Word on the street is that The founder of FedEx got a ‘C’ in MBA school and the professor wrote that the idea of a central hub delivering documents overnight was ‘nice but would never work’.
How true is this? It seems a bit pat, the egghead professor too dumb to imagine anything, and genius student who gets 'C’s (so all of us C students sympathize)
Here is a PDF copy of an article Fred Smith (the founder) wrote for Fortune Small Business. He said he doesn’t remember what grade he received.
It wouldn’t be at all out of the ordinary. Ideas are routinely shot down by teachers — and investors, for that matter.
Or his idea for Fedex in the paper was poorly developed.
I hate hearing that anecdote, along with “bill gates is a college dropout”. The claim was an economics undergrad paper, which of course professors don’t want to hear novel ideas, they want to make sure you understand whatever the topic is. I could imagine the professor writing a comment like, “the homework assignment was to solve the marginal cost formulas, why are you talking about mail?” or as Hubzilla mentioned, “too many typos and not in MLA format”
I’ve heard the story several times and have never heard it rebutted. Snopes.com has nothing on it. Here’s another retelling of it, from The Motley Fool: http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2000/foth001204.htm
Fred Smith definitely was not at “MBA school” at the time. He was an undergraduate at Yale in the mid 60s when he wrote the original paper and Yale didn’t even have a Management school until 1975. In any case the C grade is a bit of an urban legend as Smith himself says in the previously linked pdf.
Smith himself rebuts the story. See Dewey Finn’s link above.
But in the end it’s kind of ironic.
Smith wrote a paper about how shipping replacement computer parts to IBM mainframes justified an extensive national delivery infrastructure. The professor thought it was dumb. Yet while FedEx built itself on sending documents, the modern expansion of its industry owes a lot to shipping computer parts.
Again, we do not know what the professor thought of the basic idea. Even if we knew that Smith got a C on the paper (which we don’t), it could be for any number of reasons – like not supporting his idea with the proper economic reasoning which was the point of the assignment.