jump through all the necessary bureaucratic hoops. In the meantime, every week that Giles remained in Borocourt felt like a week stolen from his life.
We decided to remove him as soon as we practically could - and sort out the finer details later.
It was September 1987 by then, and the hospital management remained implacably opposed to the idea. We were told in no uncertain terms by Dr Shepherd, the consultant in charge of Giles’s case, that he did not consider it to be in his patient’s best interest to be taken out of the professionally run facility in which he had spent the previous 11 years. Everyone agreed that it was “highly irregular” for a patient to be discharged into the care of a privately hired nurse with a blot on his CV. There was no legal reason to prevent us from discharging Giles: unlike most of Borocourt’s patients, he had never been sectioned. But the professional disapproval w
as overwhelming. Local GPs were discouraged from getting involved with Giles, and it was some time before we could find a practice that would take him on.
It is hard to maintain your confidence, as a layperson, in the face of such robust expert insistence that you are wrong. But Derek and I kept reminding ourselves that things could hardly be any worse for Giles than they were already. At least our plan gave him a chance.
And so it was that, one sunny autumn morning, we led Giles away for the last time from the asylum and moved him into Redcot.
It was one of the most frightening steps we had ever taken, and there were many moments in the next few months when we wondered if we had made a terrible mistake. (If an asylum is a place of safety then, by definition, those who leave an asylum are exposed to danger.) But we never actually regretted it, and would eventually come to think of it as one of the best decisions we had ever taken.
And if we ever had had serious regrets, we would have needed only to look at the subsequent history of Borocourt to reassure ourselves that we had done the right thing. The ward team there was replaced in 1988; then, perhaps as a result of our complaint, the hospital was investigated in 1989 by the National Development Team (NDT), a government-funded advisory board specialising in services for the mentally handicapped. The NDT’s report, published in 1990, was scathing. Conditions were described as “very poor”, while patients’ needs were said to be being neglected. Derek Thomas, director of the NDT, described parts of the hospital as “as bad as any I’ve seen in my 32 years in the service” and recommended that the hospital be “closed down as soon as possible”. It finally closed in February 1992.
16: Big Ideas
It was not just Giles who was about to enter a new phase in his life. The wheels of change were in motion at F International as well.
The key year was 1985. With dizzying speed, landmarks were reached and passed. For example: we disposed (as previously mentioned) of our US subsidiary, Heights, freeing up both time and cash for more profitable activities at home; we set up a new UK subsidiary, Systematix, to develop microcomputer business systems for small companies, with help from my old friend and supporter Kit Grindley; we moved the last remnants of our head office operations into the Berkhamsted HQ; we developed a range of unmanned regional work-centres - positioned close to key motorway junctions and open night and day, seven days a week - for the benefit of home-workers who wanted or needed more direct interaction with their colleagues; we appointed our first group finance director; and we began to roll out our first rudimentary system of electronic mail, linking all our staff on our own purpose-built network. This last step is, with hindsight, such an obvious one to have taken that it is hard to believe that a distributed, IT-based company such as ours could have flourished for 23 years without it. But microcomputers (as personal computers were then known) were still a rarity, and only the most forward-thinking among us had even begun to think about the potential for linking large numbers of such computers together. Our first internal email network - which was fully functional by the end of 1986 - linked into people’s homes via their television sets. (This was not, by the way, a popular innovation.)
We had about 1,000 people working for us by then, handling an average of 150 projects a month; getting on for 200 of these people - mainly managers and administrative staff - were salaried employees, largely based in Berkhamsted. Annual revenues that year were £7.6m, with pre-tax profits of about £340,000. Our clients - around 100 at any one time - were more blue-chip than ever: Unilever, IBM, Avis, Exxon, Midland Bank, Scottish Equitable, Coopers & Lybrand, Tesco, the BBC, the Treasury; and the work we did for them was growing more sophisticated. Yet in financial terms we were still only the 20th largest software company in the UK and had barely begun to make an impact globally. Our shares - mainly my shares - had a price-to-earnings ratio of just 7.7 (roughly half the industry average). We were simultaneously a huge success story and a tantalising case of yet-to-be-realised potential.
