FOR JOHN WOOD, author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children, it started with a trip to Nepal in 1998. The director of business development for Greater China and former head of marketing for the Asia-Pacific region was taking his first holiday in nine years. He picked Nepal because, a friend had jokingly said, 'If you get high enough in the mountains, you can't hear [Microsoft chief executive] Steve Ballmer yelling at you'.
So, high in the mountains, Wood found himself invited into a small schoolhouse. A sign outside one door read 'School Library'. Inside, kept under lock and key, were fewer than 20 books, all seemingly backpackers' castoffs - a Danielle Steel romance novel, the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia, an Umberto Eco novel in Italian, James Joyce's rather inaccessible Finnegans Wake.
Nepal, he was told, had one of the world's highest illiteracy rates at 70 per cent. It didn't have books to teach its children. 'Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books?' the headmaster asked.
Wood was sure he wasn't the first traveller to be asked. But perhaps he was the first to respond. He e-mailed friends and business associates from an internet cafe and asked for donations of books suitable for children. They sent thousands, and Wood later returned to Nepal, bundled them on top of yaks, and trundled them out to the village. The overwhelming gratitude he found there convinced him to devote himself to the task full-time.
'I thought, 'Oh, my God, I've got to get out of the corporate world', instead of sitting in Taiwan thinking about how to price [Microsoft] Windows when there are 850 million people in the world who can't read,' says Wood. So he moved out of his Beijing flat, left his expat girlfriend and their expat lifestyle, and hit the road to raise money for his cause.
Since then, the 42-year-old has abandoned any semblance of a normal life. But the non-profit organisation he created, Room to Read, has built more than 3,000 schools, libraries and computer labs, donated two million books, funded thousands of girls' scholarships, and published children's books in several languages in the developing world. Wood, who admits to being a zealot, is on the road more than 200 days a year from headquarters in San Francisco. For the first few years, he didn't draw a salary from the organisation, living instead off his savings.
After setting up first in Nepal and hiring full-time staff, Wood expanded to Vietnam in 2001. Even though literacy rates in Vietnam are high, 'I've seen kids in Vietnam reading toothpaste boxes because they have nothing else to read', he says. He was inspired, in part, on a trip to Vietnam during which he met an avid computer student who shocked him by operating Microsoft Excel better than he could. The student earned US$20 a month working at a hotel, spent US$15 on computer classes, gave US$2 to his parents, and spent his remaining US$3 a month on food. He slept on a cot in the hotel's back room. That zeal for education made an impression. 'In Vietnam, we can build a kindergarten for HK$100,000,' he says. So he did - not just one but more than 50, plus 150 libraries and more than 50 language labs.
