Frederick W. Smith Interview (page: 2 / 5) Founder, Federal Express	Print Interview

How were you affected by your Vietnam experience?

Frederick Smith: Profoundly, in many ways, some good, some bad. Obviously, the war was a very traumatic thing for all of us who participated in it. Clearly, one of the great historical mistakes of all times. Barbara Tuchman wrote a great book about the great historical mistakes: George III losing the colonies, the Catholic Church losing the monopoly on Christendom, and Johnson's prosecution of the Vietnam War. For those of us who were in it, it was very traumatic, as anything like that would be, but there were some good things about it, too.

I learned an awful lot in the Marine Corps -- particularly about, I think, how to treat people, lead people -- which has played a big role in FedEx. A big part of the employee relations systems and all that we have at our company came from my experience in the service. The Marine Corps is the best when it comes to teaching people how to lead other folks. And so, it had a profound experience on me, some bad, some good.
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Can you be more specific about what you learned about interpersonal relations?

Frederick Smith: Well, you have to remember,

When I was in the Marine Corps as a lieutenant, I had come up from a good background, went to a fine university at Yale. I wasn't exactly exposed to folks that were in the blue collar professions and occupations. And then here I was in the Marine Corps, and became a platoon leader, and I was surrounded by kids like that. I maybe was three years older than they were. I was 21, they were 18. But these were youngsters from very different backgrounds than I was. You know, blue collar backgrounds, steelworkers, and truck drivers, and gas station folks. And there we were, out in the countryside in Vietnam, living together, eating together and obviously going through all sorts of things.
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I think I came up with a very, very different perspective than most people that end up in senior management positions about what people who wear blue collars think about things and how they react to things, and what you should do to try to be fair to those folks. So in that regard it was an invaluable experience. And a great deal of what FedEx has been able to accomplish was built on those lessons I learned in the Marine Corps.
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Was there anyone in particular in the Marines who had a profound impact on you?

Frederick Smith: There were several people who profoundly affected me. One was my platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Jack Jackson, who was a very wise man, about 10 or 15 years older then I was. I was the officer and he was the senior NCO, and of all of the education I ever got, I think he was the one that gave me the Ph.D., so to speak. I also had a very close friend in our battalion chaplain, Father Vince Capodano, who had a profound effect on me. He ended up receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor, as a matter of fact. I think those two people had a big effect on me.

What did you learn from Sergeant Jackson?

Frederick Smith: Sergeant Jackson was a man who knew the ways of the world. He knew the way nine-to-five, blue-collar folks look at things. He gave me a real education on that. He was a wonderful man and taught me a lot.

When I first met Sergeant Jackson I had grown a mustache and had taken up the affectation of smoking cigars, because I thought this made me look, you know, quite dashing and much older than my 22 years, or what have you. And the first thing that Sergeant Jackson did after I asked him to, in essence, take the insignia off, you know, just tell me straight up what I could do to improve my performance. And he told me, he said, "Well, the first thing, shave off that ridiculous mustache, and quite smoking the cigars -- because you look absurd -- and be yourself." And I don't think I ever forgot that. I don't think I ever tried an affectation after that point in my life.
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He told me I looked like a smooth-faced kid trying to be something that I wasn't. That stuck with me a long time, to this day.

There are a lot of people with ideas, and brains, and potential who don't achieve whatever goals they might have. How do you account for your success? For your ability to do what you've done?

Frederick Smith: First and foremost the idea was a profound idea, as has been shown. Today we have 170,000 employees and $16 billion. As I said, the requirement for this type of a system was so great and was increasing at the time. I just had the good luck to have an idea that was on the tide of history.

I'm sure many other people who've been much more successful would say the same thing. Bill Gates was given the opportunity to make the operating system for IBM and then there was a huge explosion of demand for PCs. I wish it were not the case, but an awful lot of success is being in the right place at the right time. That was a very big part of it.

Naiveté was also a big part. I didn't know that I couldn't do this.

In retrospect it was ridiculous to try to put this system together, which required so much up front money, and required changing a lot of government regulations, but I didn't know that at the time. And I think probably my experience in the service, where -- the currency of exchange in FedEx was just money, it wasn't people's arms and legs, or lives. So my perspective on it was perhaps a bit more -- I don't know how you'd say it. I was willing to take a chance, because losing wasn't the worst thing in the world that could happen to you. I had seen that very clearly.
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So luck, naiveté, willingness to roll the dice to do something productive, were all individual parts of the puzzle.

You had a certain vision. The post office didn't come up with this idea.

Frederick Smith: I was very convinced that the idea was the central feature of the new economy. That without a system like this, it simply wasn't going to be able to work. So I was, in every sense of the word, a zealot. I mean, I felt very strongly that this needed to be done, that it was something that would be extremely useful to people and that it would make the economy and the society and the system work much better than it would work absent that.
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So many things have evolved out of that system. Dell Computer relies on the types of systems that we pioneered. High-tech and high value-added businesses are by far the preponderance of economic activity in this country and increasingly around the world, and these types of business are facilitated by systems like FedEx, or (I hate to say it) our able competitors.

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