Fred Smith

And Smith chose to protect the Tiger's pilots' seniority.

His pilots, the one who'd build FedEx, who'd use their personal credit cards to buy fuel during the dark days, felt betrayed.

They called it treachery.

The family culture that Smith had cultivated for 15 years was shattered overnight.

FedEx pilots immediately began organizing to unionize.

Trust, once broken, is almost impossible to rebuild.

The one thing that stands out here is that every company has a soul.

And FedEx's soul was the loyalty between Smith and his people.

And the Tigers put a crack in that soul.

The company would recover financially, but something irreplaceable was lost.

While struggling with the Tigers' integration, Smith opened another front, Europe.

The plan seemed obvious, replicate the Memphis model in Brussels.

Hubbin spoke across the continent, overnight delivery for European businesses.

Smith had made a fatal assumption, Europeans were just like Americans.

They weren't.

Europeans didn't care about overnight delivery.

Their countries were small.

Truck networks worked fine.

A package from Paris to Berlin moved reliably by truck or train.

Why pay premium prices for air delivery?