Copyright

First published in 2012 by Collins

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Karren Brady asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

HB ISBN 978-0-00-739592-7

TPB ISBN 978-0-00-746675-7

STRONG WOMAN. Copyright © Karren Brady 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN: 9780007413478

Version 2016-11-25

Dedication

For Sophia and Paolo.

Remember work turns dreams into reality.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Ch.1 My Mission

Ch.2 My Road to Independence: Childhood and Beyond

Ch.3 My Mind-Set

Ch.4 Entering a Man’s World

Ch.5 My Lifestyle: Money, Fame … Hard Work

Ch.6 My Home Life: Having It All?

Ch.7 Learning to Lead

Ch.8 My Children

Ch.9 My Brush with Death

Ch.10 Time for My Close-Up: My TV Career

Ch.11 Did Someone Say the F-Word?

Ch.12 No Time to Slow Down: My Career Today

Ch.13 My Rules for Success

A Final Thought

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

About the Author

Credits

About the Publisher

Canapés at Number 10 might not spark a eureka moment for every visitor, but they did for me. It was at a reception to mark International Women’s Day at Downing Street that I realised I had to write this book. As a British businesswoman with a public profile, I am invited to many networking events and it must have been about the tenth year that I had gone along to this one. But what struck me this time – alarmed me, even – was that it was all the same faces yet again, year in, year out. Where was the new generation of women leaders, snapping at our heels? The new inventors? The new charity workers? The new scientists and lawyers? Where were the young women who were going to change the world? I was left with the distinct feeling that someone needed to inspire this generation of women, to get them going and help them through – hand on the baton, if you like.

My own career has seen me become, at the age of 23, the youngest managing director of a PLC in the UK, run two Premier League football clubs, sit on the boards of companies including Channel 4, Mothercare and Arcadia, and join the BBC show The Apprentice. Meanwhile I’ve got married, had two children and undergone brain surgery. Writing a book about my own experiences, I decided, telling things as they really have been for me, without glossing over any of the difficulties or pretending that it was easy, might help other women to think about developing their own road maps to success.

I want women to know they should never feel guilty about championing their own career while being a mother and should never – ever – be afraid to be ambitious. For women, that means considering the core values you need to succeed; visualising the place you want to work and the type of company and people you want to work for, or the type of business leader you want to be; then setting out to achieve this.

Ultimately, I want to change – fundamentally – the way people perceive working women. Even now, you know that if someone talks about an ambitious man, you immediately conjure up the image of a dynamic go-getter, someone you want to know, someone whose company you’d relish. Someone in control; a man going places; someone to admire. Yet exactly the opposite happens if you mention an ambitious woman. If they’re honest, a lot of people immediately think, ‘I bet she’s a right hard-nosed bitch!’

I shouldn’t have to spell this out, but I will: being an ambitious woman certainly doesn’t mean you’re a bitch. We have to change that thinking. In the same way, we have to change the perception of feminism. ‘Feminism’ has become a dirty word, so much so that, through stereotyping and media spin, few people like to be associated with anything to do with it. But a feminist is not someone who burns her bras and hates men. A feminist is simply someone who actively promotes the belief that women are equal to men. I hope, by the end of this book, you will embrace that belief and all that it means, too.

So, why am I so keen to see other women climb the ladder? It’s simple. I love my career. I’ve combined it with being a mother, and I think I’ve been a success at both. That’s why the description I think suits me best, more than chairperson, vice-chairperson or CEO, is working mother. That is what I am – a mother who works. My work and my children are the most important things in my life.

But there have been times when it has been very tough. I hope this book contains experiences and advice that will make the path easier for other women, and that it can offer some kind of inspiration when it’s needed. It also signals my commitment to try to encourage, help and champion women from all different walks of life to achieve their potential. That’s a promise.

I feel a personal responsibility in this, too. I have a teenage daughter, Sophia, who will soon take her first steps into a career. There have been a lot of changes for women at work in the 25 years since I was in Sophia’s shoes – not all of them good – but changes still need to be made to support her and all young women.

Here’s one of my pet hates. Companies will pay a lot of lip service to wanting more women to soar through the ranks, but they don’t do anything about it. They’ll say they’re flexible when it comes to helping women combine work and home life, but when push comes to shove, it’s a different story. A lot of businesses are only flexible when it suits them. But the best companies are those that are diverse. If you want different types of women, with different types of experiences and backgrounds, you just have to accept that they might have a family. You’ve got to provide the flexibility and support to allow them to succeed and, most importantly, understand that, although they may try, they can’t be in two places at once.

Another niggle. When policymakers and the media talk about women in the workplace, we hear a lot about the ‘glass ceiling’. Many people seem to think that every working woman wants to run a huge banking conglomerate and that if they don’t they’ve somehow failed. But, actually, I’ve discovered that that isn’t what most women in business want. They want a job they enjoy that pays enough for them to afford high-quality childcare and in which they are respected. Many women have a common aim: to fit a career around a family. Yes, we have to juggle and, yes, sometimes we have to leave work early because our family needs us, but that should not, and does not, affect our commitment and loyalty to our employers and our careers.

