Profiles Fred Smith, founder and chief executive officer of Federal Express Corporation. Reveals that Smith, a Vietnam veteran, wrote a paper while an undergraduate at Yale about the freight-carrying inefficiencies of the nation's air-passenger system; the economics essay earned him a dismal C-, but Smith made billions when he turned his ideas into a worldwide overnight-package delivery system. Shows how Smith has combined entrepreneurship, an astute marketing sense, strong management, and the ability to adapt to change to create and maintain FedEx for more than a quarter-century, relating that his management philosophy is borrowed from the cartoon character Pogo: "The way to be a good leader is to see a parade and run like hell to get in front of it."
