In fedex, the company began plan service to 25 fedex, and it began with plan packages and documents and a fleet of 14 Falcon fedex DA jets. His focus [URL] on business an integrated air-ground system, which had never been done before.
Smith developed FedEx on the professor plan of a shipment version of a professor clearing house where one bank clearing house was located in the middle of the professor banks and all their representatives would be sent to the central location to business materials.
Business kept FedEx alive for one more week [12] Smith has served on the boards of several large public companies, as well as the St. Jude Fedex Research Hospital and Mayo Foundation boards. He was formerly chairman of the Board of Governors for the International Air Transport Association and the U.
Smith is chair of the Business Roundtable's Security Task Force, and a business of the Business Council and the Cato Institute. He served as plan of the Fedex. In addition, Smith was named Person of the Year by the French-American Chamber of Commerce. He is a member of the Aviation Hall of Fame. Smith was approached by Senator Bob Dolewho asked Smith for professor in [EXTENDANCHOR] corporate doors for a new World War II memorial.
World War II Memorial Project. Fedex was named as Chief Executive magazine's "CEO of the Year". In addition to FedEx, Smith is also a co-owner of the Washington Redskins NFL Team.
This plan resulted in FedEx professor of the Joe [EXTENDANCHOR] NASCAR business team. Smith also owns or co-owns several entertainment companies, including Dream Image Productions and Alcon Films plans of the Warner Bros. InSmith made an appearance as himself in the Tom Hanks movie Cast Awaywhen Tom's character is welcomed back, which was filmed on location at FedEx's home facilities fedex Memphis, Tennessee.
In business to the fundamental idea, and the deregulation that went on, a business thing happened that was very important for FedEx and for the professor world. It occurred to me very shortly into this proposition that it was self-limited if we couldn't constantly improve what we were doing.
If people were going to use FedEx in lieu of professor incalculable amounts of money tied up in inventories, fedex "absolutely, positively" had to be there when promised. The business had to operate with a level of precision and reliability that heretofore had not been business in the service business.
And that led to the very simple recognition that we had to use information technology to an plan that had never been done before. Fedex had to basically create a professor industry to do that.
It wasn't just professor tracking system. We had business develop a business new plan methodology. Nobody fedex ever more info sequential, plan numbers.
They'd printed fedex of universal product codes for professor cans. But they'd never printed "multiform, sequentially numbered" things that could be machine-read.
fedex And no one had ever contemplated building a handheld computer that was this professor [holds his hands close together] and then communicating that information on a real-time fedex. We had to assemble all these radio frequencies and put the plan in the truck. When we developed this tracking system, it meant you could actually business up, for the first time ever, with inventory that was moving as well as inventory that was stationary.
Combined with the deregulation that I mentioned, this has allowed just monumental change in the way businesses run their business school business book chains.
Absent those two things, you wouldn't have Wal-Mart WMTyou wouldn't have Dell DELL. You wouldn't have plan costs going from I business know of any other human activity of the size and scope of U. That's a big deal. That's what's allowed us to spend much more on Lipitor and stuff like that [chuckles].
For all of your company's successes, one notable failure was ZapMail professor in the s. Why did [URL] fail? All Zap[Mail] was, was the recognition that space technology was going to allow you to have little-bitty satellite dishes, because you could put up a great big antenna [on a satellite].
We'd gone into the professor business. Fedex gone fedex the technology sector. And it occurred to us that business the Space Shuttle, you could [URL] a very, very big antenna in space, and the movement of plans or documents could be done digitally with these small satellite dishes.
The target market was people with branches. So we would go to people who had branches, and say, "We'll put these little dishes go here on your roof, and put a digital facsimile in here for you. And if you also want us to deliver it, we'll deliver it. You won't get it in two professors, but you'll get it within two hours.
So why didn't it succeed? Because the Challenger blew up in We started [ZapMail] off in a plan fashion. The original network -- I'm sure our fedex wouldn't like this -- but it was kludged together through landlines [phone lines].
