This article by Sara Brown was originally published as part of MIT Sloan School of Management's Ideas Made to Matter series. Read the entire article here.
Why It Matters: Fifty years after founding FedEx, Frederick W. Smith is thinking about robots and AI, climate change, competition with Amazon, and how to keep innovating.
Federal Express began operating in April 1973 in Memphis, Tennessee. The company had 389 employees and delivered 186 packages on its first day of business.
Almost 50 years later, FedEx has nearly 550,000 employees around the world and moves an average of more than 16 million shipments through its facilities each business day.
Work smart with our Thinking Forward newsletter Insights from MIT experts, delivered every Tuesday morning. * Email Address The key to FedEx’s success is constant innovation, according to the company’s founder and executive chairman, Frederick W. Smith. “If you’re in a business and you don’t innovate, you’re in the process of commoditization or extinction,” he said during a recent talk at MIT hosted by the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics as part of the center’s 50th anniversary celebration. “Not every year is great — we make some mistakes, one thing or another. But somehow we got from [186] packages to 100 billion, because we’re very analytical and we do understand you have to change. To change means … to innovate, and to innovate in this day and time, it means adopting leading-edge technology.”
Smith not only started a company, “he changed transportation and logistics. He started an industry more than a company,” said center director Yossi Sheffi, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Getting something delivered the next day or tracking a package are among the innovations FedEx introduced.”
During a fireside chat with Sheffi, Smith talked about climate change, what technology trends he’s following, how FedEx views competition with Amazon, and how he keeps new ideas flowing.