E-mail a friendJohn Wood
original airdate October 5, 2006
John Wood quit his prestigious position as a Microsoft exec, at age 35, to fulfill his dream. He founded the award-winning nonprofit, Room to Read, which is active in six Asian countries, with plans to expand into Africa. In six years, he has impacted the lives of almost a million students. In his book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, Wood tells the extraordinary story of how he redirected his focus. In '04, Time named him one of its "Asian Heroes" - the only non-Asian ever selected to receive the honor.
John Wood
Tavis: John Wood was a rising star in the Microsoft empire in the nineties when he did the unthinkable. He quit. But unlike many who cashed out in Silicone Valley for a life of leisure, he chose a quite different path. In 2000, he founded the nonprofit group Room to Read, which has now raised millions of dollars to buy books, build libraries and schools, most recently in South Africa.
His new book is called 'Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children.' John Wood, a pleasure to meet you. Nice to have you on the program.
John Wood: Thank you, great to be here.
Tavis: Tell me what you were doing at Microsoft. Tell me about your career at Microsoft, to begin.
Wood: I joined the company in 1991. The 1990s were great growth years for technology, certainly great growth years for Microsoft, and I was working mostly in our international markets, and they were growing also at geometric, exponential rates. And so it was a very fast-paced lifestyle, there were a lot of rewards. With those rewards came a lot of pressure, a lot of kind of long hours, and a lot of endless meetings and seven-day weeks. But it was a great time to be at the company.
Tavis: Tell me what happened during this time period to take your attention off of, or certainly to expand your vision of the kind of life and legacy that you were leading.
Wood: In 1994, I started focusing on international markets for Microsoft, and the more time I spent traveling the world the more I realized there was just such a divide between those of us who have educational opportunities in the developed world and all these kids in the developing world who don't have educational opportunities. I would be traveling through Vietnam on business, and I would meet kids who didn't go to school.
And I'd ask them why they didn't go to school. My parents can't afford the school fees. How much are the school fees? Five dollars a month. And I thought, "How can we live in a world where you have something as little as five dollars a month stopping a kid from going to school?" And as I traveled more and more and I met teachers and met parents along the way, I started realizing this was a global phenomena.
That there are 800 million people in the world today who are illiterate. That's nearly one-seventh of humanity. And I just kept asking myself why. Why does this have to be true in a world where we have so much material abundance and billions of dollars sitting on the sidelines? And so I didn't necessarily set out to make that my life's goal, but at a certain point, I just started thinking maybe there's a second adult life for me somewhere in the developing world, helping these kids to get education.
Tavis: So there was a particular trip to Nepal that really crystallized this for you, and made you decide that you wanted to not just wrestle with this reality, but in fact try to do something about it. Tell me about the Nepal trip.
Wood: Well, I went to Nepal for the first time in 1998. I was on an 18-day trek in the Himalayas. My goal was just to get away from work, get away from conference calls and e-mails and Monday morning management team meetings, and all that stuff...
Tavis: I have a hard time believing that Microsoft can't find you even in the Himalayas. But anyway, go ahead. (Laugh)
Wood: There was a rumor that if you went high enough in the Himalayas, you couldn't hear Steve Ballmer screaming at you to work harder. (Laugh) So I decided I would check it out and head off into the Himalayas. What I found instead of silence was actually this amazing headmaster who was running a small school with 450 students, dilapidated building, sheet metal roof that leaked during the rainy season, turning the dirt floors to mud.
They didn't have school during the monsoon season. And as though that was not depressing enough, they had 80 kids crammed into a room that fit about 20, no desks, and the kids were balancing their notebooks on their bony little knees. And then the headmaster said, come see the school's library. And I was always a library nerd as a kid. I loved reading, loved libraries, and so I was excited to go see the school's library.
But during the tour, we got to the library. It was just this empty room, other than a little sign above the door that said library. There was nothing in this room that would make up a library. There were no desks, no chairs, no shelves. Most importantly, there were no books. And again, I had this moment where I thought, I asked myself, 'How can we live in a world where there's so much abundance, and yet we're lacking something this fundamental.'
We have 450 kids who don't have a library. Now, Nepal has an illiteracy rate of 70 percent. People live on a dollar a day. And when you talk to an academic they'll say well, they're too poor to afford universal education. To which I say but until they have education, how are they not going to be poor? And probably a lot of your viewers have traveled around the developing world, you see it everywhere.
You see all these kids, whether it be in Brazil or parts of Africa or India or Nepal or Cambodia, where kids don't have access to educational facilities. And in my mind, it just became almost this obsession for me of saying can I do something to make the world better for these kids, and give them the opportunity to get that gift of education.
Tavis: So on the one hand, you are at this moment of epiphany. Put another way, you're at a crossroads. Because on the one hand, you have Microsoft and you are one of their up and coming stars, and you're making money, and you got stock options over here. On the other hand, you see this need that you wanna address, and back over here, you're dating a woman who has kind of given you an ultimatum about what you're going to do with your life. And I'll let you tell the story, but how do you navigate this tension right here?
Wood: It was really difficult to navigate, and literally it is almost like society's grabbing one arm and pulling me in that direction, saying the expectation of you is you're 35 years old, you'll be an executive the rest of your life. And the other, I felt like there are 800 million children in the developing world, metaphorically, at least, grabbing this arm, saying come build us libraries, come build us schools, come help us to endow scholarships for girls who don't get to go to school.
And it was difficult. In the book I write about these gravitational forces that teach you that you're supposed to be doing something. This is the path that society expects you to go on. And it was really difficult for me, because as I told people about my dream of going off and being in Nepal and being in Cambodia and building libraries. I had people say the most dismissive things.
Somebody said to me oh, this is a midlife crisis. And I said, wouldn't it be more of a crisis to not follow my passion? (Laugh) I can't imagine how anybody could say this is a bad thing to do. But then people would point out to me, well, the financial implications, the societal implications, you lose your status. When you go to a dinner party, well, you're well known, so people wouldn't ask you what do you do, they know what you do.
But most people walk into a dinner party and the first thing people ask is, what do you do? And I was literally going from saying I run business development for Microsoft's greater China region, at which point people kind of nod knowingly and take your business card, to saying I deliver books on the back of a yak in rural Himalayan villages in Nepal. (Laugh) At which point...
Tavis: Not much of a conversation starter.
Wood: (Laugh) No, people head straight to the hors d'oeuvres table, and you're left kind of standing there alone.
Tavis: What do you say to people - I was just speaking to some kids the other day at a school, Dunbar High School in Baltimore - and I was talking about this very thing. Talking to these young folk about the difference between a job and your vocation. A job and your calling. A job and your purpose. I was saying to them, you don't want a job. You wanna find your vocation, your calling.
That's a lot easier said than done, particularly if you're already in the game, so to speak, to your point, and you have to do a 180 or do a U-turn. So what do you say to folk who are struggling with that very same dilemma? They have a job, they have a career, but their vocation, their calling, their purpose, might be something different or something in addition to.
Wood: Yes, I get that question all the time. Literally when we have our book events, we have hundreds of people showing up, and a lot of them are saying to me I've read your book, and I'm going through the same thing. I'm doing a certain job at a certain company, but my passion lies in a certain area. And it's tough to give people advice, because if you're just meeting them for the first time, who am I to tell somebody what they should be doing?
My general advice for people is life is not that long. You have one shot at this life, and where your passions lie I think are where, the direction people should take. And if they can't afford to follow their passion, maybe they can carve out some time and work shorter hours, or find a way to incorporate their passion. I have a lot of friends around the world who still are working their day jobs, but they're raising money for Room to Read, the NGO that I started.
This year, over half of our budget is being raised by volunteer fundraising chapters in cities like New York and Atlanta and San Diego and London, where people say I'm gonna keep working at Goldman Sachs or (unintelligible) or Credit Suisse, but I'm gonna volunteer my time at night and on weekends to raise money to help more kids get access to schools and libraries.
