Anne Miller to talk at National Science Week

Mar 12 2009 by Karen Wilson, The Journal

Anne Miller is one of the world’s most successful female inventors having created everything from the female condom to macho power tools. The author of How to get your ideas adopted, (and change the world), speaks to Karen Wilson, ahead of her fascinating talk this afternoon during National Science Week.

IN 1975, an 18-year-old girl called Anne Miller from a small Northamptonshire village nervously left her rented bedsit in Heaton to start a seven-month work placement at CA Parsons on Shields Road.

As first days go, it was certainly a case of “in at the deep end”.

“I walked in past these enormous turbo generators and I was the only girl among 3,000 men,” she remembers. “The men were a bit puzzled and this weird rumour started that I was Charlie Parson’s granddaughter!

“At that time there was a total ban (or so I was told) on having women in the foundry so I wasn’t allowed to go on the standard training programme which involved rotating round all sort of interesting departments.

“They were so twitchy about letting a woman onto the shop floor that I was put in a staff department called “Machine Dynamics” where made sure the machines didn’t vibrate too much.”

However, Anne, now 52, says she learnt a lot (as well as how to drink two pints of Newcastle Brown in a lunchtime!).

“Starting at Parsons was my first experience of how sometimes you need to be smart to overcome resistance to your ideas,” she says. “I had the idea that I wanted to be an engineer, but I don’t think HR really believed me!”

When they offered her a boring sounding job in “mathematical services” she asked if she could spend half her time there and half in a design department – opting for the design department first of course.

Anne also learnt a lot about how to run a business.

“I noticed that the level of experience and expertise of the fitters was largely ignored due to the over inflated egos of the young graduate engineers,” she explained.

As her career took off, Anne vowed not to make the same mistake herself.

She was inspired by people like Ricardo Semler, who took over his father’s pump factory in Brazil in the early 1980s and transformed it into one of Latin America’s fastest-growing companies.

“His key principle was to trust and empower his workers,” she says. “He started gently, allowing the machine operators to choose the colour of their overalls, but within a few years, staff were electing their managers and choosing their own salaries! Cleverly, the catch was that salaries were also public, so people were embarrassed to be greedy.”

After gaining her MA in Engineering – and working at Wilkinson Sword, Cramlington during a gap year – Anne spent the next 20 years leading teams developing innovative products for the world’s leading companies.

As a result, she now has 39 patents under her belt.