Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, I’m extremely pleased to say is John Wood, founder of two, not one but two, nonprofit organisations, Room to Read, you probably have heard of it, supporting children’s literacy and U-Go, you may not have heard of that yet but you will by the end of this, helping women in low income countries to attend university. While Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Greater China region and steeped in the tech giant’s ‘Think Big, Move Fast’ ethos, John took a hiking trip to Nepal that would change his life. A local headmaster in the Himalayan primary school showed him their empty library and said, “We are too poor to afford education but until we have education, we will always be poor. Perhaps sir, you will someday come with books.” Within a year John had returned with 3000 donated books, creating libraries in several village schools and growing his hobby into a fulltime focus, he left Microsoft and launched Room to Read in 1999. They have since raised, wait for it, over $750 million in philanthropic capital and brought their education programmes to over 30 million children in twenty low income countries. And in 2022, John founded Room to Read’s natural extension U-Go, providing university scholarships to ambitious and promising young women in developing countries. Thank you so much for joining. You’ve come all the way round the world especially to see me.
John Wood
I am just off the plane from Kathmandu. Not an easy connection to London but one well worth making.
Elliot Moss
There aren’t many people that have said that to me. Room to Read for me is twenty years of reading about this crazy idea of books and supplying books in places that people weren’t seeing books in. Just talk to me about why you made that transition. I know lots of people have asked you that question but the compulsion, the inability for you to not to leave Microsoft and to go do this thing.
John Wood
I did this because a headmaster in Nepal challenged me. You mentioned it in the intro that he said “we’re too poor to afford books, we’re too poor to afford education. Until we have education, we’ll always remain poor” and that to me kind of struck me as a topic sense of poverty that over a billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day and almost all of those societies face the challenge of not being to educate their children. But this is a huge lifelong problem because if kids don’t get educated, they can’t work their way out of poverty and you can map the number of people in the world who are illiterate, they are almost all in the lowest income countries in the world. The headmaster when he said, “Perhaps sir, you will someday come back with books”, I didn’t realise how much that would be lifechanging. I thought I’d go back with some books, it would be a one-off event, I’d go back to my life at Microsoft. What happened was, there were other headmasters from other schools who showed up to say, “Mr Wood, we wish to petition you” in perfect BBC radio English, which is how a lot of the people in Nepal in that period of time learned their English. He said, “My library does not have books. My children do not have the same opportunity” and so I realised the first trip to Nepal to establish six libraries would probably need to turn into the second trip to establish another twenty and I ultimately realised that it could stay a hobby but hobbies don’t scale and so I had to throw myself out of the Microsoft aeroplane and pray that my parachute would deploy and I decided to quit Microsoft and do Room to Read fulltime because with nearly 750 million illiterate people in the world, it seemed like this needed to be bigger than just a little one-off hobby.
Elliot Moss
Now I buy all that John, right, and we, I’ve heard you tell the story because you are an incredible fundraiser, you don’t, there aren’t many people that you meet in the world that have raised the amount of money that you’ve raised in the time that you’ve raised it but many people, and I studied Politics at university like many people, and they would have seen at that point the exact same prognosis, the exact same bunch of facts and most people that read those facts go about their merry way and they carry on with their job at Microsoft or they carry on with their job at any large company. Why did John Wood say, “You know what, I’m not just going to do this once”? Why did John Wood say, “This is going to be the thing I do”? I’m trying to, that’s the bit that as I read all about you and I did all my research, my usual thing, I’m like going yeah but, but why, so many people have given a bit. I’m in the same camp, I give a bit, I give to some charity, I do what I can. You did something completely different. Why?
