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Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
John Wood
An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children
Collins
August 2006
On Sale: August 29, 2006
272 pages
ISBN: 006112107X
EAN: 9780061121074
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
John Wood discovered his passion, his greatest success, and
his life's
work—not at business school or leading Microsoft's charge
into Asia in
the 1990s—but on a soul-searching trip to the Himalayas.
Wood felt
trapped between an all-consuming career and a desire to do
something
lasting and significant. Stressed from the demands of his
job, he took
a vacation trekking in Nepal because a friend had told him,
"If you get
high enough in the mountains, you can't hear Steve Ballmer
yelling at
you anymore." Instead of being the antidote to the
rat race,
that trip convinced John Wood to divert the boundless energy
he was
devoting to Microsoft into a cause that desperately needed to be
addressed. While visiting a remote Nepalese school, Wood
learned that
the students had few books in their library. When he offered
to run a
book drive to provide the school with books, his idea was
met with
polite skepticism. After all, no matter how
well-intentioned, why would
a successful software executive take valuable time out of
his life and
gather books for an impoverished school? But John
Wood did
return to that school and with thousands of books bundled on
the back
of a yak. And at that moment, Wood made the decision to walk
away from
Microsoft and create Room to Read—an organization that has
donated more
than 1.2 million books, established more than 2,600
libraries and 200
schools, and sent 1,700 girls to school on
scholarship—ultimately
touching the lives of 875,000 children with the lifelong gift of
education. Leaving Microsoft to Change the World
chronicles John Wood's struggle to find a meaningful outlet
for his
managerial talents andentrepreneurial zeal. For every
high-achiever who
has ever wondered what life might be like giving back, Wood
offers a
vivid, emotional, and absorbing tale of how to take the
lessons learned
at a hard-charging company like Microsoft and apply them to
one of the
world's most pressing problems: the lack of basic literacy.
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