When my future husband, Roger Brown, and I graduated from the Yale School of Management in 1980, we postponed job offers in management consulting to run emergency programs in Cambodian refugee camps. The Vietnamese had recently invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, and thousands of refugees fled to the Thai border. I managed a program for malnourished children, and we saw a lot of very ill babies. Yet, with food and basic medicine, most completely rebounded. Roger and I had always been moved to make a difference, but this experience gave us focus. If you intervene by age five, we realized, you can positively change the whole course of a child’s life. Later, after a few years in management consulting, we went to Africa to become co-country directors in Sudan for Save the Children.
A version of this article appeared in the September 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review.