Unbelievable commitment

It's 6:49 pm, I'm finishing up the dinner dishes, and my phone rings. Now, I don't get a lot of phone calls-- maybe 25 a month. I fish out my phone, don't recognize the number on the caller ID, but it's a local number, so I answer it.

On the other end of the line, is Arne Duncan, CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and the first thing he says is, "I heard that you were involved in the incident on Friday, and I want to see if there's anything I can do for you."


For those of you in the corporate world, imagine that you work for a company with 45,000 employees at over 600 offices, serving 420,000 in-house clients, with an annual operating budget of $4.4 billion. That's, for example, about twice as big as Apple, Inc. Now imagine that the CEO calls you, at home, at 7 on a Tuesday night, to say, "Hey, man, heard you had a rough day last week. How you doing? Anything I can do to help?"


Mr. Duncan and I had a really good conversation, for about 10 minutes. I was very frank about my perspective, what I think the school needs in order to feel secure. He was really easy to talk to, and I tried to give him ideas about what's on my mind, and what the talk around the lunchroom is (he was surprised, for example, to hear that the faculty are nervous about the prospect of the school closing-- it wasn't even on his radar, and hadn't occurred to him that it'd be on our minds). At the end of the conversation, he made sure I had his email address and his direct phone number, and invited me to follow-up if I have any more thoughts that I'd like to share with him.

So, people can say what they want about the guy-- the dedication he's shown right there, his concern for me as a teacher and his interest in making sure I get my need met (especially given that he recieved my suggestions with enthusiasm) has just made me his biggest fan.