Why does this point need to be made, decades after women entered the modern workplace in their droves? Most business leaders are still male, and most male chief executives, chairmen or managers have a wife. And it’s the wife who sorts out the school uniforms, who does the weekly supermarket shop, who gets the call from school when a child needs to go home sick, and all this allows the man a relatively stress-free path to the top. Good for them. The downside for their female employees is that when a woman says, ‘My daughter’s not well, I’ve got to go home,’ there is little understanding. Women fear, with reason, they will meet a stony response, which makes them believe they can’t combine a career with a family.

It’s certainly far harder for women than for men to combine a career with children. Some of my male colleagues feel no compunction about going for a golfing weekend, or a boys’ weekend, or a team-building weekend, or they don’t bother to go and watch their son play football on a Saturday because they want a lie-in. Meanwhile I spend all my time at work or with my family. I could never say to my family, ‘I’m going on a pampering weekend’ – I just wouldn’t feel comfortable thinking it, let alone saying it. The reality is that women who run companies are under far more scrutiny from their families about what they’re doing when they’re not with them than any of their male counterparts.

And in a way, this is understandable. In many cases women are more connected to their children than men are. But that does mean men don’t tend to carry the same level of guilt. So women will want to be perfect mothers but perhaps they also want to run a business. And companies will increasingly have to accommodate that, because if they don’t, women will leave and set up on their own: that way they can run the company the way they want to.

I do recognise that, in many ways, combining work and a family is easier for someone like me than it is for a woman who has a rigid nine-to-five job. I have reached the point in my career where I can be flexible. If there’s a crisis at home and I need to be with my children, I can be – I’m the boss. But it wasn’t always like that. I definitely didn’t feel there was much flexibility when I had to go to work after three days’ maternity leave. In fact, I was miserable.

That decision gets a mention in pretty much every newspaper profile of me, so I’m going to explain it once and for all. It was a mix of feeling scared, of not wanting to let anyone down, of feeling guilty for having had a baby in the first place and – if I’m being honest – not wanting this enormous change in my personal life to get in the way of the job I had to do. Most importantly, I was determined my employers wouldn’t think I was incapable of carrying on as normal now that I had a baby. Looking back, all these years later, I still don’t know how I did it! Up all night with a baby and at work all day. What I now appreciate, and didn’t understand then, was that a career spans a lifetime, and that taking a few months off would not have harmed mine.

Nowadays, far more women are setting up businesses from their kitchen tables than ever before because they say to themselves: ‘I won’t work in a job that doesn’t respect the fact that I have a family. I want both so I’ll create my own flexible way of working.’ And I’ll be intrigued to see how many businesses are started by women rather than men over the next few years. It could become a big problem for businesses that will not accommodate women’s needs.

The answer, I believe, is to have more women in the boardroom. The more women leaders we have, the better conditions will become for all working women. I don’t believe in setting quotas, but I do believe that any public company that has no woman on the board should publish the reasons why. It would be sure to make very interesting reading. If a company came back and said, ‘We have interviewed ten women and have not been able to find someone appropriate because the skills missing are this, this and this,’ it would tell us a great deal about which skills we’re not teaching young girls that they need to survive and thrive in a corporate world. Equally, if a company came back and admitted, ‘We haven’t interviewed any women for a position on our board,’ that would be an embarrassing insight into the type of company it really was.

The suits in the boardrooms are not the only ones who have to change. It annoys me so much that the Government talks about getting more women into work, then doesn’t help. Every woman who has to pay for childcare should be able to claim that cost as an allowance against tax: you can’t work unless your kids are taken care of. It would make sense economically, too. Creating tax breaks for childcare would mean more revenue for the Government: at the moment, many mothers pay cash in hand for care. It would also mean that mothers could afford better childcare, which would allow them the peace of mind to focus on their work.

While I’m on my soapbox, another issue is particularly close to my heart: that young women should feel free to enter professions that have traditionally been seen as male. If my daughter wants to be a painter and decorator, a scientist or an engineer, I want that to seem like a perfectly natural choice. A generation of people still finds it weird that women would want a job in such an area. Those barriers need to come down. There should be a completely open path for young women to do whatever they want to do.

Too many young women pick up a magazine and see a host of glamorous models, with wardrobes full of handbags, married to footballers. They think that’s what you have to aspire to, that such things give a woman value. Rubbish. When I meet young girls who tell me their ambition is to marry a footballer I always say, ‘Why? Your ambition should be to own a football club!’

There can be nothing more soul-destroying than having a job you hate, even if you have never considered yourself a career woman. We need to encourage young women to open their minds to the possibilities of what they can achieve. Becoming an entrepreneur is nothing to do with your education. It’s about your spirit. It’s about your desire. A burning spark inside you that’s your pride. If you have an idea, and the energy to see it into a business, you’re an entrepreneur. I meet a lot of people with great ideas, but they lack the energy and determination to see them through. But if you’re determined, with a steely core and a can-do attitude, you’re an entrepreneur.

