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The Moment explores the pivotal moments that changed the lives and careers of the world’s leading CEOs and defined their leadership journeys.
From World 50,
this is The Moment where we explore the
pivotal moments that changed the lives
and careers of the world's leading CEOs
and defined their leadership journeys.
I'm your host, Claire Blake.
I joke to people that there's
someone in FedEx who is continuously
monitoring my comfort zone and that
the minute I feel even a half a
bit comfortable, that comfort zone is
taken away and something else happens.
Raj is here to tell us about how a life
spent on the move enabled him to take
more risks and shaped the
way he views the world.
There he is. The man of the hour.
Let's start in the very beginning by you
just telling me a little bit about your
childhood growing up in India.
Growing up in India in the
'70s, in a small town of,
I guess in India, a small
town of a million people,
a middle class family. And my dad,
policeman, my mom was a doctor,
but heavy focus mostly on was education.
All the schools usually finished at 10th
grade and then there's an interim step,
11th and 12th. And that's called a
college. So my dad said, "Okay, well,
you're grown up here,
but you need to really
understand the world." So at age
15,
I was unceremoniously booted out
and sent to the big bad city of
Bombay at that time and living
in a one room kitchen kind
of set up.
And so I finished my 11th and 12th
grade in Bombay and it was one of the
most fascinating experiences.
The first two or three months
was a little bit nerve wracking,
but after that I kind of took
to it like duck to water.
Well-rounded experience,
taking some risks,
being alone in some ways at 15,
but then you were alone at another
point after graduating from IIT,
which I believe landed you on a trip to
the US. Tell me about that transition.
Tell me about how that came about.
Fast forward for me a little bit into
the experience of coming to America.
Well, it's a well-worn path, to
be perfectly honest with you.
When you are graduating from a school
like the Indian Institute of Technology
and you're done reasonably well in school,
the next step is going to a master's
program in engineering in the
US. At that point, Syracuse was
top 20 chemical engineering school.
I got scholarship to go study there,
and I still remember going to the US
Councilate in India to get my visa.
And she said, "Yeah, it's going to be
cold in Syracuse." I'm like, "Yeah, cold,
whatever." There's no Google,
there's no nothing. I mean,
I have not seen temperature
below 80 degrees in my life.
Oh my gosh.
And I show up in Syracuse. So people told
me I'm going to have a culture shock.
I had no culture shock. I'm adaptable
pretty good. I had weather shock.
But that's how I got to Syracuse and to
do a master's in chemical engineering.
Is it a well-worn path to go from
engineering to starting out as a marketing
analyst?
Well, there's an MBA bit
in the middle of that.
And I think I realized
after six years that
engineering may not be
the right path for me,
that I needed to broaden my horizon.
And the only way to broaden my horizon
was to get an MBA as far as I knew how to
do. And over the course of two years,
I'd gathered up enough money for
tuition for one semester from University
of Texas at Austin, because other
schools are much, much more expensive.
And so it was a cheapest top 20 school
and I had money for one semester.
So that's why I went so went to UT
Austin. It was not much of a deliberation.
It was pretty much that was it.
So I plopped that money down and showed
up in Austin with the MBA program.
That's how that happened.
And then fortunate enough to
be picked up by FedEx from
campus from Austin.
You started out in 1991 at
FedEx as a marketing analyst.
Was there a moment in time after a
few years or over the course of your
very long tenured career at FedEx that
really changed you, the way you lead,
that was really impactful on your
journey that you can think of?
100%, yes. 1996,
I had the opportunity to go to
Hong Kong as, at that point,
managing director in marketing,
I would say as a significant
turning point for
multiple, multiple reasons.
So I would point to that one move
that was a big, big turning point.
So you were about five years in. Tell
me a little bit more about this moment.
I mean, who called you? What was the
conversation? I'm assuming at that point,
you had a wife and a child, yes?
Me and my wife,
both of us were peer
managers in marketing in
FedEx. So both of us are just coming
up through the ranks at FedEx.
This child was born three
months old at this point.
It was kind of funny because we had one
car and so we used to drive to work.
Our office was literally 10 feet from
each other and we had a daycare center,
which was next building.
And that was the setup when
this was all kind of going on.
Within FedEx, over the five years,
my main focus was international
expansion of FedEx.
So I had drawn up a lot of different
concepts, a lot of different models,
and I've drawn up these different
expansion opportunities,
creating a hub and spoke system in Asia,
and we had literally launched that.
So one day I was, I mean,
the current managing director
of FedEx Asia in Hong Kong,
he has come to visit Memphis and I had
lunch with him and I was just casually,
honestly,
I didn't think anything of it.
I was just casually asking him about his
lifestyle in Hong Kong
and what it was like.
And I didn't know that he was thinking
of finding a way back to the United
States and he was looking for a successor.
So he went back and told
his bosses that, "Hey,
I got this kid who wants to come
to Hong Kong. I never said it.
And I think he'd be pretty good in
this job." That's how that ball started
rolling down. Talking to
Uma, her simple analysis was,
"If we're not going to do this
now, we'll never do this. " I mean,
so let's just do it.
If we had literally thought about it
and gone through what it actually took
because of where we were in our green
card processing and all that stuff,
I would've said, no, never.
But luckily we didn't.
And let's also make note of a very brave,
bold wife that you have with a three
month old baby willing to make that
decision to move.
100%.
All the way around the world.
And it was an amazing choice to make.
And then by the way, while I was going
through this process of getting my job,
and I said, "Well, you better start
looking for a job in Hong Kong." Well,
she landed one in three days. She
said, "Okay, I got it. Where are you?
" And I'm like, "Oh, but you
got to wait. I'm not done yet.
I got to go through my process here.".
I'm assuming that a big move around the
world with a three-month-old baby wasn't
very easy.
One of the trips to Hong Kong,
we're still in the process of
figuring housing or whatever.
So Uma brought Arjun, at
that point, six months old,
separately and we were supposed to
meet in the Hong Kong airport and I was
coming through Dubai. And so we met
and we landed about 30 minutes apart.
We got there and she,
"Here, take your son.
I don't want to see the two of
you for the next 24 hours." So
yeah, there was a lot of
interesting moments where
it doesn't work out exactly like
the way you think it's going to be,
but it was just overall,
it just felt right.
Culturally, were there learnings there?
Was there something about the whole
scenario that was particularly tough?
Well, it kicked in day one in my job.
I got to see my team of at that point,
I would say 60 people of 27
of them were in Hong Kong.
So I met with the team and then
culturally I started talking about,
"You all are the experts in your job.
My job is to make sure that I
provide guidance and direction,
but also remove barriers to execution,
but you are the experts in the
job." And they looked at me like,
"If we are the experts,
why are you the boss?" Took a little
while for me to understand that mentality,
but we became so close. Even today,
some of the people are still there.
We built a bond over time
that was just fantastic.
One of the interesting things is I
couldn't communicate worth anything.
That was not really part of the job
description on communication when I
was in Memphis. It was much more numbers
and things like that and models and so
on. Here, I'm now traveling around Asia,
have to communicate different cultures,
different things, different ...
And yeah, got some media training,
this, that, and the other thing,
but I also became a
spokesperson for FedEx.
I don't know how that evolved in my head,
but I moved from not being able to
talk to five people without my knees
hitting each other to somehow a
spokesperson for FedEx in Asia
in that seven years too.
I'm curious why this
moment was so pivotal.
What was it about the experience in Hong
Kong that truly kind of changed your
trajectory?
Well, in so many ways. First,
I worked on these theoretical models
and they started to come up on the
ground in Asia and now you're
on the other side of it,
not just analyzing things, but actually
doing something with it and, ya know,
test your theory, so to speak.
And the number of times I was
wrong about theories. I mean,
actually living with
it was very important.
The second fact that China was
just starting to come alive.
When I got to Asia,
our revenue out of China was probably
less than what we do out of Memphis.
And in the seven years,
it just grew to be the biggest
region after United States.
And so being on the ground in the
moments when things took off in China,
that was a huge moment. Three
is on a professional level,
your scope of responsibilities
when you're working in a region,
in a big company, alright,
but in a smaller region,
you get to do a lot of different things.
