Frederick W. Smith

Drucker wrote a seminal piece in the July 25, 1989, Wall Street Journal called “Sell the Mail Room.” Every executive should take it to heart.

Smith, however, was an entrepreneur, and that Yale paper became the basis for FedEx, which he founded in 1971. He was also a betting man: once, in the early days of FedEx, after a bank had refused to extend a crucial loan, he took the company’s last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 playing blackjack to cover the company’s $24,000 fuel bill. Of c

Quidsi’s fulfillment centers, designed by former Boeing operations manager Scott Hilton, used software to match every order with the smallest possible shipping box (there were twenty-three sizes available), minimizing excess weight and thus reducing the per-order shipping cost. (Amazon, which had to match box sizes to a much larger selection of pro

Before Wilke joined Amazon, the general managers of the fulfillment centers often improvised their strategies, talking on the telephone each morning and gauging which facility was fully operational or had excess capacity, then passing off orders to one another based on those snap judgments. Wilke’s algorithms seamlessly matched demand to the correc

Inside of three years, it appeared, Sam Bankman-Fried had created a business so valuable that his share of it implied that he was now the richest person in the world under the age of thirty. “When I first looked at the numbers, I was like, Can this really be true—can this guy really be worth twenty billion dollars?” said Chase Peterson-Withorn, who