A tutorial from the business school of life We cover many subjects on this page: new working patterns, women in management, immigrant start-ups, the future of computing, empowering staff, business's responsibility to society. It is a wide spread and it is unusual to find it all in just one person. But all these themes run through the life of Dame Stephanie Shirley - child refugee, software pioneer and crusading philanthropist - who, at the age of 79, has published her autobiography. It is called Let IT Go, the capitalised middle word a play on "it" and "information technology," which is a slightly limp introduction to the book's bracing start. Dame Stephanie was among the last of the 10,000 German, Austrian, Polish and Czech children allowed into the UK, without their parents, as the second world war loomed. Aged five, she and her older sister tumbled on to the platform at London's Liverpool Street station, flotsam in a "river of exhausted, bewildered, tear-stained faces." Most of the children on the Kindertransport never saw their parents again. Hers survived. Her father, a Jewish judge who had been dismissed by the Nazis, managed to cross into Switzerland. Her mother, who was not Jewish and occasionally tried to protect herself by wearing a swastika, left by train. Although they all ended up in England, they never managed to reconstitute the family. Her parents split up and when her mother had earned enough money to look after one child, she chose the older daughter. The father, remarkably, returned to Germany after the war, resumed his thwarted career and rose to become head of the judiciary in the state of Hesse. While Dame Stephanie retained a relationship with her mother, it remained complicated. Her greatest affection, by now, was for the English couple who had taken her in and helped her in her education. When her girls" school could not satisfy her interest in mathematics, she started lessons at a nearby boys" school. "I never reconciled myself to the daily gauntlet of leering and catcalls," she recalls. It was preparation for what came next. It is startling to read now of the undisguised prejudice against women in the 1950s UK workplace. Working in the Post Office research institute, which had built the world's first programmable computer, the young Stephanie was paid less and denied promotion, her ideas often dismissed. She set up on her own. Freelance Programmers would employ women who could work, at home if they wished, while bringing up children. They would write software for companies that did not want to develop it themselves. Normal today; revolutionary then. Her own baby Giles soon joined the infants, nappies and programmers cluttering her house. But she and her husband Derek soon sensed something was wrong. Their fears proved correct. Giles was profoundly autistic. It was, she writes, "like a skewer in our hearts." The story of how these devoted parents built a life for their beautiful, sometimes violent son, never sure, beyond occasional laughter, when or whether he was happy, is both harrowing and deeply affecting. The pressure of caring for Giles and building a business drove her to a breakdown. She learnt a lesson: "None of us is truly invulnerable, and those of us who deny our vulnerability are merely storing up trouble." But the company grew, picking up blue-chip clients. As it did, she steadily transferred shares to her staff. This was not charity. The business was theirs as much as hers. She brought in new management who, eventually, to her great distress, eased her out. Like King Lear, she grasped what happens when you hand your realm to a new generation and, like Lear, she raged against it. But the stock market listing of the company, which became FI and then Xansa, and its eventual sale made her, and many of the staff, rich. She devoted herself to philanthropy, mostly in the field of autism, setting up projects that could eventually cope without her. This was the challenge of her life: learning to let go - of her troubled son, of her company, of her philanthropic enterprises. There is an entire business course in this book: about the dangers of profitless growth, the difficulties of succession planning, and the problems of managing clever people. But more important, this engrossing story of an extraordinary life is filled with lessons in what it means to be human.