Member Article

Dynamo speaker's amazing life

A hi-tech trailblazer who has lived an extraordinary life seems an inadequate description of the keynote speaker at this year’s Dynamo Conference.

Dame Stephanie Shirley, 82, is regarded as a workplace revolutionary and a pioneering entrepreneur who started the hugely successful IT company which became Xansa plc when there weren’t many around, and few, if any, led by women.

Her remarkable story begins with a separation from her parents at the start of the Second World War and her arrival in Britain as an unaccompanied Kindertransport refugee in 1939.

Despite the trauma of her early years, she has always considered herself fortunate: “I was extraordinarily lucky. A million Jewish children died in Europe during the war, but I was one of only 10,000 who escaped to the UK.

“I was born in Germany, but the Quakers found me and my sister in Vienna and brought us as unaccompanied child refugees to England where we were taken in by kindly foster-parents. Both our parents survived and we were eventually reunited but, sadly, I never really bonded with them again.

“My experience as an unaccompanied child refugee gave me the drive to prove that my life had been worth saving. My early experience of the ‘glass ceiling’ at work encouraged me to set up my own business - which I did, thanks to my supportive husband.

“There is a relationship between trauma and entrepreneurship. You become a survivor, full stop. I think my ‘guilt’ about surviving the Holocaust gave me a strong urge to succeed. And after that, the survivor mentality helped me through the difficult times.”

Remarkably it was more than 50 years ago when she started what was to become a multi-billion pound corporation with £6. It was 1962 and she was just -.30

Her software house led the way with new working practices and changed the position of professional women, especially in hi-tech.

“My name is Stephanie but no-one took women seriously when I started out so I would write to people and give my name as Steve Shirley. It worked and the name stuck.

“While planning to start a family, I hit upon the brilliant idea of offering part-time employment to professional women with dependants and developed techniques to manage the business that way.”

When the company began, the majority of its employees were female programmers working from home, which was unheard of and radically different to mainstream business and the emerging tech industry.

When FI was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 it was worth £121m. At its peak in 2000, Xansa, as it was then renamed, was valued at £1.2bn and employed 6,000 people.

She ultimately sold her own controlling stake in the company to her workforce who ended up owning more than a quarter of the company - 70 reportedly became millionaires.

Since retiring in 1993, her focus has been increasingly on philanthropy based on her strong belief in giving back to society. In 2009/10 she served as the UK’s first ever National Ambassador for Philanthropy. Her charitable Shirley Foundation has initiated and funded a number of projects that are pioneering by nature and strategic in impact, totalling £67m to date. The focus is on IT and her late son’s disorder of autism.

In 2013, she was named by Woman’s Hour as one of the 100 most powerful women in Britain. In 2014, the Science Council listed her as one of the Top 100 practising scientists in the UK and in 2015, she was recognised with the Women of the Year Special Award. Her TED Talk in 2015 was to a standing ovation from more than a thousand of the world’s most recognised technical entrepreneurs, thinkers, creators and doers. It has received 1.6m views.

The Dynamo conference has become a hotly-anticipated event in the northeast technology calendar, and this year is being hosted by Northumbria University on June 23. The conference is a key project of Dynamo, an industry-led initiative to connect and grow the region’s tech sector – and shine a spotlight on the work that connects firms to key trends across the world.

Other speakers will include Alex Depledge, founder of sharing economy marketplace HASSLE.com, Giselle Stewart OBE, Director of Corporate Affairs at interactive entertainment business Ubisoft and Nick Bell, Vice President of Content for Snapchat on a live link from Los Angeles.

Dynamo was set up in 2013 by Opencast Software Chair Charlie Hoult and Accenture’s Bob Paton, and is made up of IT organisations and employers, technology hubs, universities, colleges and local government.

A pre-conference Dynamo careers event – Get Into IT - for careers advisers and teachers will also be hosted by Northumbria University on Wednesday, June 22. The following week, on Monday and Tuesday, June 27 and 28, Dynamo North East will be part of the Big Bang North East Fair, a free programme of events designed to get young people aged 7-19 excited about science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) in the world of work.

Dynamo 16’s headline sponsors are Sage and Accenture.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Julie Kemp .