Now let's look at why someone would leave Microsoft to change the world. It's practically a template. If not schools, why not libraries? Keep the mission thing. "An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children." Then go for numbers: 10,000 libraries, 433 published books, 7.4 million books distributed, 9,000 scholarships to girls and the goal to raise literacy to ten million children by 2015.
If Room to Read bought one of my books for each claimed library, I could buy health insurance. They claim the importance of locally produced books, but maybe because I sell my books rather than "distribute" them, they're not interested. I've tried to contact the regional office many times. This is an email response I got:
Thank you for sharing your company website with us.
According to our procurement policy, we normally buy our books in big amount through biding and quotation process (depending on purchase amount). We would place advertisement on local newspapers requesting for quotations or selling our biding document.
In regard to book selection to meet with our library objectives, we have a team who would set book criteria and select the book to supply to our RR / library.
For this reason, we might not be able to direct to individual vendor, except for small purchase. I have forward your organization website / address to library team (Reading Room program) and HR section for consideration.
Thank you for your interest in supply reading materials for us. We hope that you would remain contact with us in future.
I'd love to bid between myselves, but I guess I'd have to find myself in a newspaper. So I wrote again to ask where I might find myself.
Dear Martin -
I definitely understand your objective to promote printing industry in Laos which we are appreciated - similar to RtR objectives. Please do not discourage, if our committee conclude that your books are matched with our library and then we would place the books on our list for RR.
Even though, we may not buy from you directly due to our limitation, the bidder would finally be contacted you for supplying to them the books. In some cases, we do buy books directly from publishers depending on the situation. However, we could not contact to all individual suppliers. If so, we would increase so much work for our HR team as normally we buy many hundred of titles each year. Hope you understand.
Again, thank you for sharing information with us. Please contract our HR section for any procurement issues.
There are personalized looking websites so I wrote some questions on the comment post. They weren't posted and an automated response comes back saying something like, "Hey, thanks for your support. Bit busy and will get back to ya after the weekend." Ah, there are paying jobs for writing for blogs.
I finally managed to get an appointment with the regional director. She must have been warned because she was defensive, shrill and hostile. She said she would not buy books from me because they are closing down secondary school libraries. Students weren't using the libraries. The books were too hard. So they were rethinking their strategies and concentrating on elementary school literacy. So they were cutting back and couldn't afford to buy books. She said she knows what she's doing and is the best around. I asked where all the money goes. By now, she was kind of screaming and I couldn't pick out the words. Her assistant was thumbing through the books and after she left, he bought a few.
I finally managed to get an appointment with the regional director. She must have been warned because she was defensive, shrill and hostile. She said she would not buy books from me because they are closing down secondary school libraries. Students weren't using the libraries. The books were too hard. So they were rethinking their strategies and concentrating on elementary school literacy. So they were cutting back and couldn't afford to buy books. She said she knows what she's doing and is the best around. I asked where all the money goes. By now, she was kind of screaming and I couldn't pick out the words. Her assistant was thumbing through the books and after she left, he bought a few.
"John strives to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the non-profit sector. Room to Read combines his passion with the discipline of a well-run global company. He has been described by Fast Company Magazine as "all heart, all business."
Who write this stuff? But, OK, maybe the regional manager was just having a bad day. Several months later, I saw in the newspaper that another couple thousand dollars worth of books had been donated somewhere.
In Seattle, I talked to someone in the supermarket who knows John and said he's kind of stepping down. I don't judge these guys' intentions, but is the marketing on key? Shouldn't it be more like, "Why I quit Microsoft at the peak of my corporate career so that I could make millions more on book tours?"
