FedEx blackjack story

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing

by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman  · 19 Feb 2013  · 407pp  · 109,653 words

would be out 35 grand. (By comparison, a month later, in a Richmond race, the winner took home only $16,275, and the spread at the top was about $5,000 per place.) Certainly, drivers are naturally competitive. It’s also true that they’ll fight their hardest in the most prestigious events

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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

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, 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

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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

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an interesting effect on FedEx employees. First, the story had the effect of deepening their loyalty to the firm, say Northwestern University researchers, who have since retested stories like these in experiments. Also, the employees began to make riskier and riskier decisions, often putting themselves into situations akin to Fred Smith that weekend. When

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all of which biased them to see what they were expecting to see. NASA engineers would probably object to any comparison between the Columbia accident and Fred Smith’s trip to Vegas. The NASA staff would insist that they aren’t gambling when they work on a mission. However, what they had done

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needed only 1,000 employees were staffed with 10,000. For example, one firm, Jenoptik, was purportedly a high-technology manufacturer of optics and lenses, but, of its 27,000 employees, 3,000 of them had been working in the company’s canteens. Jenoptik began rebuilding by laying off 17,500 employees. In

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would all come to Athens, to gather in a huge public arena. There were impartial juries and rules of conduct for civil discourse. Men would come forward to stand before 5,000 of their fellow citizens and argue why their course of action would be best for the populace. When the debate had ended

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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,”

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2), pp. 181–215 (2011) Washington, Robert, “Bringing Sport Back In: Sport as a Model of Meritocracy: Theoretical Implications and a Research Agenda,” Paper Presentation at Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Assn., Las Vegas (2011) Washington, Robert, Interview with Author (2012) History of the Black Sox, the Progressive Era, etc.: Anderson, William

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer  · 7 Sep 2020  · 317pp  · 89,825 words

Las Vegas

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AND AFTER) YOU PLACE YOUR BET Bet-taking has been linked to entrepreneurship for decades. In 1962, Frederick Smith

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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

How to Retire the Cheapskate Way

by Jeff Yeager  · 1 Jan 2013  · 212pp  · 70,224 words

27,000 in student loans from my time in school, and about $5,000

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Las Vegas show and then told to return to his seat and

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and so we just don’t spend!” (Fred Smith

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5,000 every year since I retired and had the time to do more things myself … and