1. “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.”
2. “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.”
3. “The greatest leadership principle I learned in the Marine Corps was the necessity to take care of the troops in a high performance based organization.
   The Marine Corps’ strong emphasis on this overriding leadership requirement has been of inestimable importance to me in developing FedEx over the years.  In the main, people want to be commited to an organization and to do a good job.  The principles of leadership taught by the USMC, and based on two centuries of experience, will produce outstanding organizational results in any setting, if those principles are studiously followed. In short, FedEx owes its success to this simple truth.”
4. “I’m not afraid to take a swing and miss.”
5. “The riskiest strategy is to try to avoid risk altogether.”
6. “Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something.”
7. “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.”
8. “My innovation involved taking an idea from the telecommunications and banking industries, and applying that idea to transportation business.”
9. “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.”
10. “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.”

—Fred W. Smith, Chairman, CEO, Entrepreneur and Founder of FedEx