|
|
 |
|
| Visions & Revisions |
Worker of the World
11/01/2007
|
If I were writing your biography, would the first chapter be
about karate class leading to a fascination with Asia?
Karate piqued my interest in
Japan. I started studying it in 1983, so I was grown up. I’d wrestled
competitively in college, and I took up karate because I wanted to continue in a
competitive sport. My instructor was Japanese. The first time I went to Asia was
in 1986, and a few years later I went to China for the first time. My last six
years with Dell I worked in Singapore, which is a melting pot for almost all of
the other cultures in Southeast Asia.
What is your commute like now?
I describe the home office as wherever I
decide to go. My family lives in Singapore most of the time, but they spend a few months of the year at our home in Austin. I’m in
Raleigh a lot, too. I’m on a plane about once a week. Outside of the United
States I fly commercial, but on domestic trips I use NetJets. I’ve had more
delays trying to fly commercial in the United States and missed several
important engagements, with people waiting for me.
Where would you live if you had to settle down in one place?
I live by the adage "Happy wife,
happy life," so a better person to ask is my wife, Jamie. She’s very happy in
Singapore, with our four children and two girls from Cambodia for whom we’ve
become legal guardians. Jamie is a financial planner by profession, but she has
found the spot where we’re able to do what we think is important.
Meaning the charity the two of you started called Caring for Cambodia?
Yes. Jamie got the idea when she
took a vacation to see the 12th-century temples at Angkor Wat. The little girls
who took her around to the temples could speak pretty good English, and they
told her it cost their families $5 a month to send them to school, which was a
big burden for them. Before she left, she agreed to sponsor maybe a dozen girls.
We went back a month later with 10 huge duffel bags of donated clothes and
uniforms that we gave to the villages and the schools. We bought bicycles while
we were there and had a big lucky draw for some villagers. This was right before
Mother’s Day of 2002 and Jamie said to me, "I don’t want anything for Mother’s
Day this year except one thing: I want you to build a school here in
Cambodia."
I said, "You want me to build what?" I reminded
her that we’d built plenty of houses in our life and none of them had been
finished on time or on budget. She said, "You know how to run a company, you
should be able to figure out how to do this." Here we are now, four schools
later, plus a teacher training center that we built because we realized how
important it was to teach the teachers. And every one of them was done on budget
and on time. We’ve also started a program we call Food for Thought that provides
the kids with one meal a day.
Now we have people on the ground there taking care of the
day-to-day operations, but Jamie travels there about once a month, and I go
there once a quarter. What’s nice about living in Singapore is that there are a
lot of trailing spouses who have some great expertise and want to give back to
the world. We get some very talented people who serve on our board of directors
and have had some great creative ideas that we’ve been able to incorporate into
the schools.
Are there computers in the classrooms?
In each school there is a room
with dozens of computers that the kids share. There was a problem with the
electricity spiking a lot. But we got the Raffles Hotel to help us with that; it
donated some generators.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
