0:00:00.988,0:00:02.889
When I wrote my memoir,

0:00:02.889,0:00:06.636
the publishers were really confused.

0:00:06.636,0:00:11.000
Was it about me as a child refugee

0:00:11.000,0:00:14.844
or a woman who set up a high-tech [br]software company

0:00:14.844,0:00:16.960
back in the 1960s,

0:00:16.960,0:00:23.143
one that went public, and eventually[br]employed over 8,000 people?

0:00:23.143,0:00:27.550
Or was it as a mother of an autistic child?

0:00:27.550,0:00:31.945
Or as a philanthropist who has[br]now given away serious money?

0:00:31.945,0:00:34.569
Well, it turns out, I'm all of these.

0:00:34.569,0:00:38.079
Let me tell you my story.

0:00:38.079,0:00:46.446
All that I am steams from when[br]I got onto a train in Vienna,

0:00:46.446,0:00:51.543
part of the kinder-transport that saved[br]nearly 10,000 Jewish children

0:00:51.543,0:00:53.171
from Nazi Europe.

0:00:53.171,0:00:54.230
I was 5-years-old, clutching the hand[br]of my 9-year-old sister

0:00:54.230,0:01:01.813
and had very little idea as to [br]what was going on .

0:01:01.813,0:01:06.794
"What is England and why am I going there?"

0:01:06.794,0:01:09.941
I'm only alive because so long ago, [br]I was helped my generous strangers.

0:01:09.941,0:01:18.446
I was lucky, and doubly-lucky[br]to be later united

0:01:18.446,0:01:20.885
with my birth parents.

0:01:20.885,0:01:28.087
But, sadly, I never bonded with them again.

0:01:28.087,0:01:31.227
But I've done more in the seven decades[br]since that miserable day [br]

0:01:31.227,0:01:33.003
my mother put me on the train

0:01:33.003,0:01:36.350
than I would ever have dreamed possible.

0:01:36.350,0:01:39.438
And I love England, my adopted country[br]

0:01:39.438,0:01:43.489
with a passion that perhaps someone[br]who has lost their human rights

0:01:43.489,0:01:45.831
can feel.

0:01:45.831,0:01:52.188
I decided to make mine a life[br]that was worth saving.

0:01:52.188,0:01:54.449
And then, I just got on with it.

0:01:54.449,0:01:59.404
(Laughter)

0:01:59.404,0:02:03.485
Let me take you back to the early 1960s.

0:02:03.485,0:02:08.023
To get past the gender issues of the time,

0:02:08.023,0:02:14.663
I set up my own software house[br]at one of the first such startups in Britain.

0:02:14.663,0:02:20.301
It was also a company of women,[br]a company for women,

0:02:20.301,0:02:23.565
an early social business.

0:02:23.565,0:02:25.201
And people laughed at the very idea

0:02:25.201,0:02:29.254
because software, at that time, [br]was given away free with hardware.

0:02:29.254,0:02:31.268
No body would buy software,

0:02:31.268,0:02:33.717
certainly not from a woman.

0:02:33.717,0:02:37.635
Although women were then coming out[br]of the universities

0:02:37.635,0:02:39.366
with decent degrees,

0:02:39.366,0:02:42.619
there was a glass ceiling to our progress.

0:02:42.619,0:02:49.395
And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often.

0:02:49.395,0:02:52.680
And I want opportunities for women.

0:02:52.680,0:02:56.242
I recruited professionally-qualified women[br]who'd left the industry

0:02:56.242,0:02:59.573
on marrriage or when their first child was expected

0:02:59.573,0:03:04.584
and structured them into a home-working[br]organization.

0:03:04.584,0:03:09.069
We pioneered the concept of women[br]getting back into the workforce

0:03:09.069,0:03:11.701
after a career break.

0:03:11.701,0:03:15.554
We pioneered all sorts [br]of flexible work methods:

0:03:15.554,0:03:20.716
job shares, profit sharing, and eventually,[br]co-ownership

0:03:20.716,0:03:24.332
when I took a quarter of the company[br]into the hands of the staff

0:03:24.332,0:03:29.732
at no cost to anyone but me.

0:03:29.732,0:03:36.033
For years, I was the "first-woman" this,[br]or the "only-woman" that.

0:03:36.033,0:03:39.709
And in those days, I couldn't work[br]on the stock exchange,

0:03:39.709,0:03:43.510
I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane.

0:03:43.510,0:03:49.353
Indeed I couldn't open a bank account[br]without my husband's permission.

0:03:49.353,0:03:53.905
My generation of women fought[br]the battles for the right to work

0:03:53.905,0:03:58.367
and the right for equal pay.