John Wood
I think Andrew Carnegie was a big reason for that, you know you look at what Carnegie did in his life and he was widely viewed negatively for very, very good reasons in some cases but towards the end of his life he decided to invest in libraries, 2500 plus libraries opened across the UK, the US and Canada. At the time, when I came back from my first Nepal trip in 1999, it was too early to actually Google anything so I think I was Yahooing it and trying to figure out who was the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world. Has anybody done a similar initiative to Carnegie and established thousands of libraries? There was not a Carnegie of the developing world so the entrepreneur in me, the social entrepreneur in me, the builder, I’m kind of a Bob the Builder type of mentality, I’m an entrepreneur and I want to make things happen and I want to get stuff done. I looked at that and thought well if there’s no Andrew Carnegie of the developing world, perhaps that should be me. That to me was a fun challenge not to make a billion dollars but to maybe help a hundred, thousand or a million or ten million kids get literate, that to me was, sounded like a great way to spend the next couple of decades of my life.
Elliot Moss
Small choice that you’ve made there. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper, it’s John Wood, he’s the founder of Room to Read and the founder of U-Go and also, I should mention, a jazz fan.
John Wood
Yes.
Elliot Moss
You know a lot. I mean again, I get people that when sometimes just before they come on the programme they say, “Don’t ask me about jazz”, I mean, and I go no, no that’s fine, it’s okay, we want to find out about you and we want to talk about you and we want to talk about what you do but in your case actually, Cannonball Adderley is one of many, many artists that you love.
John Wood
I was fortunate to spend five years in Chicago, including graduate school at Northwestern. If you’re living in Chicago and not learning about jazz, you’re kind of not paying attention.
Elliot Moss
And the learning, because it’s funny, I was thinking before today about learning. What I’ve learned over more than a decade of doing this programme is extraordinary, I knew stuff, I knew some but now I really know my way around. For you though, music, has it always played a role in your life or was this a Chicago inspired thing?
John Wood
I think I started off mostly as you know like a kid in the, in school in the ‘80s I was totally into New Wave and everything, you know Adam Ant and English Beat and stuff like that and then one of my college roommates, Eric, said to me, “What are you doing about classical music because we can’t really be complete adults if we don’t understand classical” so we started listening to, you know the usual, the Vivaldi, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and then I fell in love with classical, to this day when I’m on an aeroplane, that’s really all I want is classical music because it calms me in airports, it’s Beethoven, it calms me, it’s Mozart, it calms me, it’s a nice I think background, not just to listen to, to go see live performances but just when I need to just get my brain focused, I’m not a good meditator, I find that classical music for me brings me to a more calm and meditative mood.
Elliot Moss
I’m exactly the same but when it comes to jazz though, the disruptor in you comes out I imagine because we were… you know, you mentioned before about this, “I just had to do it”, I’m still struggling with that because as you said, “I now plotted out the next two decades of my life.” You were in a really safe job, not just safe but Microsoft was going places. Do you remember the feeling you had because you’re obviously a highly educated person but tell me about the feeling that you had that said, “I am just going to go and change things now.”
John Wood
Well, it was not an easy decision to make. A lot of people thought I was having a midlife crisis and I said, “I’m 35, that’s too young technically, for a midlife crisis.” I didn’t want to be the guy Elliot, who got to the end of my days and looked back and had regrets. I didn’t want to be seven years old and look back and say, “What if?” What if I’d had the courage to leave Microsoft? What if I’d had the courage to devote two decades of my life to Room to Read? And there’s so many people out there who get to the end of their life, if you’ve read, I love Sinclair Lewis, ‘Babbitt’ for example, a classic American novel written in the 1920s, the guy gets to the end of his life and he thinks, “I haven’t really accomplished anything. I’ve not done what I wanted to do” and so for me, Room to Read was this… it meant I was going to give up millions of dollars and salary and stock options but I thought you can’t really whinge about that because compared to so many kids in the poorest parts of the world, I still had a pretty good deal on life.
Elliot Moss
And were there a bunch of people that you consulted at that time, if you recall? Before you made the leap or was it regardless of what the advice is, I’m just going go and do it anyway?
