Leadership Quote by Frederick W. Smith

There is a particular kind of authority that hides behind the word "feasible": the professor’s red pen turned into a worldview. In this anecdote, feasibility isn’t a neutral criterion; it’s a gatekeeping instinct dressed up as rigor. The idea is “interesting and well-formed,” the language of someone conceding intellectual merit while still insisting the real world will snap it in half. It’s academic caution as status maintenance: a management professor, tasked with teaching innovation, instinctively defends the current logistics order as if it were natural law.

The subtext is sharper because we know what happens next. Fred Smith becomes the founder of FedEx, and the “C” becomes a cultural parable about institutional blindness. That retrospective punchline is why the quote travels. It turns a classroom into a stage for a familiar drama: credentialed expertise versus entrepreneurial audacity. The professor’s skepticism reads less like incompetence than like a rational response to the era’s constraints. In the 1960s, overnight delivery at scale would have sounded like magical thinking: thin margins, fragmented transportation networks, no real-time tracking, no algorithmic routing culture. “Feasible” meant “within the tools and incentives we can currently imagine.”

Smith’s intent in repeating it is strategic. It’s not just revenge; it’s mythmaking. The story flatters risk, frames doubt as the enemy, and recasts an A-grade business plan as something the market, not the classroom, is qualified to judge. It’s also a warning to today’s experts: dismissing the improbable is how you end up grading the future a C.