YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephanie Shirley

lines on the record: 62
first: 2020-02-27
most recent: 2020-02-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The long history. So it's quite different. I mean, it employed eight and a half thousand people when it was acquired. A quarter earned by the staff. So I was doing lots of things in an entrepreneurial way like getting it into share ownership. getting share ownership embedded into the organization. And that really underlined the sort of rather collegiate way of working that we always had, because with our female start, we worked as teams, we worked multitasking, we worked, we liked each other, we may not have been in the same office because we all worked from home, but we liked each other, we were friends, it was a team, we were going to do it.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm surprised it hasn't changed more because some of the things that I was doing about job shares, about co-ownership, about paying people with a cafeteria of benefits, about real opportunities, about teamworking. These things are still being talked about. And I was doing it 50 years ago. So in a way, I'm disappointed that it hasn't moved faster, but it's moving. Right direction, at least”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, no, no, I definitely wanted to build not a corporation, but I wanted to build this culture, the sort of organization that I wanted to work in, that I wanted to live in that I thought was right for people in a holistic way.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a female founder. People laugh. They really did. They laughed at my crusade for women. They laughed at the idea of selling software. It's free. Can you sell air? And in a way, again, I'm a very proud person and I didn't want to be ridiculed. And when things got really tough, where somebody else might have given up, I knew that My success opened the door for a lot of other women. And within a few years we got 300 staff, 297 of whom were women. You know, it was very much a crusade. And that lasted until 1975 when equal opportunities legislation came in in this country. And it was not legal to have a pro-female policy. So, my woman's company had to let the men in”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dom It's a very young industry. I mean, I think it was virgin territory so that in the early days, women during the war, for example, World War II were working in coding at Bletchley Park, which was a pre-runner of software as I know it. And it was a very vibrant industry. The excitement would look banal to you. We got excited because we got a photocopier, a photocopy and it printed white on black. Everything was so different and software was given away free with the hardware. So the idea of writing software and then selling it was quite alien. So we were breaking new ground and that really drove us.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in my later life, the Holocaust is slipping from human memory. So in the last few years, I've tried to do more about talking about national Holocaust Memorial Day and things like that. But I'm not Jewish in culture. I've lost anything that ever was Jewish in my family. And I'm really the child of my foster parents in all but birth. And so I'm pretty traditionally English. I'm a very. Patriot, I really love this country with passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can feel. And that is a driver for me.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe it is something to do with the kinder transport story, because there's a high proportion of British companies, at least, something like 7%, are founded by immigrants. And you think, why should that be? And it's partly because we're subject to discrimination, perhaps partly because we can bring something from one country to another with a highest possibility of success. But also I think because we've become very cussed, driven people. And with the sort that if somebody says, no, the more they say no, I want to do it, the more I want to do it.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was very much a feminist issue. that I'd been patronized as a Jew and I was not going to be patronized as a woman. And at that time, women were not allowed legally to do certain things you couldn't work on the stock exchange. You couldn't take out a higher purchase agreement. You couldn't drive a bus or fly an aeroplane. And I couldn't even open the company's bank account without getting my husband's signature you needed mail authorization. So women were very much second class citizens. And I began to get very fed up with that and was really a battling for equal pay and opportunities and fighting to be allowed to do what I wanted to do. So that was the original motivation. It was very much for women. It was a social business. I did not go into business to make money. I went into business to offer opportunities for women.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's simply that that workaholism, and I know it's not fashionable to talk about that these days, but really the dates from my traumatic childhood, and that has motivated me because my life was saved from the Holocaust, really motivated me today as it was 70, 80 years ago, to make sure that mine was a life that was worth saving. So the kinder transport, which was the rescue mission that brought me out of Nazi Europe, is still current as far as I'm concerned, because it's what drives me, what can I do today, what is it that I can offer at my age with my skills? Make the world a better place.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the film that's being made of my book is focused very much on the years in business, and there were 40 of those. But especially in the early days, it was predominantly female oriented. It was a policy to use female. It was one of the earliest high-tech companies set up in 1962. And then if we talk about, you know, if we think about what motivates me to work in the way that I do, because work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else. I love my work and I think you do as well.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and I've been called Steve for many, many years simply because Stephanie didn't get any appointments when I wrote letters under the name of Stephanie. Nobody wanted to see me because I date from the days when women were not expected to do serious things and perhaps run a little hat shop or something like that. But in the fifties and sixties women were not expected to run a financial services company or software house or anything. Really what I call serious business.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, well, I'm always called Dame Stephanie if you are prepared to do a bow or courtsy if you're a girl. But if you're not prepared to do that, then you just call me Steve.”
2020-02-27 · The Diary of a CEO · E49: Dame Stephanie Shirley - Escaping Nazi Germany and Making £2.3bn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT