My highlights from the book:

1. At age thirty Fredrick Wallace Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father’s Greyhound Bus millions. He was hock for 15 or 20 million more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo jet planes and also his wife. His own board of directors had fired him as CEO. Now the FBI accused him of forging papers to get a $2 million bank loan and was trying to send him to prison. He thought of suicide.

2. This was a matter of salesmanship—as all things are.

3. Fred is one of those people who never gives up if he wants something and you say no. He just goes on and on.

4. To open an air express company would imply that packages could be delivered anywhere. There would be few customers if half the time Federal Express didn’t serve the city the customer wanted to reach. So they had to put in place a system covering the whole United States just to carry one package. Which meant that you started off with all fixed costs and no variable costs. The ideal business is you get the first order, and make money from day one and expand on that. Like you open a Wal-Mart store, and if that formula succeeds and you do well, you open a thousand of them. But with Federal Express you open a thousand of them to take the first order.

5. He did so much that looked crazy to me. But he was just so focused on overcoming whatever obstacles sprang up in his path.

6. In terms of starting a company of this size, we were first grade novices. And I think that really played to our advantage because we were not fully aware of the obstacles we faced or the difficulty in overcoming them. I look back on it now and think, Oh my God, why in the world would anybody try to do something like this!

7. What Smith learned in Vietnam about leadings troops with personal courage and confidence helped him now. Nothing seemed to faze him. He rarely let you see him get down. Bad things happened to him; he kept them private. He would constantly look for the bright side of trouble, and laugh. That was infectious, so we all followed suit.

8. We were fearful the bank would try to seize the mortgaged planes. The bank had an officer keeping track of the situation. Every time he showed up at the airport we would radio the jets not to land. It was all very touchy. We went on by the skin of our teeth for a long time.

9. You have to be absolutely brutal in the management of your time. 

10. In our cargo terminal we were having a hell of a problem keeping things running on time. The airplanes would come in and everything would get backed up. It became obvious that the underlying problem was that it was in the interest of the employees at the hub to run late because it meant they made more money. [They were paid by the hour.] So what we did was give them all a minimum guarantee and say if you get done before a certain time just go home. [Now they are paid by the job] Well, it was unbelievable. In the space of about forty-five days the place was way ahead of schedule. 

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