0:03:58.367,0:04:01.358
Nobody really expected much[br]from people at work

0:04:01.358,0:04:04.826
or people in society because [br]all the expectations then

0:04:04.826,0:04:08.721
were about home and family responsibilities.

0:04:08.721,0:04:11.508
And I couldn't really face that,

0:04:11.508,0:04:17.597
so I started to challenge the conventions[br]of the time,

0:04:17.597,0:04:23.142
even to the extent of changing my name[br]from Stephanie to Steve

0:04:23.142,0:04:25.251
in my business development letters,

0:04:25.251,0:04:27.369
so as to get through the door[br]before anyone realized

0:04:27.369,0:04:28.610
that he was a she.

0:04:28.610,0:04:32.254
(Laughter).

0:04:32.254,0:04:39.404
My company called Freelance Programmers,[br]and that's precisely what it was,

0:04:39.404,0:04:44.287
couldn't have started smaller: [br]on the dining room table

0:04:44.287,0:04:49.931
and fiancee by the equivalent of[br]one hundred dollars in today's terms,

0:04:49.931,0:04:57.048
and financed by my labor and by borrowing[br]against the house.

0:04:57.048,0:05:02.615
My interests were scientific, [br]the market was commercial.

0:05:02.615,0:05:06.290
Things such as payroll, which I found[br]rather boring.

0:05:06.290,0:05:11.912
So I had to compromise with operational[br]research work,

0:05:11.912,0:05:17.843
which had the intellectual challenge that[br]interested me and the commercial

0:05:17.843,0:05:23.010
value that was valued by the clients.

0:05:23.010,0:05:28.108
Things like scheduling freight trains,

0:05:28.108,0:05:34.437
time-tabling buses, stock control,[br]lots and lots of stock control.

0:05:34.437,0:05:38.545
And eventually, the work came in.

0:05:38.545,0:05:41.270
We disguised the domestic[br]and part-time nature[br]

0:05:41.270,0:05:47.440
of the staff by offering fixed prices,[br]one of the very first to do so.

0:05:47.440,0:05:50.755
And who would have guessed that[br]the programming of the

0:05:50.755,0:05:55.939
black box flight recorder of Super-Sonic Concord[br]would have been done by

0:05:55.939,0:05:59.648
a bunch of women working [br]in their own homes.

0:05:59.648,0:06:07.722
(Applause)

0:06:07.722,0:06:12.483
All we used was a simple "trust the staff" approach,

0:06:12.483,0:06:14.504
and a simple telephone.

0:06:14.504,0:06:22.375
We even used to ask job applicants, [br]"Do you have access to a telephone?"

0:06:22.375,0:06:25.464
An early project was to develop[br]software standards

0:06:25.464,0:06:27.434
on management control protocols.

0:06:27.434,0:06:33.636
And software was and still is a maddeningly[br]hard to control activity,

0:06:33.636,0:06:35.747
so that was enormously valuable.

0:06:35.747,0:06:37.971
We used the standards ourselves,

0:06:37.971,0:06:40.989
we were even paid to update them[br]over the years,

0:06:40.989,0:06:46.323
Eventually, they were adopted by NATO.

0:06:46.323,0:06:50.560
Our programmers, remember, only women,

0:06:50.560,0:06:53.896
included gay and transgender,

0:06:53.896,0:06:58.939
worked with pencil and paper[br]to develop flow-charts

0:06:58.939,0:07:02.706
defining tasks to be done.

0:07:02.706,0:07:06.509
And they then wrote code, usually machine code,

0:07:06.509,0:07:08.776
sometimes binary code,

0:07:08.776,0:07:13.646
which was then sent, by mail, [br]to a data center

0:07:13.646,0:07:17.884
to be punched into paper-tape, or card

0:07:17.884,0:07:22.251
and then re-punched, in order to verify it.

0:07:22.251,0:07:25.607
All this, before it ever got near a computer.

0:07:25.607,0:07:31.796
That was programming in the early 1960s.

0:07:31.796,0:07:36.921
In 1975, 13 years from startup,

0:07:36.921,0:07:40.082
equal opprtunity legislation came in[br]in Britain

0:07:40.082,0:07:46.824
and that made it illegal to have [br]our pro-female policies.

0:07:46.824,0:07:50.400
And as an example of unintended consequences,

0:07:50.400,0:07:59.258
my female company had to let the men in.

0:07:59.258,0:08:01.418
When I started my company of women,

0:08:01.418,0:08:08.487
the men said, "How interesting that it only[br]works because it's small."

0:08:08.487,0:08:14.255
And later, as it became sizable, they accepted[br]that yes, it is sizable now,

0:08:14.255,0:08:18.322
but of no strategic interest.

