12 Greatest Entrepreneurs in the World

Fred Smith

Though Fred Smith came up with the idea of Federal Express during a paper for Yale University class, it was his experience during the Vietnam War that actually helped him to peep into the future. Fred’s leadership handbook draws mainly from his Marines experience. "We tell our executives that the key to their success is to rely on their first-level managers [the company's counterparts to noncommissioned officers], to set an example themselves, and to praise in public when someone has done a good job. All those are standard operating procedure in the Marines." Smith provided many small businesses the customer reach that had long been the region of big companies. It was a game-changing modernization for FedEx, but also for the wider entrepreneurial economy. FedEx‘s market value stand at $30 billion today.