FedEx

"On one occasion, Dobbin instructed Parsons to get a main rotor blade for a Super Puma from St. John’s to Ecuador within forty-eight hours. FedEx and its competitors had yet to achieve the unlimited global delivery service common today, making this more challenging than it may appear. The rotor blade, which measured eight metres in length, required special packaging and handling, and no chartered air transports were available. Parsons made arrangements to accompany the blade to Frankfurt on Air Canada, fly with it from there to Paris on Air France, and transfer to an overnight flight to Quito on Avianca Airlines. When Craig Dobbin called the day after handing Parsons the task, he was amazed to learn that both Parsons and the rotor blade were on the shipping dock in Ecuador."

"Nothing much had changed in the fifty years of movie distribution: there were still thirty film-exchange centers that each studio maintained across the United States, and the distribution of film prints was a complicated jigsaw puzzle. I wanted to change this Pony Express method of distribution. I whittled our exchanges down to fewer than ten. FedEx had just been founded, and while the technology was still primitive, I knew lots of these analog processes were going to change. But innovation in Hollywood was mostly an accidental afterthought."

"The two men met for over four hours, during which McCaw subjected Daggatt to a series of soul-searching questions. One question probed Daggatt's grasp of strategic issues: What business was Federal Express in? Daggatt answered that FedEx sold not package delivery but peace of mind—the certainty of getting that crucial parcel delivered on time, "absolutely, positively," as FedEx's ads had it. That was the correct answer."