Sadly, since I started out, it’s become vital to have a degree. My first job was with Saatchi & Saatchi, the legendary advertising agency. I joined them, aged 18, straight from school, and I don’t think that could happen now. I don’t think you’d get near a company like Saatchi’s today without a degree, which is a great shame.

It seems to me that all companies are now looking for the same type of person – someone who has been to the right university and who has the right degree. That means there’s little diversity within organisations, which can cause problems. You don’t have people from different backgrounds with different experiences.

To me, it seems obvious that one of the problems behind the banking crisis was that the boardrooms were all full of people from similar backgrounds who followed each other off the edge of the cliff. Really good companies encourage their employees to question – ‘Why aren’t we doing this? What’s going on here?’ And that comes from having people who come from different backgrounds and look at things from different angles, to whom different issues are important. And, yes, that might mean not everyone has a 2:1 degree from Oxbridge or a redbrick university in their pocket.

I fear that talented people with great personal qualities won’t get a chance. Not everyone wants to go to university, but many companies believe that if you have a university degree you’re far more intelligent than someone who hasn’t. That’s not always the case. Life experience gives you the ability to think for yourself, the energy to provide for yourself and the desire to champion yourself.

Added to that, there’s also a snobbery about which university you’ve been to. Young people could spend all that money and find that companies still turn their noses up at them because they’ve been to the wrong institution or chosen the wrong course. Despite all the talk about the glass ceiling, I think the biggest obstacle to entry into an organisation is the HR director. When you apply to a company now your CV goes into one of two piles – university, yes; non-university, no. And that definitely comes from HR.

But with the increased costs of university, so many people can’t afford to go or are so fearful of debt that they won’t go. And what happens to them? Either they have to be motivated enough to work for themselves, to come up with an idea and drive it forward, or they have to start at the absolute bottom and hope they’ll find someone who notices their ability and is prepared to push them forward.

Companies will need to be more and more open-minded to unearth the right talent. At one point in my career I was offered a job as vice-president of a major IT company in Europe, which sounded great – on paper. Then they asked me to go to America for six months to complete an induction into their company. My response was, ‘Why would you want to turn me into someone who has the same mind-set as everybody else who works for you? Surely it is better to have diversity.’ But they were adamant: that was what they wanted. And, ultimately, it wasn’t me.

On a more positive note, apprenticeships are a great way forward: you earn while you learn and you learn on the job. It’s also an opportunity for the company, as the apprentices are with you from the outset and they become used to your way of doing things. Then, at the end of the process, they have a practical skill.

As well as looking past the letters – or lack of them – after your name, sexist stereotyping is another area that should be tackled to make sure the best women can rise to the top. We might think there is no sexism today, but there is. Strikingly, while I have rarely experienced it at work, I get it all the time from the media. If you look on Internet message boards, the abuse is always targeted at my gender: ‘Oh, that Karren Brady, she can motivate the team – she knows how to put a spring in their step, nudge nudge.’ They’d never say anything so personal about a male director, they would simply say he was really bad at his job.

Without a doubt, the hardest thing about being a female executive in the spotlight is that your gender makes you an easy target. Many women perhaps couldn’t cope with some of the stuff I’ve had thrown at me, and I wouldn’t blame them. Luckily, I have a very thick skin and I hope via this book to help you develop one, too. It can be achieved. You’ll likely need it too, with the guilt the media encourages in working mothers. Newspapers will publish the research that fits their particular viewpoint – you know the headlines, they’re the ones along the lines of ‘Working mothers’ children die young’ or ‘Working mothers’ children are dyslexic/stupid/earn less money.’ Either that, or it’s stories about superwomen who have five children, a million-pound job and do it all perfectly – and, believe me, those stories are always misleading. Still, women measure themselves against them.

Then there’s still this sense that if you have a career, children and a nanny, you’re some sort of ruthless bitch who doesn’t give a damn about anyone but yourself. That you just drop your kids off whenever it suits you and do as you like. That’s hard for women to cope with. And it just is not true. Working women are weighed down with the guilt, either that they weren’t at sports day or that they missed the board meeting. I want to help women to understand that you can only do what you can do. The balance is different for everyone.

What can I bring to this debate? Lessons born of hard-won experience. I am independent, driven and motivated. I have taught myself to rely on no one but myself. I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not. I have self-esteem, and I know that I’m capable of achieving anything I put my mind to. Yet, as you’ll read in this book, I never thought it would all turn out as it has. It’s not been easy, and sometimes it’s been punishing. But the result of 25 years’ hard work is that I’m fortunate: I have a career I love.

And that comes with a warning. I did not wake up at the age of 42 and parachute into this position. I’ve worked hard, sacrificed a lot, and all the time I’ve been in pursuit of success. Yet I can say, with my hand on my heart, that it’s been worth it. That’s why I hope to inspire you not to feel guilty for having a dream, for having ambition and not being afraid to go out there to do something about it. To turn your dream into reality.

After all, if you don’t champion your career, who will do it for you?

I want to make things better for my daughter, for you and yours.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.