From Silicon Valley to Swaziland by Rick & Wendy Walleigh (read aloud txt) 📖

life in Europe to be a doctor in a remote region of Africa. However, I hadn’t been so moved that I wanted to be a hero and give up all the worldly pleasures of a good life. I wanted a good career and the rewards that went with it.

Now was different. We had been fortunate in our lives and careers. We weren’t rich, but we had enough saved that we didn’t need to focus on maximizing our income. Also, our children seemed on their way to careers of their own. One was in medical school and the other nearly finished with law school. So when I left my last high-tech job, I evaluated our finances and decided that I’d finished my primary career, but I wasn’t ready to stop working. For a number of years, Wendy and I had periodically discussed what we would do next as we contemplated wrapping up our primary careers. Neither of us wanted to be heroic, but we both wanted to “give something back.” We both wanted to be working on something of obvious benefit to society.

Wendy had taken the first step in this direction. Four years earlier, she was feeling frustrated and unsatisfied selling just one more new technology product. So she left her career as a director of marketing in the high-tech industry where she had spent her career. She took time off to contemplate and explore what she wanted to do next. As she thought about her interests and how she might contribute to society, she narrowed her focus to three major themes: youth (especially young women), education, and entrepreneurship. Her next step was to network and explore for potential opportunities that could satisfy these interests. After a lot of lunches and coffee sessions, a friend suggested that she might want to join the board of directors of Junior Achievement (JA) in Silicon Valley as a part-time activity while she continued to explore. The focus of Junior Achievement is teaching young people the life and business skills they will need to thrive in our free market economy. So it aligned precisely with Wendy’s interests, but it wasn’t a fulltime activity.

Wendy joined the Junior Achievement board and immediately assessed that JA needed help with marketing. There was no marketing plan, so Wendy set out to create one. She did extensive interviews with the executive director, the staff, donors, and other stakeholders and developed a marketing plan that would allow JA to increase their revenue and the number of students that they could serve. The executive director loved the plan and convinced the executive committee of the board that she needed someone to implement it. She wanted to hire Wendy as a full-time employee. The executive director got her approval and approached Wendy, who was excited, but a little surprised and definitely hesitant. The position sounded great, but Wendy had been expecting to take more time off. In the end, the opportunity was too good a fit to pass up, and Wendy agreed to start in a part-time role that quickly evolved to fulltime.

Wendy became JA’s vice president of marketing, and several months later, when the vice president of development left, Wendy became vice president of marketing and development. She was paid half of her former salary, and she still worked long hours, but she felt she was doing it for a better reason. In addition to teaching kids about the free enterprise system and how to be successful in business, Junior Achievement encourages young people to stay in school, study hard, and to see themselves as future entrepreneurs or businesspeople. It was a great fit with Wendy’s interests and allowed her to use her skills and experience to benefit society.

While Wendy was at Junior Achievement, I was still pursuing my career in the high-tech industry, but I knew it wouldn’t be for many years. It had been a very enjoyable, challenging, and rewarding career. I had been a partner in a large consulting firm, a senior vice president at a start-up and a general manager in a software company, but I was ready for a major change. I thought a lot about what might come next. As with the millions of baby boomers who will soon reach the traditional retirement age in good health, I knew that I could easily live another thirty years, and I knew that I would have a lot of time to fill. I didn’t play golf, which can fill more time than any other human activity I know, so I had to think of something.

I knew I wanted to contribute something back to society, and I knew I wanted something that would excite me, but I wasn’t sure what it would be. My first thought was to become a paramedic and support relief efforts after global disasters. It sounded exciting and heroic, but it would have meant a year of training and then being away from Wendy for extended periods of time. I realized that I needed a more disciplined approach to my search. I bought What Color Is Your Parachute? and followed the instructions and exercises for a “life-changing job hunt.” In one exercise, I decided the person that I would most like to be was Kofi Annan because he worked to achieve world peace. I decided I wanted to work on world peace, and I knew I could use my skills and experience to do it.

