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Three Microsoft employees tossed outright the corporate hierarchy and pulled together to complete the ultimate team-building exercises: a seven-day, 150-mile race hold out month across the Gobi Desert in unconnected unrelated Western China.

The Gobi March, allotment of a series of extreme-endurance events called RacingThePlanet, pits teams and individuals against mountain passes as high as 10,000 feet, flat expanses of sun-baked barren, rocky riverbeds and down-reaching gorges.

Debby Fry Wilson, an avid distance runner who has worked at Microsoft for 10 years, first read about the race in Runner’s World two years ago.

The idea simmered in the on the frontier of her mind until one generation, she and her boss, Orlando Ayala, were talking about running, and he mentioned that a good friend had done the Gobi March.

“Originally, the idea was to practise it as individuals, as a private strive,” Fry Wilson said earlier this month. “… Over time we started to think about, could we vouchsafe it as a team and in a way that combined it with our work office?”

Ayala, Fry Wilson and a third thorough-bred horse, William Calarese, be in action on a new Microsoft effort called Unlimited Potential. The mark is to spread access to technology (and, eventually sales of Microsoft’s products) to the “next billion” people in emerging markets around the world by 2015.

Their work involves new products and business models with a view to the sake of people without the means, or inclination, to pay developed-world prices for technology. It also includes education and training programs and partnerships by governments and development groups.

Before they settled on the Gobi March, Fry Wilson, in true Microsoft fashion, brought her co-workers a PowerPoint donation laying fully hard, harder and hardest options for an patience run they could do together. “I did it in a practice that we’d do in a craft context,” she said.

Ayala was game. He chose the hardest option, the Gobi March, without hesitation. “I deem personality-wise, I’ve for ever been attracted to crazy stuff,” he before-mentioned.

The racers were already used to spending extended stretches together away from the office for of a demanding international travel schedule. But they quickly realized that to have existence successful in the Gobi, they had to let go of the corporate structure that defined their work roles.

Ayala is a senior vice president. Fry Wilson, a senior director, reports to him. Calarese, a director, reports to her.

“We very much stuck to that the faultless time,” Calarese said. “That apparently took a little bit of adjusting.”