A survey of all our panel workers, conducted with the help of City Business School at the end of 1984, had revealed an unmistakable thirst for change. People were generally happy with the company, although many would have been happier had they been earning more. Most considered that they “worked for” F International, even though they had no guarantee that we would have any future use for them. Many had been with us for a long time. (I had lost count of the gold watches and bracelets I had handed out in recognition of 10 years’ service, and now we had set up a 20 Year Club as well.) And most of them hoped to carry on working for us.
But there was one overwhelming dissatisfaction: people wanted more training, more involvement in decision-making and planning, more scope for personal development. We were already investing large amounts of time and money in training - much more than most companies - and devolving large amounts of responsibility to ordinary panel members. But our people still wanted to contribute more. They knew that the world was changing, and they wanted to be in the vanguard of the gathering global IT revolution. This eagerness represented a huge opportunity for the company. The challenge was finding a way to harness it.
With this as background, in July 1985, we had appointed a new chief executive for our UK operations: Hilary Cropper. I flatter myself that I am reasonably good at spotting, recruiting and developing talent, but I don’t think I have ever made a more inspired appointment than Hilary. Headhunters had brought several possible candidates to our attention, but she stood out immediately as someone who might have been tailor-made for F International’s needs.
Born and raised near Macclesfield, Cheshire, and educated at convent school and Salford University (where she studied mathematics), Hilary had begun her working life as an apprentice in a large engineering factory in Trafford Park. She did her early computer programming there as well, observing later that, in that overwhelmingly male environment, “you had to prove yourself over and over again. If you weren’t better than the average guy you weren’t going to get on. You had to prove your worth the whole time.” This had left her with ingrained habits of high achievement that seemed to me to make her ideal chief executive material.
Now 44, she had spent much of the past 15 years with ICL, at one point running a big home-working software division for them and more recently heading their Professional Services business. So she had plenty of relevant expertise and experience. She was also at a stage in her life where taking charge of a medium-sized business success story and turning it into a global force to be reckoned with was precisely the sort of challenge she was ready for. Insiders felt that, had she been a man, she would have been on ICL’s board by then. As so often in F International’s history, a prejudiced workplace’s loss was our gain.
The impact of her arrival was felt instantly, right across the organisation. Tough, brash, driven and demanding, Hilary buzzed with a terrier-like energy that made any form of professional complacency unthinkable in her presence. Perhaps more importantly, her ambitions for herself and for the company knew no bounds.
Even I found this a bit of a shock. She made no secret of the fact that she thought the company was underperforming - and that she saw the chief executive’s position as an opportunity to make her fortune in financial terms as well as career terms. She insisted on a big salary, a big car and generous share options - with similar deals for other senior management. The options meant little at the time, since our shares were not publicly traded and we had never yet paid a dividend. But Hilary had ideas about that; and, in the meantime, it seemed reasonable to accede to the demands of a chief executive who had such a clear vision of how to unlock F International’s unrealised potential. Also, of course, such options represented one more way of - ultimately - getting some of the ownership of the company into the hands of those who worked for it.
I remained group managing director of the F International Group (which at that point still included our Dutch, American and Danish subsidiari
es, as well as an overseas operating company called FI Services and a small telecommunications venture called Sprint Telecoms), although over the next three years we would dispose of the foreign subsidiaries one by one (starting, later that year, with Heights). I stepped up my involvement in public life, serving (for example) six years on the Council of the Industrial Society (1984-90) and three years on the newly formed National Council for Vocational Qualifications (1986-89). I also acted as our external ambassador and, at board level, as an arbiter of last resort. But to a large extent I tried simply to keep out of the way, alternately congratulating myself on an inspired appointment and worrying that I might have unleashed a monster.
I needn’t, on the whole, have worried. Hilary brought to the company an outsider’s clarity of vision, which enabled her to spot and slaughter sacred cows with a detachment and ruthlessness that would have been impossible for an internally promoted chief executive. Yet she left intact the things that really mattered: our flexibility, our trust and empowerment of our staff, our ethics, our team spirit, and our collective belief that we could and should be the very best.
The full story of Hilary’s 17-year involvement with the company deserves a book of its own, and I will relate only the highlights here. From my point of view, her tenure as chief executive was significant in three ways. It led, gradually, to my almost complete disengagement from the company (culminating in my retirement in 1993). It allowed me to take my dreams of staff ownership as far as they could practically be taken. And it did much (thanks to some spectacular successes in the 1990s) to empower me to begin the next - and arguably most important - chapter of my life. But all these outcomes were still some way off.