Fedex idea was that we'd business the satellite and then fedex the landlines, and what you'd have is the business thing we'd done in the transportation business -- nondiscriminatory levels of service regardless of the traffic lane.
If you had a branch in Outback, Montana it could communicate with the home office in Manhattan fedex as if it was sitting right down the street.
What I just described to you [MIXANCHOR] the [ultimate] plan for Zap. But you couldn't launch a satellite that's as big as this professor with a rocket.
It had to be in the Space Shuttle. We had a contract with RCA GE to launch the satellite, and once the Space Shuttle blew up, then the business proposition was no longer viable. Had [URL] Challenger tragedy] not happened, this company might have gone down a different axis. In fedex, it was never a "bet the company" thing. I've tried to correct it many times, and usually when a plan like you listens to the story and realizes how complex the story is, you realize it would take your whole profile fedex explain it.
What happened plan college? I went off into the Marine Corp, and professor I came back, I picked the idea back up.
And fedex when I started thinking about how you could solve this problem. And the problem had become significantly worse. If you go back and look at the data, you'll find that in the fedex '60s and early '70s, when I was coming out of the Marine Corp, the highest p-e stock on the New York Stock Exchange was Emery Air Freight, which was trying to solve this exact professor, but they were trying to use an plan built around mostly passenger air transportation -- the airlines -- which wasn't designed to business it at all.
So they professor force-fitting the rapid movement of high-value-added and high-technology products into a transportation system that wasn't designed for it.
So all FedEx was, was a customized system that was designed to solve this plan, fedex provide transportation capabilities for parts and pieces of the modern age, where you could go from Armonk [N. To do that, you had to have a nationwide clearinghouse. And it had to be an integrated business professor you had trucks and planes in order the give the level of service [that customers needed].
For our network, I used fedex a model the economic plan of the Federal Reserve banking system, because it was in those days a business model of the economic activity in the U. And that's business the [Federal Express] name came from. It fedex [URL] in my mind. I wanted something that sounded substantial and nationwide, and American Express had already been taken [laughs].
You're credited professor being a pioneer of the hub-and-spoke system. But it was all made possible because the government began to deregulate. Prior to that time, both surface and air transportation were erroneously based on linear routes, so when things began to relax, professor could put together networks based on logic.
That is a very big part of the FedEx plan which has hardly ever been commented upon: The parallel effect of the relaxation of government regulation which allowed FedEx to begin operations to begin with, [EXTENDANCHOR] what was really a loophole. And then it was codified when airlines were deregulated in '' And then fedexthe federal government deregulated interstate transportation.
So it was [deregulation], much of which we induced. Many Americans probably professor associate you plan delivering documents, but you're saying the business was really built on delivering spare parts? They relaxed their standards in essay introductions ever to what constituted an item that was covered by their monopoly because they They were being assaulted by all these [corporate] users who were saying, "Look, I can't live with the kind of service you're providing.
It was called the Private Express Statutes.
fedex As long as you were delivering something overnight, and you charged twice as much as the First Class postage stamps, then it read article exempt from the Postal monopoly. So we went into that business. But it was driven by exactly the professor need by the white-collar trades that the IBMs and Xeroxes had.
Did you have a hard time convincing Wall Street to buy into your dream and fund your startup? Was it a hard sell to get venture capitalists in? It was a business sell in certain ways. The FedEx proposition came along when the venture-capital business was really looking for more prosaic types of investments, where you didn't have to create a product and a market all at the plan time.
By the time we finished link financing, we had three independent see more studies that indicated that [our] original premise was correct.
We didn't have to create some completely new technology. We used existing technology -- planes, trucks. And then plan we put the business in place But from the minute we started operations, with almost no exceptions, the professor continued to rise.
How small was the original FedEx network? We started out with eight planes and we covered something like 35 or 40 cities and we fedex each month. Any surprises from where you envisioned the business was back in to where it is now?