“The third underlying element of the FedEx culture, after the philosophy and the continuous improvement management system, has been the focus on change,” says Smith. “As time changed and markets changed and peoples’ expectations changed, we changed with them.”
Smith has grown Federal Express into the corporate giant it is today by maintaining a flexible and nimble structure that has been able to adapt to its changing environment. The company faced one of its biggest challenges with the rise in popularity of the Internet. “It became obvious that people wanted to interface with FedEx electronically, many years before people were doing this,” says Smith. Instead of ignoring the demand and refusing to change, Smith knew that he would have to adjust with the times. “We built an electronic interface system that allowed them to do business with us…and now there are millions of people doing business with FedEx every day electronically.”
Learning such lessons is especially important, says Smith, as the size of your company grows, since it takes on a much more important place within society. “In certain ways the big challenge for our company parallels the big challenges for the country,” he says. “Our company has become enormously global in nature. FedEx and our competitors are the primary means of moving the high value-added, high-tech goods around the world. And that's what's propelling global growth today. It's not the growth in mining, and lumbering and agriculture. It's the growth in electronics, and computers, and new medicines, and equipment and things of that nature. We're the way those things get to market.”
As the company expands and gains increasing importance within the national and global economies, so does it become increasingly important for the company to understand the changing nature of those economies. “We’re the thing that binds everybody else together,” says Smith. “And successfully navigating from a mostly national economic structure, to now a global structure with different types of cultures and governments and what have you.”
To that end, Smith argues that the service that Federal Express delivers continues to improve each year because management keeps itself abreast of wider developments both industry and nation-wide. “That's very rare for big service organizations,” says Smith. “Most of the time, as they get larger service deteriorates, it doesn't improve.” The company is also learning how to better deal with other cultures, something that is equally important in this era of globalization.
In addition to creating a corporate structure that is able to change as new trends come and go, Smith suggests that it is advantageous for entrepreneurs to learn from history and past trends. “Spend some time learning how the world has evolved,” he says. “There are a lot of good lessons in history, and other peoples' experiences in the past, that could be exactly the solution to the problem you're looking for. Particularly today, with everything available online and on the Internet, and with quick delivery of books or whatever you need, to not take advantage of this educational opportunity is a real tragedy.”
Lesson #5: Be Flexible Enough To Change With The Times
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