How FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam is adapting to the era of ‘re-globalization’

FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam graduated from Syracuse and the University of Texas at Austin. But he also attended what he calls “CEO school,” taught by Fred Smith, FedEx’s founder and first CEO. Subramaniam is its second; he took over the company in 2022. 

Decades of experience informed Smith’s CEO school curriculum. He first conceived of a system for urgent, overnight deliveries in an economics paper at Yale. Smith ran with the idea, launching Federal Express in 1971, and growing it into a global logistics giant with $90.1 billion in revenue in the past 12 months. 

In his first three years as CEO, Subramaniam operated with Smith as executive chairman, but Smith died in June at age 80, leaving Subramaniam without his mentor—and FedEx without its founder—for the first time.

Part of Smith’s legacy is FedEx, now a Fortune Global 500 company that moves about $2 trillion worth of commerce every year; handles 17 million packages a day; and operates 400 daily flights from hubs like Memphis, Guangzhou, Singapore, Paris, and Dubai. But it’s also the big lesson he taught Subramaniam, which the CEO drew on last year when the Trump administration’s global tariffs threatened FedEx’s core business of moving goods around the globe. “One thing that Fred taught me…is that change is part of our culture,” Subramaniam recalls. “He always used to say: ‘If you don’t like change, you will hate extinction.’...