CV: PHILIPPA HARRISON Chief executive, Little, Brown

SIX WEEKS AFTER I ARRIVED, MR MAXWELL JUMPED OFF HIS BOAT. I WAS LEFT HAVING TO REPAY A pounds 48M DEBT. IT WAS THE MOST UNPLEASANT AND EXTRAORD INARY SIX MONTHS OF MY LIFE

I went to Bristol University, where I read English, drama and philosophy. I thought I would go into either television or publishing, and my first job offer was doing publicity for a TV company called Associated Rediffusion. But just before I was to start, I realised I didn't want to do that.

The first job I was offered in publishing was for pounds 600 a year, in 1963, which I thought was exploitation of female graduates - I'd got a good 2:1. I went back six months later to the same job, as the copywriter for a group of companies called ABP, for pounds 900, which was the beginning of my learning to negotiate.

I learned the basics of how to be an editor over seven years at Jonathan Cape. It was incredibly good training at a wonderful company, but I was very badly paid still, earning pounds 2,000 a year. So at the age of 30, I went to Hutchinson, where I quite rapidly became the editorial director. It was a very good flowering period for Hutchinson, as Robert Lacey's Majesty was a phenomenon, and Kingsley Amis, whom I'd been editing at Jonathan Cape, moved there with Jake's Thing. That was very controversial among feminists, but I thought it was an entirely allowable stroke in the sex war.

Then, in 1979, Peter Mayer came to London to run Penguin, and I was appointed joint editor-in-chief of the whole Penguin group alongside Peter Carson. I was far left at the time, but discovered that it was both morally and intellectually necessary that there was a vast swathe of redundancies, as Penguin was on the verge of collapse. The ensuing strike went on forever, and people continued to work after they'd been fired, so it was a very tough experience. The management won, as it were, but I'd taken an enormous amount of the flak myself, and later resigned to take a job I thought would be much simpler. What I think I should have done, on reflection, was to have taken a four-week holiday.

I went to Michael Joseph, where I spent five years as editorial director, but the company was bought at the end of this period by Penguin. That meant that my boss's boss would have been on a board from which I had resigned, which didn't seem a brilliant move, and so I went to Macmillan London to become managing director.

But during my time there, the company came to be the sole owner of Pan, and my boss made the decision that Macmillan London's sales and marketing would report to Pan. That would have made Pan the primary publisher, whereas the primary publisher must be the person who acquires the author and understands how to market the whole campaign. I said if that happened I would resign, and I think nobody believed that I would. But, feeling very strongly that I had always been able to deliver on what I offered a writer, and that I would no longer have the power to, I did.

Since this was over a principle, I didn't just take another job: I went off, in my early forties, to do a postgraduate at the Courtauld Institute. I thought I wasn't going to go back into publishing, so I became managing director of V&A Enterprises at the V&A museum - but found to my horror I was bored stiff.

Macmillan in New York were looking for a new managing director for Macdonald, owned by Robert Maxwell, and I felt I would be able to bring the company to a new level. But, six weeks after I arrived, Mr Maxwell jumped off his boat, and I was left in the position of having to repay a pounds 48m debt to the Maxwell companies, because that's what he'd put in the books as his investment in Macdonald. In the most unpleasant and extraordinary six months of my life, I put the company into administration and managed to persuade both Little, Brown US and the administrators that the best way forward was for Little, Brown to buy the company. Any other solution would have been the end of the company and the staff's jobs.

In the five years since, Little, Brown's turnover has gone up from pounds 19m to pounds 34m. We were elected by our peers to be Publisher of the Year at the end of 1994, and had two Books of the Year out of four - Nelson Mandela's autobiography and Jonathan Dimbleby's The Prince of Wales. So I'm immensely proud of what everybody's done here, and of our results. And I hope the fact that the authors who have stayed with us and are permanently at number one, like Iain Banks and Patricia Cornwell, means that we've paid them backn

Interview by Scott Hughes