It may not seem obvious as to how experience in management consulting and managing high-tech companies can directly contribute to world peace. However, a few years earlier, I had read Tom Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and in my opinion, he had defined the path to world peace. Paraphrasing, with apologies, his idea was to get everyone doing business with each other to generate economic benefits for all parties. Once people got significant benefits from doing business with each other and developed strong stakes in preserving society, they wouldn’t go to war against each other because they would understand how devastating it would be to their lives. In other words, the idea is to create enough economic incentives not to go to war that they offset the many other causes that push people to war. It all seemed very logical to me—create economic development to decrease the possibility of war and, along the way, reduce poverty.

I wasn’t so naive to think that this was an easy path to solving all the world’s problems, but I do believe that one person can make a difference. My philosophy is to light one candle rather than curse the darkness. When confronting difficult or undesirable situations, I hate feeling hopeless. I always look for a solution, and the solutions to difficult problems are often complex and difficult themselves. If I was going to pursue this path, I didn’t want to be simple-minded or foolish. I really wanted to know what the experts said about how to foster economic development. If I was going to put a lot of effort into something, I wanted to be contributing in the most productive way.

So my next step was to study. I read over twenty books related to international economic development. Some were academic; some were inspirational. Some were very hopeful, others just the opposite as they recounted all the mistakes that continue to be made in the name of trying to help poor people and developing countries. As I read the books, I continued to focus my direction, but I didn’t find anything that made me change my course.

The first thing that I learned from all my reading is that the experts don’t have a clear, consistent recipe for successful economic development. However, as I read, I became convinced that building private enterprise was the best way to achieve sustainable success. There are too many stories of grand government schemes costing hundreds of millions of dollars that have failed to make a difference or just failed outright. Also, with large government projects, there are too many people who can benefit whether the project is successful or not. Naturally, this includes the graft that is endemic throughout the world, but it also includes all of the people who get an income from contracting to do the work whether the work generates real benefits or not. But for independent businesses, there will ultimately be a success or a failure, and it is not hard to measure the successes and keep score. You can keep doing the things that work and stop investing in the things that don’t. Independent business development also promotes freer societies as we’ve seen in many developing countries, such as South Korea and even China. Once again, don’t get me wrong. I know that there has been a lot of exploitation of people and resources by business. However, on balance, free-market economic development is good, and independent businesses with some government regulation are the ways to make it happen.

Fortunately for me, and probably not coincidentally, I had a lot of experience in private business. I knew how to help businesses solve problems, and I knew how to help businesses grow. So my skills aligned with where I saw the best opportunity to contribute. I had theoretical convergence, but I had no idea as to where to apply my theoretical solution. I didn’t know if any real-life organization doing international development needed my skills. I also had no experience in international development or the whole nonprofit arena, and I didn’t even know most of the major players in the field.

I needed to do more research, so I went to the web, and I started networking in person. On the web, I started researching the larger organizations that I had heard of such as CARE and Heifer. I also read about the Peace Corps, USAID (United States Agency for International Development), and various agencies within the United Nations. I asked all of my friends who they knew who might be in the field, and I went through the alumni directories of MIT and Harvard Business School to find fellow alums who worked in international development. As I talked to all of these people, I asked them for additional contacts. I eventually talked to over eighty different people about what I wanted to do. Some were in government, some in academia, some in large nonprofits or NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), and many were in smaller NGOs. They all gave me ideas about organizations that might be of interest to me. Then I researched those organizations on the web and made contact to find out more. Thank goodness for the Internet.

After making contact, I visited a number of organizations where I thought I had relevant skills and experience and interviewed for potential job openings. Although people were impressed with my background and experience in business, I kept hearing the same refrain, “But you have no experience in international development or even the nonprofit arena.” There was a terrible mismatch. Without the international development background, no organization was going to hire me into a senior-level position despite all of my business experience and accomplishments. On the other hand, it made no sense for the organizations, or to me, to hire me into an entry-level position. It was a frustrating dilemma.

As I spoke to knowledgeable people in the international development field and explained to them specifically what I wanted to do, a number of them recommended that I talk to an organization called TechnoServe. TechnoServe’s tagline was “Business Solutions to Poverty,” and their mission was to grow businesses that could provide livelihoods for the poor. It sounded like a good match, and so I contacted them.

TechnoServe was located in Washington DC, and I was going back to the DC area for Thanksgiving, so I arranged to meet with Bruce, TechnoServe’s CEO for an informational interview. With TechnoServe’s approach to international development,