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Learning a new lingo
Nonprofit founder takes Microsoft lessons and learns to give back
By David Jasper / The Bulletin
Last modified: November 17. 2009 8:48AM PST
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Linda English, of Bend, is one of six finalists culled from a pool of 65 nominees up for a $25,000 humanitarian award from the Microsoft Alumni Foundation. The winner will be announced Wednesday at an award ceremony in Bellevue, Wash.
Pete Erickson / The Bulletin
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“You can only cross-country ski so many hours,” says Linda English, of Bend.
In 2005, the successful former Microsoft employee founded the nonprofit LINGOs, which stands for Learning for International Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs. English and a small staff scattered around the country help some 45 humanitarian organizations, including Habitat for Humanity and the Nature Conservancy, train their employees worldwide.
She's one of the more than 150 former Microsoft employees who have started nonprofit organizations, taking with them the same philanthropic impulse of their former employer, company founder Bill Gates, whom Time magazine recognized as a Man of the Year in 2005 for his humanitarian actions.
A pool of 65 of those 150 ex-Microsoft employees were recently nominated for the Microsoft Alumni Foundation's first-ever Integral Fellow Award, a $25,000 prize that comes with dedicated support from the foundation, according to its Web site.
English is one of the six finalists for the prize, which was judged by President Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates Sr. and others. Up to three finalists will be awarded by Bill and Melinda Gates at Wednesday's Microsoft Alumni Foundation Founders' Gala in Bellevue, Wash.
Oh, ‘MS' stands for ‘Microsoft'
Twenty years ago, English had never heard of Microsoft.
Born in Miami and raised in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., she graduated from the Florida Institute of Technology and earned her master's degree in instructional technology at Syracuse University.
Instructional design, she explains, involves naming learning objectives, then designing and building the training course.
“I've always been interested in how you can use computers for remote learning,” she says. “Rather than getting everybody together in a classroom, how can you use a computer that will connect people?”
“It's the same thing I'm actually working on with the NGOs, the nonprofits that I work with today. I can't seem to get out of the industry,” she says, chuckling.
When she started at Microsoft in 1989, it was in the capacity of an instructional designer working on programming courses, she says.
“They were not big then,” she adds. “I was in grad school when I interviewed with them ... I had never heard of them before. When I was reading the literature, it said, ‘MS-DOS,' and I was like, ‘Oh, that's what the “MS” in “MS-DOS” stands for.'”
Once she was hired, she and husband Kevin English moved to Seattle, where he was stationed in the Navy and she began her decadelong career at Microsoft.
“About the time I got there, they were hiring a lot of people. It was really the beginning of them taking off. Now I don't even recognize it. When I go back to Seattle, I'm just driving around this maze of huge buildings. They have divisions all over the world. ... It's insane how big they've become.”
Giving back
Still, philanthropy has always been a part of the culture at Microsoft.
“When I was there, his mom, Mary Gates, used to come in and talk about the United Way and really encourage people to get active,” English says. “From there, honestly, I think what happens with people, especially during the years that I was there, they questioned ‘How many more years am I going to do this for? Shouldn't I give back, shouldn't I do something else with my life?'
“You sort of go through a midlife crisis. We were all hired really young,” she says. “I can remember being there in '89 ... and there would be somebody who was vice president of something or other and they looked like they were 28.”
Responsibility came quickly at Microsoft.
“Within two years I was managing a team of 50 people. I was managing managers,” she says. “I remember when I started managing managers, and I'd never managed people before. I only managed people for about two months, and then they said, ‘OK, manage managers.' Now I'm coaching people on how to become a manager, which I don't recommend.”
“Every six months I was going through reviews and hiring more people,” despite the fact that she didn't have a business background.
If she ever felt intimidated, she could take solace in the fact that “everybody around you doesn't know what they're doing either, because they're all really young.”
She, like other Microsoft employees, dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts, and recalls meetings with employees at traditional computer companies like IBM and Dell.
They wore “blue suits and white shirts, and here I'd come waddling in in a pair of heels I bought yesterday because we wore T-shirts and shorts to work,” she says, laughing. “You'd walk in and tell them what to do, and you'd be like, ‘It's so obvious!'”
On vacations, English and her husband liked to visit Central Oregon and climb at Smith Rock.
The culture at Microsoft was one of frequent change. “You change jobs about every year and a half. They just kind of believe in the philosophy of shake the tree and see what falls out,” she says, laughing. “You were constantly on your toes.”
