By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | With hundreds of thousands of South Carolina students headed back to classrooms soon, here’s hoping that it will be their best year ever, a year in which they exceed the expectations of their parents and teachers, a year in which they work harder to achieve excellence.
If we all exceed expectations, we’ll change the places where we learn, work and play. Imagine if 700,000 public school students did better in the classroom. Not only would they perform better in an irritating flurry of standardized tests. But they would also create a more positive, competitive learning environment that might change the pathways of their lives.
The story of Joshie the Giraffe illustrates the importance of doing more than required.
A few years ago, a family vacationed in the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island in Florida. Upon arriving home, the parents discovered their young son’s stuffed giraffe Joshie didn’t return with them. Joshie, it appeared, was lost. The boy panicked at the prospect of going to sleep without Joshie.
Businessman Chris Hurn told his son Joshie was fine. “’He’s just taking an extra long vacation at the resort, ‘he wrote in 2012 in Huffington Post. “My son seemed to buy it, and was finally able to fall asleep, Joshie-less for the first time in a long while.”
Fortunately, the Ritz-Carlton staff found Joshie that night. Hurn asked the staff to take a photo of Joshie in a lounge chair by the pool to reassure his son.
But the staff went way beyond one photo. They took pictures of Joshie all over the property. One photo showed him with cucumber slices on his eyes while getting a massage. In another, Joshie lounged with other stuffed animals and a real parrot. He drove a golf cart on the beach. And finally, as a new member of the hotel’s Loss Prevention Team, they snapped a picture of him watching security footage.
Joshie and the photos soon arrived an album with a cache of hotel goodies. The Hurn family was blown away by how the staff exceeded expectations for guests that had already checked out.
Joshie’s story went viral on social media. But it didn’t end there. Three years later, Joshie got left accidentally in another Florida hotel room. Again, the boy was distraught. The parents couldn’t find another Joshie, so they bought a stand-in giraffe soon named Tucker.
Later that year, the family returned to the Ritz-Carlton. Staffers were saddened to learn Joshie was again missing.
“Later that afternoon someone knocked on the door of our room and handed my son a bag with his name on it,” Hurn wrote in a follow-up column. “ In it was another stuffed giraffe with a small note around his neck introducing him as ‘Jeffie,’ a long-lost cousin of Joshie’s. The note said that while Joshie is off on his worldwide adventures, Jeffie would be honored to be his new companion. It also said he likes warm hugs.”
None of that was in anyone’s job description. But the staff went the extra mile to make a little boy happy. It’s what authors Chris Heath and Dan Heath called “breaking the script” of what was expected with a strategic surprise. They related the story of Joshie in their 2017 book, “The Power of Moments.”
Charleston School of Law Dean Andy Abrams shared the Joshie’s story with faculty and staff as they prepared to welcome students.
“The story is about the commitment of people to not just meet but to exceed expectations, and it resonated for me because it reminded me of the kind of culture so many of you work so hard to nurture daily here at the Charleston School of Law,” he wrote in an email. “It also underscored the impact that your small acts of kindness and compassion can sometimes have.”
For students, teachers, administrators and anyone in a service-oriented business, the inspiring story of Joshie the Giraffe highlights how good things can happen by embracing a lifestyle of exceeding expectations and striving for excellence.
And it reinforces one suggestion my daughters frequently hear about school work: Always do the extra credit. It will always help you.
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We Can Do Better, South Carolina!