0:08:18.322,0:08:25.434
And later, when it was a company[br]valued at over 3 billion dollars,

0:08:25.434,0:08:29.877
and I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires,

0:08:29.877,0:08:33.397
they said, "Well done, Steve!"

0:08:33.397,0:08:42.048
(Laughter)

0:08:42.048,0:08:46.255
You can always tell ambitious women[br]by the shape of our heads,

0:08:46.255,0:08:49.580
their flat on top for being patted patronizingly.

0:08:49.580,0:08:56.591
(Laughter)

0:08:56.591,0:09:01.835
And we have larger feet[br]to stand away from the kitchen sink.

0:09:01.835,0:09:05.692
Let me share with you two secrets of success:

0:09:05.692,0:09:08.961
surround yourself with first-class people[br]and people that you like

0:09:08.961,0:09:18.065
and choose your partner very, very carefully.

0:09:18.065,0:09:21.278
Because the other day when I said, [br]"My husband's an angel",

0:09:21.278,0:09:25.052
a woman complained, "You're lucky,[br]mine's still alive."

0:09:25.052,0:09:33.717
(Laughter)

0:09:33.717,0:09:39.464
If success were easy, we'd all be millionaires.

0:09:39.464,0:09:46.998
But in my case, it came in the midst[br]of family trauma and indeed, crisis.

0:09:46.998,0:09:57.532
Our late son Giles was our only child,[br]a beautiful, contented baby.

0:09:57.532,0:10:05.061
And then, at two and a half, [br]like a changeling in a fairy story,

0:10:05.061,0:10:13.652
he lost the little speech that had[br]and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler,

0:10:13.652,0:10:17.794
not the terrible-twos, he was profoundly autistic,

0:10:17.794,0:10:24.597
and he never spoke again.

0:10:24.597,0:10:30.214
Giles was the resident in the first house[br]of the first charity that I set up

0:10:30.214,0:10:33.494
to pioneer services for autism.

0:10:33.494,0:10:38.240
And then there's been a groundbreaking[br](something) school for pupils with autism

0:10:38.240,0:10:41.584
and a medical research charity again,[br]all for autism.

0:10:41.584,0:10:49.313
Because whenever I found a gap in services,[br]I tried to help.

0:10:49.313,0:10:54.583
I like doing new things and making new things happen.

0:10:54.583,0:11:02.699
And I've just started a three-year think tank[br]for autism.

0:11:02.699,0:11:06.434
And so that some of my wealth does go back[br]to the industry from which it stems,

0:11:06.434,0:11:12.761
I've also founded the Oxford Internet Institute[br]and other IT ventures.

0:11:12.761,0:11:16.795
The Oxford Internet Institute focuses[br]not on the technology,

0:11:16.795,0:11:24.047
but on the social, economic, legal[br]and ethical issues of the Internet.

0:11:24.047,0:11:31.089
Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago, now.

0:11:31.089,0:11:34.869
And I have learned to live without him,

0:11:34.869,0:11:39.719
and I have learned to live without [br]his need of me.

0:11:39.719,0:11:42.829
Philanthropy is all that I do now.

0:11:42.829,0:11:47.128
I need never worry about getting lost[br]because several charities [br]

0:11:47.128,0:11:48.697
quickly come and find me.

0:11:48.697,0:12:01.067
(Laughter)

0:12:01.067,0:12:04.885
It's one thing to have an idea [br]for an enterprise,

0:12:04.885,0:12:07.112
but as many people in this room will know,

0:12:07.112,0:12:10.025
making it happen is a very difficult thing

0:12:10.025,0:12:18.117
and it demands extraordinary energy,[br]self-belief and determination,

0:12:18.117,0:12:22.322
the courage to risk family and home,

0:12:22.322,0:12:27.491
and a 24x7 commitment that borders [br]on the obsessive.

0:12:27.491,0:12:31.475
So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic.

0:12:31.475,0:12:34.516
I believe in the beauty of work[br]when we do it properly

0:12:34.516,0:12:38.353
and in humility.

0:12:38.353,0:12:45.992
Work is not just something I do[br]when I'd rather be doing something else.

0:12:45.992,0:12:48.375
We live our lives forward, so what[br]has all that taught me?[br]

0:12:48.375,0:12:57.086
I learned that tomorrow's not going [br]to be like today

0:12:57.086,0:12:59.119
and certainly nothing like yesterday.

0:12:59.119,0:13:02.306
And that made me able to cope with change,

0:13:02.306,0:13:06.834
indeed, eventually to welcome change.

0:13:06.834,0:13:11.936
Though I'm told I'm still very difficult.

0:13:11.936,0:13:13.181
Thank you very much.

0:13:13.181,0:13:26.371
(Applause)