FedEx blackjack story

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

Going home empty-handed was not an option. Smith traded in his plane ticket to Memphis for a flight to Las Vegas. Over the weekend, he played blackjack until his winnings totaled $32,000—his original $5,000 plus $27,000 in winnings. Later that week, Smith’s staff secured another round of financing. Within six months, the company, now known as FedEx, was flying in twenty-five cities across the country. It’s impossible to hear this story without thinking, What if he hadn’t gone to Vegas? and What if he’d lost? FedEx would have been ruined. It’s a story that portrays the company as vulnerable, desperate, and a little bit crazy.

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King, “Company, Country, Connections: Counterfactual Origins Increase Organizational Commitment, Patriotism, and Social Investment,” Psychological Science, vol. 21(10), pp. 1479–1486 (2010) “Federal Express Honors ‘Day One’ Employees,” FedEx Press Releases, http://at.fedex.com/NAnNDQ (9/22/98) “Fred Smith: An Overnight Success,” Entrepreneur, http://bit.ly/RstGhz (10/9/2008) “Frederick W. Smith,” About FedEx, FedEx, http://at.fedex.com/ODJYaw (2012) “Frederick W. Smith: No Overnight Success,” Business Week, http://buswk.co/OMGfs0 (9/20/2004) Frock, Roger, Changing How the World Does Business: FedEx’s Incredible Journey to Success, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. (2006) Kopko, Ed, & Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, “What’s in a Leader?”

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Competitive fire will flourish when long-term goals are high, and when it’s accepted that risks and mistakes go hand-in-hand, and we are free to let ambition reign. CHAPTER EIGHT How One Night of Blackjack Sped Up the World Economy 1 One Friday in July of 1973, Fred Smith, then a 28-year-old headstrong entrepreneur, was sitting at the Chicago airport, waiting for a flight home to Memphis, Tennessee. He’d just come from a failed meeting with General Dynamics, who had turned him down for a loan. He had only $5,000 left in the bank. While everyone else in the airport lounge was thinking about their planes about to take off, Smith was consumed by the thought of planes about to be grounded.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
Published 7 Sep 2020

If Smith’s professor had been Smith’s boss, he would certainly have put the kibosh on the whole innovation. Smith, however, was an entrepreneur, and that Yale paper became the basis for FedEx, which he founded in 1971. He was also a betting man: once, in the early days of FedEx, after a bank had refused to extend a crucial loan, he took the company’s last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 playing blackjack to cover the company’s $24,000 fuel bill. Of course, Netflix doesn’t encourage its staff to go to casinos, but it does seek to instill some of Fredrick Smith’s spirit into the workforce. As Kari remembers: When I started at Netflix, Jack explained to me that I should consider I’d been handed a stack of chips.

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The vice president of corporate operations, Brent Wickens, oversees all the company’s office spaces around the world. One spring, a woman on his team, Michelle, made several business trips to Las Vegas. Brent did spot-check his own department’s expenses, but it was only a few times a year. One night I couldn’t sleep so I clicked on the link in my email titled “Departmental expenses broken down by employee.” I perused through a bunch of people in my group when something unusual popped out. Michelle had a travel expense listed as Food and Drink at the Wynn casino in Las Vegas for twelve hundred dollars. That was a lot of food and drink for a two-day trip! So, then I got curious and started looking at her expenses from past months.

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When some of those bets don’t pay off, we just fix the problems that arise as quickly as possible and discuss what we’ve learned. In our creative business, rapid recovery is the best model. STEPS TO TAKE BEFORE (AND AFTER) YOU PLACE YOUR BET Bet-taking has been linked to entrepreneurship for decades. In 1962, Frederick Smith wrote a paper for his economics class at Yale outlining the idea for an overnight delivery service. The idea was that you could put a package in the mail in Missouri on Tuesday and, if you paid enough, it would arrive in California on Wednesday. According to legend, Smith received a C on the paper and his professor told him that in order to get a better grade, the idea had to be feasible.

How to Retire the Cheapskate Way
by Jeff Yeager
Published 1 Jan 2013

The Cedotals’ success in flipping their used mobile homes for a profit—something many financial pundits consider a fool’s errand—is proof of their cheapskate business savvy. But by the time Jonathan decided he wanted to take the plunge and attempt to start a business of his own (technically, a franchise), the couple had managed to rack up some pretty significant debt, despite their modest living conditions. “We had two car loans, $27,000 in student loans from my time in school, and about $5,000 in credit card debt,” Shelle recalls. As Jonathan was getting his new business started, the couple was living off Shelle’s nursing income alone, taking home less than $600 per week. Jonathan admits that things were dicey for the couple at that point, with his not being able to pay himself a salary out of his still fragile new company, and admitting that the business was being cash-flowed mostly on credit cards.

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He also didn’t take a single note during our meeting, which rather surprised me, but I figured he might have a photographic memory, since he had a photographic business card. Finally, he snapped out of his apparent coma, like a daft audience member who’s been recruited up on stage by a hypnotist in a Las Vegas show and then told to return to his seat and bark like a dog whenever anybody says the words “variable annuities.” The planner then handed me a three-page checklist of tax and other financial documents I would need to assemble and send to him in order for his firm to develop our “customized retirement plan.”

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(Karen Callinan, 60) “I think that’s true. I put a 10-year-old shirt in the rag bag, and my mom took it out and has been wearing it for at least another ten years.” (Deborah Torres, 50) “Part of it is that we remember when everything cost so much less. We have a hard time accepting today’s prices, and so we just don’t spend!” (Fred Smith, 73) “I’ve grown more frugal over the years. Part of it springs from necessity (disability payments aren’t much!), but another part is that I’ve learned that I really don’t need many things in life in order to be happy and content.” (Lisa Denny, 53) “With every passing year, I’m starting to appreciate more and more that saying ‘The best things in life aren’t things.’ ” (Al Hanson, 47) “Like a lot of activities when you get older, shopping becomes more a chore than something you really enjoy doing.