9 Business Icons who Faced Utter Failure

Frederick W. Smith

Company: Federal Express (now FedEx Corp.)

Fredrick W. Smith is the founder of the Federal Express, which is the first overnight express delivery company in the world, whose tag line was “We live to deliver”. In order to live up to his tagline, he started an electronic delivery system in 1984, called Zapmail, to compete fax machines. But this did not fetched customers well and ended with a loss of $350 million in 2 years.

Fredrick understood this business strategy a bit later, of acknowledging failures, avoiding bad ideas and to move on positively. He completely focused on his delivery business and successfully generated more than $35 billion revenue within 2010.

One of his most famous quotes is “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.” He says, “(You should) be willing to acknowledge failure, abandon bad ideas and move on.”