Tavis: This school that I mentioned in Baltimore the other day, I was speaking in Baltimore at this school because it's a part of my foundation where I'm speaking to schools all across the country. And because I run a foundation, I understand what it's like to do fundraising. The thing I hate the most about running a foundation is (laugh) the fundraising. Do you feel similarly?
Wood: Fundraising is a very difficult thing. Nobody likes to be put in a position of having to ask for money. In business, you can ask for the order, because there's a quid pro quo. So I'm gonna ask you to sign a contract, and you're gonna get a certain thing, whatever it might be, in return. Charity is quite a bit harder. Now what we try to do at Room to Read is to actually give people a very tangible idea of what we can do with the money.
We can build a school somewhere in the developing world for between $11,000 and $18,000. And the reason we can build a school for that low of a price is because the local people donate land, donate labor, donate small amounts of money. We call it the challenge grant. So we never actually build a school for a community, but we do kind of catalyze the creation of a school by funding, let's say, 50 percent to 80 percent of the resources.
And it's incredible to witness what happens in these villages. I've been in Nepal where I've seen mothers carrying 110-ound bags of cement two hours up a steep mountainside as their contribution of labor to the school. We've had villages in Cambodia where literally hundreds of families have come to the ceremony to open a new library, and they've put 50 riel or 100 riel, the local currency, into the fund.
It may only be 10 or 15 cents to these people, but they're living on less than a dollar a day. And you see these parents who have such a zeal for education, and in my mind, I wanna work longer hours and I'm not gonna be shy about fundraising. Because these mothers, these fathers, these kids want us to not be shy. So as much as I don't enjoy fundraising, pretty much I know I have to do it. (Laugh)
Tavis: I know the feeling. I'm certain there are some people watching right now who are moved, as I am, by the work that you do in Nepal and in Cambodia and other parts of the world, but I suspect there are also some other folk watching right now who are waiting for me and wishing and wanting me to ask you, why not Oakland, and why not south central Los Angeles?
And why not these parts of our country, clearly, and for that matter, there are reports that indicate that we are lagging farther and farther behind as the superpower, this industrialized nation. We're performing abysmally where our educational excellence of our children is concerned, and yet you spend your time abroad doing this wonderful thing. Now how do you respond to folk who say, why not here domestically?
Wood: Well, I try to say that it shouldn't be an either-or thing. In my mind, it shouldn't be do we invest in education in this country, or do we invest in education in the developing world. I think we should invest in education everywhere. Education is the most important thing. I personally give money out of my rather unfortunately paltry personal philanthropy budget every year to a group called Donors Choose, which basically hooks schoolteachers up with potential donors, and a schoolteacher will say I need volleyball equipment, or we need art supplies.
And so I personally give money to some domestic education initiatives. Now the reason Room to Read's focused where we are in the developing world is that the barriers to educational infrastructure are not great in the developing world. You don't have the political backlash; you don't have the fights between the unions and the governments. You don't need $15 million to open a school.
We can open a school in Nepal for $11,000. We can build a small library in India for $2,000. We can endow a girls' scholarship in Cambodia for $250 a year. So the money goes a long, long way, and unfortunately for me, I don't have lots of money. I didn't walk away from Microsoft with a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet-size war chest. I have to go out every week and whatever I bring in from fundraising is what I can do in the developing world.
Now, on just $15 million, we've opened 3,000 school libraries, we've put two million books into the hands of kids, we've opened over 200 schools, we have 2,000 girls on long-term scholarships, and we've reached nearly a million children. So we have made a little bit of money go a long way, and I just think that if you look at the world and you say a kid is a kid is a kid, I wanna help as many kids as I can, and I wanna help them everywhere in the world where they need help.
Tavis: I accept that. 'Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, An Entrepreneur's Odyssey' - easy for me to say - 'to Educate the World's Children.' By the founder of Room to Read, John Wood. John Wood, nice to meet you, and thank you for the work you're doing.
Wood: Great, thanks for having me.
Tavis: It's my pleasure. That's our show for tonight. Catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International, check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles, thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.
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