FedEx Freight president and CEO – a CNU graduate – speaks at alma mater
News Release - April 10, 2006
Media contact:
Karen L. Gill
karen.gill@cnu.edu
(757) 594-8428
 FedEx Freight president and CEO Douglas Duncan spoke to the CNU community on April 5. |
(NEWPORT NEWS, Va.) — Although technology has revolutionized the business, it is FedEx’s employees and its commitment to serving customers that has made it so successful, the president and chief operating officer of FedEx Freight told the Christopher Newport University community on April 5. Douglas Duncan, a 1972 graduate of Christopher Newport College, returned to his alma mater – now a growing university – as an Executive-in-Residence at the Joseph W. Luter, III School of Business and as a member of the University’s Board of Visitors. The Hampton native advised and informed faculty, staff, students and the general public in the daylong visit that included two classroom lectures, several meetings and a community forum in which he discussed the challenges of leadership with an audience of more than 500 made up mostly of students at the Ferguson Center for the Arts. Duncan said FedEx Express, the original and largest of FedEx's four separate operations, was founded in 1971 on a commitment to serving customers' needs – a principle that extends to FedEx Freight, Duncan’s operation that ships 70 million pounds of heavyweight freight every day with 99 percent accuracy, he said. |
“FedEx was a company built around customers, which has a lot to do with its success,” Duncan said. “You have to look at each customer differently. It’s not one-size-fits-all. We have the most imaginative, challenging customers who push us and stretch us every day.”
Duncan said the best compliment of FedEx that he’s heard was “FedEx is so customer-oriented that it’s a marketing company that happens to be in transportation.”
Along with serving its customers, Duncan said FedEx has a culture of taking care of its 250,000 employees worldwide.
“The thing that makes us so successful is the army of people who come to work every day with a ‘want to’ not a ‘have to’ attitude,” he said.
And the most important role for a CEO, Duncan said, is to be a champion for the company’s employees. He said the CEO must set the tone that people are important and have empathy for employees.
“It’s not how you succeed, but if you can teach and promote others to succeed,” he said.
Duncan said that regulators and analysts often question him on the company’s finances, productivity, bottom line and other topics, but that they don’t question him on employee morale and turnover.
"People are our secret weapon," Duncan said.
Other traits that Duncan said are needed for business leadership include enthusiasm, an insatiable desire to read and the ability to grow and to think differently. Another important trait is the ability to deal with change.
He said that last year he spent more time in Shanghai, China, than his hometown of Hampton because more freight is originating from overseas and more employees are not of U.S. origin. “Globalization is here, and it’s not going away,” he said.
Duncan’s first job after earning an accounting degree at Christopher Newport College was selling computers that cost millions of dollars and required entire buildings and massive air conditioning systems, he said. “And they didn’t have the power of the laptop you carry around. That’s the change just in my lifetime.”
In a morning supply chain management class, Duncan said of FedEx Freight: “It looks like a trucking company, but it’s really a technology company.” He told students that the technology that allows customers to follow their shipments in live action – visibility of the product – is now almost as important as the product itself.
Bar codes on packages are scanned an average of 14 times, he said, but the company is researching better and more efficient methods, including radio frequency identification tags (RFID) that provide their location.
“The bar code revolutionized what we do; RFID is next,” Duncan said. He expects to be able to use the technology in production in two to three years and foresees it allowing a Wal-Mart to inventory its entire store each night.
Christopher Newport University is a four-year public university in Newport News, Virginia. CNU enrolls 4,800 students in programs through its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Luter School of Business and offers great teaching, small classes and an emphasis on leadership, civic engagement and honor. Visit us at www.cnu.edu.