John Wood Turns the Page

John Wood is in too much of a hurry to revel in the splendor of a fall morning in San Francisco. The 38-year-old Microsoft alumnus (he was the company's director of business development for China before he left) is driving to work at his organization's new headquarters in the Presidio. Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge are visible in the distance, but Wood, like any impatient founder, is more concerned with the emails he has to answer, the meetings he has to arrange, the presentations he has to make.

And he's concerned with one more thing: the fact that more than 850 million people around the world can't read. Wood is the founder of Room to Read, a nonprofit group that builds schools and libraries for children in Asia. "There are nearly 1 billion illiterate people in the world," says Wood. "My goal is to help 10 million children achieve literacy by 2010."

Without question, he has a long way to go. But it's hard to argue with the results so far. In just three years, Room to Read has established 300 school libraries, built 25 schools, donated more than 140,000 books, set up 11 computer rooms, and awarded 100 scholarships to fund the education of young girls. Most of this work has taken place in Nepal, but Room to Read is also building schools and libraries in Vietnam, and there are plans to expand into Cambodia and India. As Wood speaks, a cargo ship steams from San Francisco to Ho Chi Minh City, carrying more than 30,000 books such as Clifford the Big Red Dog, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and Math in Action. In a few weeks, Nguyen Hoai Nam, Room to Read's program director for Vietnam, will meet the ship and, in partnership with the city's Department of Education and Training, deliver books to schools.

Still, 10 million children? Wood is unfazed. Achieving that goal means doubling the number of kids his organization reaches every year for the next eight years. "Why is that not possible?" he asks. "Microsoft doubled every year in its early days. Cisco more than doubled every year. I worked in a lot of different organizations at Microsoft that doubled year to year, and none of us thought it was incredible."

As John Wood is starting his day, more than halfway around the world, Bala Krishna Shrestha is finishing his -- and putting Wood's work to good use. Shrestha is headmaster of Pashupati Kanya High School, a 600-student, all-girls school in a bustling mountain village called Charikot in northeastern Nepal. The school is on a long slope of land, in the lap of one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas, next to an army camp and surrounded by a dense forest.

Today, like many other school days during the past year, a handful of students arrive a good half hour before school starts at 10 AM. "They come for the books," says Shrestha, whose teaching career spans more than half of his life. "There is no public library. Our little room of books is the only place where the students can go to widen their knowledge. They are very curious, and they like the colorful pictures in the books. They have never seen anything like this."

Man on a (New) Mission
This is the time of year when successful executives pause long enough to question the meaning of their success. If I'm doing so well, why aren't I happier? If I've achieved so much, why don't I feel a greater sense of satisfaction? A few weeks after the holidays, though, the questions begin to fade, replaced by more businesslike concerns. Will our new product ship on time? Why is our stock underperforming?

John Wood asked himself the big questions and then answered them with action. He spent most of the 1990s at Microsoft. It was the era when the company sealed its dominance and began minting millionaires (more than 7,000 at last count) almost as fast as it shipped software. Wood was director of marketing for Microsoft Australia, where he oversaw the launch of Windows 98 and planned for a visit by Bill Gates to the World Economic Forum in Melbourne. Wood had 70 people reporting to him and was, by all accounts, at the top of his game. "I had achieved a certain definition of success," Wood says. "But I wasn't going to stick around to see if I could continue to run up the score on stock options."

Wood was 34 and single enough to be able to travel the world for an indefinite period of time. But he didn't take a leave of absence; he quit. "Microsoft wanted to give me a three-month sabbatical, but I knew that three months would not be enough time," he explains. "If you want to figure out your path in life, you can't have an end date on the exploration."