276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Let It Go: My Extraordinary Story - From Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist

£5.495£10.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

My favorite parts of this audiobook were the bits that I found astonishing. She began from such humble beginnings and went on to create her own multi-million dollar company while juggling married life and life with her autistic son. Eventually she became a philanthropist. And others when Dame Stephanie Shirley ponders on what it means to her to build/grow her ideas into companies and enterprises...

Das Konzept von Mrs Shirleys Firma ist simpel: Home Office und Teilzeit sowie auf Selbstständigen Basis. Modern eben. Und das in den 60igern. Co-written with Richard Askwith, the former Executive Editor of The Independent and the award-winning author of seven books in his own name, including biographies of Emil Zátopek and Lata Brandisová. Offen und ehrlich berichtet Dame Stephanie Shriley von Selbstmordgedanken, Nervenzusammenbruch, Selbstzweifel und schweren Zeiten.However, I would warn readers that their are a lot of possible triggers here for neurodiverse people. As someone with 3 diagnosed family members (2 non verbal, 1 with a rare form of epilepsy) I found this very upsetting. As a half-Jewish child during the beginning of World War 2, Shirley was saved from the horrors of Nazism by escaping on a train as a child refugee. In England she would build a new life, and build a software consulting company. Freelance Programmers (later F International) employed female programmers who were under-appreciated and discriminated against by the business world at the time. Many of these women worked from home part-time or while raising children in a world that wouldn’t allow them to work otherwise. They would work on large technical projects for some of the largest companies in Britain. Let It Go is a strong feminist treatise drawn from reality, not abstractions. By the early 1960s, now a British citizen and married with a new name, Stephanie Shirley was becoming frustrated with the low expectations, inequality and sexism that women faced in the workplace. She decided to start her own company, selling software. It was called Freelance Programmers, and it was staffed by women working from home, blazing a trail for flexible working practices for women with caring responsibilities. 297 of the first 300 staff were women. At the time, when a woman couldn’t open a bank account without her husband’s permission, this idea was truly revolutionary.

A child refugee builds the first wholly female software company, putting feminism into practice, and goes on to become one of the most noted philanthropists in her country. It’s a story fit for Hollywood. Stephanie Shirley tells it with gusto, raw honesty, and compelling writing in her autobiography, Let It Go.Als halb-jüdisches Flüchtlingskind gelangt Stephanie Shirley vor vielen Jahren nach England. Ihre Pflegeeltern sind gut zu ihr und ihrer Schwester und ermöglichen ihr ein Leben in Sicherheit. Sie ist mathematisch begabt und arbeitet sich bis zu ihrem eigenen Unternehmen durch. Doch damit ist noch nicht annähernd die Essenz des Lebens dieser faszinierenden Frau umrissen. Shirley was a pioneer in many ways. Creating a software company in and of itself was still a new idea in 1962 when she got started. Creating a company of freelancers decades before “the gig economy” was an innovation. Employing almost all women in a technology company (although women were many of the first programmers) was unheard of. In Let It Go Shirley takes you through the early struggles of building Freelance Programmers. The reader receives a strong understanding of how the company operated, how it acquired clients, and the challenges that it faced as it grew from her cottage into a multi-million dollar enterprise. While Shirley covers the early period in the right level of detail, the company’s later growth is not as well recounted in the book. Now with all that being said, some of the ins and outs about her business endeavors, weren't so interesting and lagged in spots. But that doesn't take away from the fact that her life was interesting and she used her money for good.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment