LET IT GO Quotes

“We waste too much time being afraid, when what we should really fear is wasting time.”
― Stephanie Shirley, Let IT Go: The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

“But employee ownership is not just about sharing. It is also, in practice, often about giving. Such schemes depend on someone, usually the proprietor, deciding at some point to transfer ownership of some or all of a company to its employees. And it is this aspect of the ideal, I think, that has the greatest significance for my story. Of all the things I have given, it is arguable that the shares in my company that I gave away had the greatest financial value. In fact, I have rarely thought of this transfer of ownership as a gift, and I would be wrong if I did. The staff had a right to share in the company. Without them, the company would not have been so prosperous (and I am certain that Xansa would never have reached anything like the financial heights it eventually did if it hadn’t been powered by the fuel of staff ownership). But while I never doubted that aspect of the transfer, I did sometimes struggle with a more abstract issue: the fact that transferring ownership also means, ultimately, transferring control. That was the real challenge: surrendering power. Anyone can adjust to having a bit less money; ceding control of an enterprise that really matters to you is, by contrast, painfully counterintuitive. Who in their right mind would entrust an organisation that they have built up against all the odds, through years of tears, toil and sweat, to someone else? What if they mess it up? What if they don’t really understand what it is that you have created? What if they take it in some dangerous new direction, or manage it in a less idealistic way? Yet without that surrender, the most important part of the transaction is lost. A feudal grandee can be as generous as he likes with his wealth and property, but as long as he remains the grandee then his dependants are not empowered: they are merely well-fed. Empowering them means letting go: in other words, ceasing to be the grandee. I have struggled all my life with an instinct to hang on to the things that matter most to me, to control and protect them myself. Yet the art of surrender is, I am convinced, a key to many kinds of success - and fulfilment. And many lives are limited by a failure to master it.”
― Stephanie Shirley, LET IT GO : The Entrepreneur Turned Ardent Philanthropist

“Philanthropy isn’t about letting someone else take your money and spend it as they, rather than you, see fit. (We call that “tax”.) Rather, it is about putting your money to uses you believe in, and taking pleasure from the process. Your money isn’t lost, just because someone else has it. It is simply realising its potential: wealth as numbers on a bank statement transformed into wealth that enriches the world - and, as a result, enriches you.”
― Stephanie Shirley, Let IT Go: The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

“One of the reasons why Freelance Programmers thrived in its early days - where so many new enterprises fail - was that, simply by allowing our programmers and project managers to perform their duties when and where they pleased, I had surrendered a significant part of the control that employers traditionally exercise over those who work for them. Our competitors were still insisting that their staff worked for fixed hours, in fixed places, clocking in and clocking out and having to account for what they were doing throughout each shift. I trusted mine to manage their own time, as long as the work got done. The result? Not the anarchy and idleness that a traditionalist manager would have predicted but, instead, unrivalled productivity.”
― Stephanie Shirley, LET IT GO : The Entrepreneur Turned Ardent Philanthropist

“The challenge was to ensure that the device - which worked by sampling “white noise” generated by a neon gas discharge tube - was genuinely random. The key (without going into too much detail) was to use two such devices for each number that needed to be generated, subtracting the output from the second from the output from the first, in case one of them went wrong. This meant - we thought - that 32 devices were needed to generate the requisite 16-figure number. Then our youngest lab boy suggested that we could achieve the same result with just 16 devices, pairing the first with the second, the second with the third, the third with the fourth, and so on, instead of having 16 discrete pairs. At a stroke, the cost was halved. The genius of Tommy Flowers - or part of it - was to run his team in a way that allowed such suggestions to be both made and heard”
― Stephanie Shirley, LET IT GO : The Entrepreneur Turned Ardent Philanthropist