LITERARY GREATS
Our guide to the 10 books that could save your life.
BY
her own admission, straight-talking TV’s queen of shops Mary Portas has mellowed.
The fiery red-head who has made it in a business world dominated by alpha males has taken to meditating, reading philosophy, and tuning into her feminine self.
She explains: “I found myself not getting the joy that I thought I was getting.”
It started when her youngest son Horatio was born and her eldest Mylo was going off to university.
“So I had one child coming into the world and another going out,” she muses.
“Then I just started wondering how I really wanted to spend my life.
“I’d read about these incredible people who had got the balance right and I initially thought, ‘Yeah but they can’t do it if they work like I do’,
“But then I thought, ‘Why don’t I just change the way I work?’
“Once I’d started, it just became this wonderful rollercoaster.” Was it a mid-life crisis? “Yeah, there was a bit of that,” Mary, 58, reflects.
“It might have been menopausal, but it was something I needed to do.
“I certainly wouldn’t have had the confidence to do it when I was younger.”
She stepped down as CEO of her communications company, the Portas Agency, whose clients include Mercedes-Benz and Westfield, becoming its chief creative officer and leaving the practical, daily steering of the business in other hands.
“I put a woman in to run the business,” Mary says.
“I even had to deal with some of my own thoughts, like, ‘She’s had a baby, will she’ll be wanting another one, will she be able to be an MD?’ I had to cut myself short and stop that.”
This sea change is detailed in her latest book.
She says: “We realised that the historic way of working was just based on keeping profit, profit, profit and you narrow who you are as a person to achieve that and you don’t develop the people around you in a much more caring, deeper way.”
Her values now lie in collaboration, empathy, instinct and trust as she tries to nurture female energy and sensitivity.
Emotion does matter in business, she argues.
“I don’t work weekends, I don’t work evenings,” she adds.
“I’m full when I want to be full but I can also turn it off for ‘me time’, otherwise I’d be in a home.”
Her proudest achievement to date is the creation of 26 Mary’s Living And Giving charity shops for Save The Children, but she is still banging the drum for women in the workplace.
And her book features lots of statistics and information on everything from the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling to bullying, sexual harassment and attitudes to childcare.
However, it’s been tough building a meaningful, authentic life.
She divorced her husband Graham, with whom she has two children, Verity and Mylo, in 2003.
Soon after she met and fell in love with fashion editor Melanie Rickey whom she eventually married in 2014, two years after Melanie gave birth to their son Horatio following IVF treatment.
And she did encounter prejudice about her sexuality in the workplace. But she admits she didn’t have the confidence to challenge it then.
“I wouldn’t keep quiet now,” says the woman who puts the almost testosterone-driven determination of her early career down to the survival instinct she developed following the death of her mother when she was 16 and her brother 14. So, is she truly mellowing? “I probably am,” she says, chuckling.
“I do meditate, which I never used to. I could have done with that 20 years ago.
“I know it’s a cliche that you learn things when you get older, but I want to help other people change, even if it’s just one thing they do – to be kinder and more vulnerable and more empathetic and collaborative.”