How A Military Forward Air Controller Built One Of America's Best Companies

You don’t become a billionaire and titan of industry by going with the flow. Those who dream big often have to do it alone. It’s not that the world is against them, it’s the fact that their visions are so grand the world can’t wrap its collective head around what they’re doing until it’s accomplished.

Take the founder of FedEx.

Fred Smith is the founder and CEO of FedEx. Smith’s first foray into what would become FedEx, air to ground transport, was as an undergrad at Yale. He wrote an underwhelmingly received paper on overnight parcel delivery in the computer age, an out-of-the-blue concept at the time.

After his graduation in 1966, he commissioned in the United States Marine Corps and served two tours in Vietnam, one as an infantry officer and one as a forward air controller. It was in Vietnam that he personally witnessed the power of the military’s logistics operations — utilizing air to transport personnel and equipment on a massive scale. And when he left Vietnam, he took these lessons with him.


https://taskandpurpose.com/fred-smith-founder-ceo-fedex/