John Wood
No, I talked to a lot of people and they fell into three camps. Camp Number 1, mom and dad, “Go for it son, we believe in you.” That was awesome. Camp Number 2 were the negative, the Debbie Downers, the Negative Nancys, the people who told me ALL the reasons it was not going to work and I chose to ignore them. And then Camp 3, the most blessed camp were my friends who said, “You’ll probably figure this out. You’ll probably run into obstacles and roadblocks you had no idea existed but you’re an entrepreneurial type of guy, you’ll figure it out and let me know how I can help.” And the greatest thing that anybody can say to an entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur, a change agent, especially early, you should always say to them, “How can I help? Please be specific.”
Elliot Moss
And in those early years, what kind of help did you need? And please be specific.
John Wood
Oh yeah. Well first of all money. No money equals no mission. So many nonprofits treat fundraising like it’s some little side business you can’t really talk about. I was unabashedly enthusiastic about asking for money.
Elliot Moss
And you still are by the way, I’ve heard this guy talk, I mean it’s extraordinary.
John Wood
Oh right.
Elliot Moss
You’re like, you’re like possessed.
John Wood
Well and Mishcon has made a multi-year commitment to my new initiative U-Go, if I may say that, you’ve not asked me to say that but that’s because I’m not afraid, as they say in Glengarry Glen Ross, “You can’t be afraid to ask for the order” and for me, I wasn’t asking for money to put in my own pocket, I purposely worked for no salary for the first three years of Room to Read. Today with U-Go, I work for zero salary so that I can hand on heart tell people, “I’m not asking you for your money to put it in my pocket, to feather my next, I’m asking you for money so a young woman in Bangladesh can go to university, so that a young child in rural India can have access to his first library.” So, I think for me when people ask how they can be supportive, I say number one, financially, number two, your network. Right, there’s a thing in technology called Metcalfe’s Law that you look at the power of a network and it’s directly proportional to the number of nodes in that network but an exponential level so, I look at people like you Elliot and I’m like well who does Elliot have in his network and how can his network potentially help amplify and magnify what I am doing so I basically with Room to Read and now with U-Go, we created really a network of networks, so powerful leaders especially business leaders and entrepreneurs around the world who could understand how difficult it is to get something new off the ground but it would have that spirit of “I worked hard to get my thing off the ground, I’m going to help John Wood and that founding team get Room to Read off the ground.”
Elliot Moss
The power of network, just think about that for a moment. It’s absolutely bang on. Much more coming up from my guest John Wood in a couple of minutes. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions which can be found on all of the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Suman Kaur and Geoff Dragon talk about how startups can best prepare for success.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you’re lucky, all you have to do is pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is John Wood, founder of two nonprofit organisations, Room to Read, supporting children’s literacy and U-Go, helping women in low income countries to attend university. You talked about being specific and it’s about the money and it’s about actually asking how can I help. One of the things that I’ve read about and this is a question around what you’ve learned from the world of business that you’ve applied, was this sense of if I could scale this thing called Room to Read as fast as Starbucks open in every town or McDonalds opened in every town, wouldn’t that be cool. At the heart of that is a business view of the world which is it's about growth. Just tell me about the value of your business experience as it relates to what you’ve done in the last twenty plus years.
John Wood
For us with the Starbucks test, it really came down to the fact that I mentioned Carnegie, 2500 libraries across the US and the UK and Scotland. We at Room to Read had opened our 2500th library about five years in, right, so we caught those tail lights in front of us and then the question was okay, now that we’ve done that, what are we going to do next and then I had this crazy idea and Jason, Erin, Emily, some of the founding team at Room to Read, we said, “What if we benchmarked ourselves against Starbucks”, right, if the world needs a watery latte, the world damn well needs literacy and it’s one thing for the private sector to scale but if there’s a Starbucks open in that corner over there, it’s really not going to influence humanity in a huge way. If a child in rural South Africa or rural Tanzania does not get access to a library, that does affect the world in a big way. So, a number of so-called experts told us you can’t possibly open libraries faster than Starbucks because you don’t have access to private capital markets, you can’t pay private sector salaries, you can’t issue stock options, which I argued that are stock options paid off comically in the afterlife at Room to Read but there was all kinds of reasons we could not possibly open libraries as fast as Starbucks opened outlets post IPL. We said, “Great, thanks for the advice, we’re going to try it anyway.” And by our fifth year, if you benchmarked Room to Read against Starbucks post IPL, we actually were opening libraries faster than they had opened outlets and we kept that up for nearly a decade.
