'Lifted' before taking off - thanks to folks at Haneda Airport

Racing through the airport in Tokyo, we discovered my husband had left his jacket containing his passport on the shuttle bus from the other airport. Yikes! A major problem! The bus had departed by the time we realized the jacket and passport were missing. Speeding through our minds were thoughts of a delayed departure, a call to the Canadian Embassy, hotel vacancies, potential work missed. We asked one of the staff at the shuttle bus counter if there was anything they could do, and the individual got on the phone immediately. Of course, we didn't understand much of the communication, and we were feeling anxious. We were told 'don't worry' that he'd be paged. Tokyo's Haneda airport is anything but small, so we decided sticking to a radius of 50 feet of the shuttle kiosk was our best bet. 90 minutes later, we heard my husband's name paged, and barely had time to look up and start back to the kiosk when a young man came up to us, bowing and offering the nicely folded jacket with the passport on top to my husband's gob-smacked face.

Someone owned the problem (when clearly it was my husband's problem, his fault for being forgetful) and took steps to have the bus intercepted once it stopped downtown, secure the jacket and bring it back to the airport. I'd loved Japan until that point; now I was smitten. I did return, and will again. Feeling welcome and wanted as a guest in a airplane, an airport, a hotel, a restaurant or a store are what makes a tourism industry flourish. I've added an article by Sarah Green, an associate editor at Harvard Business Review on this site in the 'helpful articles' section. These are the stories of Service Leaders manifest, told by grateful and appreciative customers. Imagine an organization filled with empowered folks with this kind of wiring and alignment to a service culture. Imagine a world like that.