Leaving Microsoft
Her best job came when she headed technical education for Microsoft in Europe, where she was based in Paris for two years.
Still, in 1999, English decided to leave Microsoft. It was a quality-of-life decision, she says.
“We're really into athletics, cycling, all the classic Bend sports. Cross-country skiing, running, etc.,” she says. “We just decided one day, let's get out. We came back and moved here.”
“We love it here,” she says. “I've been in big cities for the last week and a half, and I'm just walking around going, ‘Oh God. Who cares?'”
Sitting in her beautiful home on Congress Street, a stone's throw from Drake Park and downtown Bend, English concedes she has a great life. Several years ago, she decided she wanted a little more out of life than to recreate it away.
She began trying to volunteer for nonprofits, but quickly decided, “OK, I don't know what I'm doing,” she says. She went back to school for a year, attending the School for International Training in Vermont.
English then became the e-learning manager for Save the Children, a nonprofit that, according to the description at the LINGOs Web site, www .ngolearning.org, “work(s) with families to define and solve the problems their children and communities face using a broad array of strategies to ensure self-sufficiency.”
For a time, she and her husband lived in Westport, Conn., where her job entailed figuring out a way to train Save the Children's 4,000 employees around the world.
“I started writing checks to businesses to pay for all this stuff,” she says. “And I hated that. I didn't want to write a $40,000 check so that the organization could have IT training, while the guys next to me were working on the Bam, Iran, earthquake,” a 2003 disaster that killed thousands.
Getting LINGOs down
Having come from the software industry, English knew she could get the necessary learning materials donated to these causes, “if I made it really easy to donate,” she says. “A business doesn't want to go in and deal with 45 nonprofits.”
Through LINGOs, “We manage that whole process,” she says. “We have 25 business partners that we work with that give us all sorts of stuff that we turn around and give to these agencies, all with the whole objective of, ‘how do we make sure that that agency has the best possible skilled employee that they can have, in a whole bunch of areas.”
An organization such as Save the Children might pay LINGOs $8,600, English says, “and they'll probably get $150,000 worth of product from us.”
And good products they are. For example, business leadership courses from the likes of Cornell and Harvard, which will share materials with LINGOs, “and then we can just put them on a computer and deliver them to the guys in the field,” she explains.
Further, technology must be incorporated in order to build an online “university” for each organization. “So when a Save the Children employee comes to work, they can log in and say, ‘Oh, look, here's Save the Children University, here's all of this content that's been built for me.' But it's all donated to LINGOs, and the LINGOs donates it out to these organizations.”
In her work, she's traveled to Bolivia, Ethiopia and other corners of the world.
“The reality is, that's not really where I need to spend my time,” English says. “Nor should I. It's so expensive for me to go there. I'm a liability every time I get on a plane.”
When she's home, she works most often amid the green plants in her sunroom. Neighbors probably think she spends all day in the sunroom talking to herself, as she spends a lot of time fielding LINGOs-related calls.
‘A great life'
Overall, “I have a great life. It's easy,” she says.
“When you work out of your house, you have a really different schedule. You work in little bursts. I mean, I don't care if I'm working on a Friday night. It doesn't bother me a bit,” she says. “Probably the hardest thing for me is that I have a lot of 6 a.m. phone calls.”
But working from home nevertheless has its advantages, such as afternoon bike rides to Mount Bachelor.
However, LINGOs just got its first partner in Australia, “which I'm totally bummed about, because 2 o'clock in the afternoon is when they come online in the morning. It used to be that 2 o'clock in the afternoon became a really quiet time for me,” she says.
The award ceremony in Bellevue on Wednesday comes some five years, almost to the day, after she first met with five nonprofits to discuss the possibility of something like LINGOs.
“The whole goal of this award is that they really want to encourage and motivate other former Microsoft employees to get out there and make a difference,” English says.
“For me, personally, I see so many people in Bend that come up to me and say, ‘Well, I'd really like to give back,' or ‘I like to travel, you know, I couldn't possibly give back.'
“I just always say, ‘You know what? You can. Just go out and do it. Figure out what you're passionate about and then figure out what you're good at doing.'”
And if English hadn't conceived of LINGOs, what would she be doing?
“I have no idea,” she says, laughing. “Skiing too much.”
David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or djasper@bendbulletin.com.
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