Elliot Moss
And just give me the two things that you did to enable you to do that. Top two.
John Wood
I think number one is just building an incredible team around the world. A lot of social entrepreneurs use the I, I, I, first person singular. I try to always use first person plural so, we are doing this, we would like to have you on the team. My mantra has always been “Recruit, delegate, repeat. Recruit, delegate, repeat.” Build a team. So here in the UK, John Ridding, when he became CEO of The Financial Times, we said, “John, can you help us to build the UK board?” We went to some senior people at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, “Can you help us to build a Hong Kong board?” and we built these boards all around the world whose job was to a) fundraise and b) expand the network. Fundraise, expand the network, repeat, repeat, repeat and that for us I think is one of the main reasons Room to Read has grown to be as large as it is because we were not shy about saying this is a global effort, we need a global movement and it’s not just about a few of us who are the founding team, let’s get out and create hundreds of people who view themselves as co-founders.
Elliot Moss
And yet, because when that happens John and you’ve got scale which you need, guess what, bureaucracy kicks in and the entrepreneur goes, they start tearing their hair out, I mean I’m an entrepreneurial person and I hate bureaucracy but I wasn’t doing what you were doing, so how did you, how did you manage to focus on and fight that one?
John Wood
We had a mantra internally which was that we love structure but we hate bureaucracy. We had to have structure because we couldn’t get to the point of helping millions of children and we couldn’t hand on heart be asking people to give us tens of millions of dollars if we didn’t have structure. The challenge was defeating bureaucracy. Number one, it comes down I think to who you hire, who you recruit. When you’re talking to somebody for the first time, the types of questions they ask you are going to tell you a lot about the kind of person they are. Are they kind of a damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead type of person and that’s where I think I get along with entrepreneurs so well or are they the kind of person who spends the first interview with you talking about risks and processes and procedure and I’m not that kind of guy, that stuff should exist in some way but to me it was all about finding people who are likeminded who are saying the damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, we need to make these things happen. Number two is if you get to the point where you think someone is being a bureaucrat, ask them why are doing this and is there a reason you are doing this that I don’t understand because many time that structure was necessary and I viewed it as bureaucracy but they said no John, here’s why we need to do this, situations specific to a country for example. But then third, if you get to the point where someone is just being way too much of a bureaucrat and slowing things down, you have to get divorced, you have to say look, thank you for your service but we need to keep moving in the direction we’re moving in and you’re being a little bit of a drag on the anchor.
Elliot Moss
What you do John could be considered political in some ways and to many, you’re essentially going and fixing stuff which is way beyond the remit of, in some cases, businesses for sure but governments as well. I’ve read a bit about you and you’ve been involved in politics. Just tell me about your relationship with politics and how that’s informed or not your attitude to Room to Read and to U-Go.
John Wood
Our goal for both organisations has been to be apolitical and to be non-religious, to respect the fact that there’s a lot of differences in the world and I don’t want to ever be seen as taking one side as a social entrepreneur of a political argument for example. I’ll give you a story with Room to Read, we realised early on that it was, it was a good thing to donate used English language books to libraries but it wasn’t the be all and end all. What the local communities needed were books in the mother tongue but no publishing company like Scholastic for example is not going to publish books in the Lao language or the Khmer language because if people living on a dollar a day can’t afford children’s books so here you have a chicken and egg thing where if they don’t have books in the mother tongue, the kids won’t get literate, if the kids don’t get literate they’re probably not going to get an education. So we decided early on to become a publisher, to go find literally the JK Rowling of Tanzania, the Dr Seuss of Nepal and we decided we would do only original content, we could take Pippi Longstocking or Heidi and translate into Khmer but then it would have no cultural relevance for the kids and we would have, we would use only local authors and local artists and give them a chance to really bring their talent to a new sphere called children’s books. Even though Vietnam is a communist country and we’re an American headquartered NGO, even though Laos is a very heavily cloistered communist country, we got permission from those countries, from those governments to start publishing children’s books. Why? Number one, because our books were not political. Number two, we were using only local authors and local artists and three, we were really telling stories from those countries so those governments viewed this as being something that was a positive. So when people look at us, I say don’t view us as being having a passport, view Room to Read or view U-Go today as being global organisations full of people from all kinds of countries and that’s why I think we try to avoid taking any kind of political stance because to me what it all comes down to is if a child’s not getting educated, we have to not let anything get in the way.
