Fred Smith Quotes
Best 20 Quotes by Fred Smith
“A manager is not a person who can do the work better than his men; he is a person who can get his men to do the work better than he can.”
“Every time we make an investment decision at FedEx, we ask ourselves: What is the return on this investment?”
“Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something.”
“I am not someone who tends to advocate for increased government involvement in the private sector.”
“I do not believe I could have built FedEx without the skills I learned from the Marine Corps.”
“I’m not afraid to take a swing and miss.”
“If you keep working at it, in the last analysis, you win. They’ve got to kill us a hundred times. All we have to do is kill them once.”
“If you look historically, what creates growth and wealth is innovation and investment, and increase in scale - more customers.”
“If you’re going to run a high service organization, you have to get the commitment of the people working for that organization right at the start.
If you don’t, you’ll never be able to deliver at the levels of expectations of the customer.”
“Information about the package is as important as the package itself.”
“Leaders get out in front and stay there by raising the standards by which they judge themselves — and by which they are willing to be judged.”
“Leadership is simply the ability of an individual to coalesce the efforts of other individuals toward achieving common goals.
It boils down to looking after your people and ensuring that, from top to bottom, everyone feels part of the team.”
“My four years in the Marine Corps left me with an indelible understanding of the value of leadership skills.”
“My innovation involved taking an idea from the telecommunications and banking industries, and applying that idea to transportation business.”
“Passion is born when you catch a glimpse of your true potential.”
“The biggest part of our business has always been moving things, not paper.
With the Internet, people in Mississippi can buy things from Macedonia, without regard to time or place or quantity.”
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“There is no man living who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.”
“The riskiest strategy is to try to avoid risk altogether.”
“There is no free market for oil. It's controlled by a cartel, OPEC.”
“Try to be a happy memory for your friends.”
“You can’t make people do what’s right. You can lead them, and you can empower them to make the right decision.
But if you don’t produce a culture that allows them to do that, then all the rest is just bumping your gums as one of my old business partners used to say.”
