The Thursday, December 9, 2010 Charlie Rose Conversation with John Wood
CHARLIE ROSE: John Wood is here. He is the founder of Room to Read. It is a nonprofit organization that works to promote literacy in poor countries. Wood started it 10 years ago after leaving his job at Microsoft. Since then Room to Read has built 1,000 schools, established 10,000 local libraries, and funded nearly 9,000 scholarships for young girls. I am pleased to have him here at this table to talk about it. And a remarkable achievement on the cover of this book -- leaving Microsoft to change the world. Bill Clinton says "Just think what would happen if a couple of hundred people followed his example." What did he mean? What would they be following if they followed your example? JOHN WOOD: My example I think was seeing a problem, finding a great unmet need trying to go out and fill it. And in this case the lack of books for kids all over the developing world.
In 1998, John Wood was a rising executive at Microsoft when he took a vacation that changed his life. What started as a trekking holiday in Nepal became a spiritual journey and then a mission: to change the world one book and one child at a time by setting up libraries in the developing world. He was soon driven to leave his career with only a loose vision of the change he wanted to bring to the world. John made the unlikely marriage between Microsoft business practices and the world of non-profits to create Room to Read, an organization that has created a network of over 7,500 libraries and 830 schools throughout rural and poor communities in Asia and Africa. The organization is now one of the fastest growing, most effective, and award-winning non-profits of the last decade. John has been recognized in the worldwide media as a "21st century Andrew Carnegie," building a public library infrastructure to help the developing world break the cycle of poverty through the lifelong gift of education.
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