Elliot Moss
But someone with your experience and I understand all of that and I think it’s a brilliant idea which, just as a quick question, the publishing idea, where did that come from because that’s genius. There’s one thing kind of redistributing books and there’s another thing actually getting them printed. What was the kernel of that idea?
John Wood
I think the main thing was that we are very data driven in everything we do, it’s one thing to assume you are doing good for the world, it’s another thing to go ask the teachers, ask the students and so Erin Ganju, my co-founder and I, did an early study with our local teams to ask families and teachers in Nepal and Vietnam how are we doing, what are we doing well, what are we not doing well, what can we be doing better? Number one answer that came back was more books in the mother tongue. Well I’m a big fan of Jim Collins, Good to Great, right, the numbers don’t lie. If 56% of the parents and teachers are telling you they need books in the mother tongue, you can ignore that, you can make excuses of oh it’s going to be difficult, I’m not sure how we’re going to do it. Erin and the team and I sat down and we said we’ve got to figure this out and thankfully we had great teams in Vietnam, great teams in Nepal who said, “We can find local authors, we can find local artists, we just have to give them a small financial incentive to produce children’s books.” Room to Read eventually won the UNESCO Confucius Prize which recognised the fact that we were doing this in a culturally appropriate way and I don’t mean culturally appropriate in some PC BS kind of way, I mean culturally appropriate in the fact that a child in Vietnam would be reading books that had a Vietnamese theme and they could see an author and an artist who looked like them and they could think to themselves, “Maybe one day I will be a published author.” You mentioned earlier Elliot, I was just in Kathmandu. One of the people I met and ended up meeting with at a cocktail party, Nabin Shrestha, was one of our illustrators and here he is fifteen years later still illustrating children’s books.
Elliot Moss
Not bad eh. We’ll have our final chat with my guest today, that’s John Wood and we’ve got some Snarky Puppy for you too. That’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
John Wood is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. You mentioned Jim Collins, Good to Great. You talk about business, you talk about data, you said that was you know the publishing thing was the answer to the data point. You’ve got feet in both camps, John, which I just want to talk to you about. You’re still involved in the private equity world, you’re still involved in the private world, how does the synthesis of public and private help you?
John Wood
The easiest answer is that people who have a lot of resources can give to new things, like the U-Go initiative which I’m starting now but I think also there’s something about meeting people through philanthropy, meeting people through doing good for the world, we end up meeting likeminded people. Business can be so transactional, everything is what can you do for me, what can I do for you and it’s very quid pro quo. I think when people meet on a playing field like Room to Read or like U-Go, you realise the people who are there are there for the right reasons, they’re usually people who have done well for themselves but who are really thinking about how can my good fortune be used to help others and so I think that I don’t like to use the word ‘networking’ because it has a terrible connotation but what I would say is that when you meet somebody because you’re united in a quest to make the world a better place, you’re probably more likely to be better off doing business with that person in the long run than with a person who is greedy or the person who is self-centred and egotistical or a person who doesn’t give a crap about the state of the world. I’d rather work with people who care.
Elliot Moss
Your caring is at a very high level and your energy is too and you mentioned music as a way of calming you and you talked about classical music and I fall into a similar camp, I need to be calmer than I am generally and I listen to classical music to do that. How do you, how do you ensure that you harness your energy in the most positive way because I imagine that’s a, you know, daily challenge? My observation of you, even though we’ve known each other only just for a few months is, this guy’s always on. I mean, how do you manage your energy levels properly, calmly, so that you’re looking after John Wood because you’re doing a lot for millions of other people but John Wood is still the person that needs to be healthy and happy.
