Dame Stephanie Shirley OBE
Speaker
Dame Stephanie Shirley is a remarkable business manager in the rags to riches mould. Having arrived in Britain as an unaccompanied child refugee in 1939, she founded the FI company in 1962 and in 25 years as chairman and chief executive, developed it into one of Europe’s leading computer software and training companies.
A pioneer of workforce participation, she ceded control of FI to the workforce in 1991. As one of the first to see the full impact of computing on the business workplace she has been a consistent innovator in the development of new management techniques to reflect changing values and pressures within the workplace.
There have been three strands to Stephanie Shirley’s business life:
A desire to build a successful and lasting company whose management and ownership could be passed to the staff
A growing interest in the philosophy and ethics of the private enterprise system within a world whose values were changing
A determination to make things happen rather than just talk about them
Her determination in these three areas are increasingly recognised by business and academic organisations. In 1991, she was awarded the Gold Medal of the British Institute of Management for the originality of her thinking, in regard to the distributed office as an answer to new work patterns.
She was also honoured with the OBE and received the US Presidential Pin in recognition of her work on Anglo-American Relations.
Her election as the first woman president of the British Computer Society was followed by her election as Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, which became the 100th livery company to be formed in the City of London. During this period she was extensively quoted in the media and spoke regularly on platforms about the future development of information technology and its role in corporate strategy. She has personally set up companies, agencies, licensors etc. in Europe, the Middle East and USA and lectured and consulted world-wide including several addresses given in the UK Houses of Parliament, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC and other prestigious institutions.
Dame Stephanie Shirley, apart from being awarded a number of honorary Fellowships and Doctorates of British Universities, is a member of the British-North American Committee, a non-executive director of AEA Technology plc and Tandem Computers Inc.
Her acute sense of social responsibility leads her to believe in business people giving something back to society. She has thus been a trustee of Help the Aged, a Council member of the Industrial Society and Patron since 1987 of the Disablement Income Group. She is also the founder of two charities, the ‘Shirley Foundation’ and the ‘Kingwood Trust’, a charity that provides long term care for adults with profound learning disabilities.
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