New wealth, new priorities

By Tara Weiss

updated 5:09 p.m. ET Oct. 5, 2006

Back in the mid-1990s, John Wood was living large. As Microsoft's director of business development in China and director of marketing for the Asia-Pacific region, he was Bill Gates' point man in Asia. He traveled the world, was shuttled to meetings in chauffeured cars and wheeled, dealed and dined at four-star restaurants

These days, Wood's meetings are held in developing countries over cups of tea with heads of villages. He left his jet-set lifestyle in 1999 to found Room to Read, a nonprofit that builds schools and libraries in developing nations. Wood details his personal and professional transformation in his new memoir "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World."

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Abandoning corporate America to solve the world's problems is not for everyone. But in the last decade, more execs seem willing to give up the fight to get ahead in their own careers so they can battle on behalf of others. Forsaking pricey creature comforts is a little easier than it used to be. Top executives have amassed massive amounts of wealth in recent years. Just look at the Forbes list of the 400 Richest Americans, where the price of admission is now $1 billion.

Evidently, there are only so many new jets or Bentleys one can buy. Newly anointed millionaires and billionaires are looking to do something altruistic with their wealth. Case in point: President Bill Clinton's recent Clinton Global Initiative, which partners business people — and their money — with projects aimed at improving the quality of life for the world's poorest citizens. Clinton raised a record $7 billion during the three-day conference. Like Clinton and CGI's attendees, many former corporate executives are trying to replicate their business success in the nonprofit world.

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"Making a lot of money doesn't make you a good person — it makes you a lucky person," Wood says during a phone interview from his San Francisco office. "The question is, What do you do with that good fortune?" For Wood, that meant quitting his lucrative job, leaving Asia and moving to San Francisco to start Room to Read.

It all happened rather quickly while on a rare vacation to Nepal. While there, Wood visited a bare-bones schoolhouse in the Nepalese mountains. The school's library was a joke. There were some old travel guides left by visitors; other than those, books were scarce. When Wood got home, he e-mailed friends, encouraging them to send him children's books.

That mass e-mail procured hundreds of books. Months later he returned to Nepal with his father to donate them. The villagers' joy changed his life. When Wood quit his job to start the nonprofit, "a lot of people though it was absolutely crazy," Wood says. "I didn't want to tell people, because they were talking me out of it."

Wood was well-equipped to start Room to Read from his days as a corporate executive. He was used to breaking through bureaucratic tape, pulling all-nighters and organizing. But it wasn't easy. He didn't take a salary for the first four years and went through much of his life savings. He won funding from several places, including the Skoll Foundation, and with it, designed an infrastructure.

Room to Read is expanding into Africa and India and is setting up educational infrastructures and offering scholarships. There is a particular focus on young women, who are often kept out of school to help work. The eldest son is typically the only child sent to school, since it's too expensive to send all the children. Wood says that in developing countries, it costs about $250 to send a girl to school, but it can "forever change a girl's life." "If you educate a man, you typically educate the man," he says. "If you educate women, you're educating the next generation. We're trying to undo that balance. That's the way to break the cycle of poverty."

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