John Wood
For me, the key things are exercising every day, giving myself a night when I exercise I don’t listen to a podcast, I don’t try to listen to a book on audio, I just get out and exercise, hiking, tennis, running, whatever it might be for myself. Number two, I don’t work set hours, I just, I work when I’m motivated. The reality is I’m motivated about fifteen hours a day…
Elliot Moss
I was going to say.
John Wood
…so I’m constantly, like I’m constantly working.
Elliot Moss
You kind of, I thought you can’t not be honest but you were honest so that’s fine, I’m thinking he’s pretty motivated this guy.
John Wood
Well now I’m getting this new thing off the ground, we’re getting U-Go off the ground. The idea behind U-Go is that it’s a natural extension of Room to Read that when these young women especially get to be sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, they start asking, “How can I go to university?” Where is the programme to help me go to that next step to go to university so I can be a nurse, a doctor, a teacher, an accountant, an entrepreneur? And so I’m super motivated to get U-Go off the ground and you can’t get something new off the ground if you don’t have incredible reserves of energy, if you don’t have an insanely strong work ethic and if you’re not willing to get on a plane and go around the world multiple times to say here’s what we’re doing, here’s what U-Go is all about and now I, twenty plus years at Room to Read, phenomenal, I left on a high note and the third generation CEO, Geetha Murali and her team are doing a phenomenal job. I’m onto the next challenge and I love to build, I’m a Myers-Briggs ENTJ, right, so like if you point to a hill and you say I’m going to take that hill and I need you to get the team, the resources, we take the hill and then I say, I don’t want to run this hill, I want to go to the next hill and that’s what U-Go is doing, we’ve now launched programmes in nine low income countries to help thousands of young women who are at seventeen, eighteen years of age, at a magical inflection point; they go to university or they don’t. U-Go’s belief is that every young woman should get a chance to go to university and that’s why I’m motivated for the next twenty years of my life that I hope U-Go can be as big for this area of university education for young women as Room to Read has been in the fields of early grade literacy and secondary school for girls.
Elliot Moss
I’ve got two options here, one is to say I come with you and the other one is to get out the way. But either way, it’s going to be good, I think I’m going to be coming with you so that’s okay. I mean god, if you’re listening to that and you’re thinking about setting up your own business, I would say make sure you tick at least a good 80% of those boxes. It’s been fabulous talking to you John, thank you so much for finding the time post-Kathmandu. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
John Wood
My song choice is by a South African jazz pianist named Abdulla Ibrahim. I did not know much about him and then once upon a time when I was living in Sydney, his CD, his Ode to Ellington fell into my lap. The opening piece of the album is titled Impressions on a Caravan and I love this piece because in the early years of Room to Read I often questioned whether or not we were making fast enough progress. Do we have the right people involved? Was I going to be a success or a failure as a social entrepreneur? And then one day my friend, Sunisha Ahuja, who was the first country director Room to Read in India, gave me a card and it had a poem that I believe was a famous sufi poet and he had said something along the lines of, “I set off at night alone to cross the desert. Hours later I looked back and I saw lights and I realised we had become a caravan.” With Room to Read and with U-Go I wanted to have that caravan so whenever I hear Abdulla play this piece, it reminds me if we really want to create change in the world, we got to recruit our caravan and we’ve got to lead it across the desert.
Elliot Moss
That was Abdulla Ibrahim with Impressions on a Caravan, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, John Wood. “I didn’t want to be the guy to have regrets”, his impetus for wanting to go and do it. He works to get things done, he’s Bob the Builder in his own words. How can I help? And please be specific he said of what we need to do and what I need to do when it comes to talking to a charity. He loves structure but he hates bureaucracy. Super, super important to think about that as your business grows. And recruit, delegate, repeat, that is the way forward if you really want to scale with effect. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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