And I was put in a position to do
multiple things, no job title
will ever describe it accurately.
I ate that up. For me, that
was just perfect for me.
It may not be perfect for other people,
but it was perfect for me because it
was not like, "Oh, this structure,
this silo." It was like, "Do what you
got to do." And then on a personal level,
just being in Hong Kong and
really being able to travel
and understand all the way from Japan
to New Zealand and everything in between
and live in this incredible
city that was Hong Kong,
I just couldn't be more
grateful for that opportunity.
You walked me through your dad booting
you out of the house at 15 and Bombay.
You talked about coming to the US,
not knowing anybody with $2 in your
pocket to this move with Hong Kong.
Do you feel like there's a theme
here that you are willing to
take risks and explore? I mean,
and I guess I would say take
that and then tell me now,
how has this impacted the way you
think about the world, frankly?
A hundred percent.
I joke to people that there is
someone in FedEx who is continuously
monitoring my comfort zone and that
the minute I feel even a half a
bit comfortable, that comfort zone is
taken away and something else happens.
And it's always been challenged
to do this, do this, do that.
And unquestioningly, I saluted
the flag and said, "Okay,
I'll do the next thing and the next
thing and the next thing." I said about
ability to adapt. And I think
while sticking to your core values,
I think as a global company like FedEx
and you get the opportunity to be in
different places and doing different
things. And how do we do that?
I think that ability to just be
in that continuous learning mode
and culturally put
yourself in somebody else's
shoes and see the world
from the other side,
it's amazing the perspectives that
you come up with that are different
than 99% of the rest of the people
who are right there with you.
And I think that has happened to
me over and over and over again.
Sitting now as CEO and thinking
back on this experience,
what would you tell yourself back when
you were Raj in Hong Kong about the
20 next years ahead? I mean,
what do you think that you've learned
now from these two experiences that you
could tie together?
If I knew then what I know now,
I would keep my vision even broader,
keep a much broader lens on
what's possible. Honestly,
I was just trying to take the next step,
put one foot in front of the other and
keep going with determination and grit.
With a little bit of a wider vision,
that journey would have
been a little bit easier.
My assumption is nobody ever
prepares you fully for the role.
And until you're in the role,
you really cannot possibly understand
the magnitude of what you're faced with.
The thing that I didn't fully
appreciate and anticipate are
two things. One is time management.
I thought I was doing 90%
of the job when I was COO.
Fred had increasingly given
me more and more things to do.
So when I answered,
"I'm ready," I figured it
was a jump but manageable.
But one of the things I didn't
quite realize is the number of
stakeholders around external and internal
that ultimately want a piece of your time,
and especially in a moment when
the world economy was
not in the best of shape,
and so things were not performing so well.
The second aspect of it is when I
learned quickly that when I'm speaking,
I'm not speaking as Raj Subramaniam,
I'm speaking as CEO of FedEx,
and there is a significant
difference between the two. And so
over this period of time, I have
learned to be able to say, "Okay,
what are the things I am most
responsible for?" It'll be culture,
it'll be their strategic
direction, it'll be the talent.
Those kind of agenda items, which are
much more higher level agenda items,
I feel today that I'm in that
fifty-fifty stage where I can
start to think about
a longer term horizon.
I can think about some of these
bigger agenda items whilst some of the
operational executional type
of things that I have a very,
very strong team that can take it forward.
You get the corner office, your
jokes start to become funnier.
People are starting to tell you a
little bit less than they were before.
My guess is it's going to be a little
bit harder for you to find people who are
willing to kind of push you
outside of your comfort zone.
Now you do have a chairman
whose name is Fred Smith,
who I'm sure has no problem
being very direct with you,
but how are you thinking
about that now as CEO?
How are you building people around
you who you know will be authentic,
candid, direct, pushing on you?
How are you getting that 360 feedback
to continue to keep you on sharp and
thinking ahead?
That's an excellent point. Before,
we used to travel somewhere,
we'd sit together and now people run
to the back and leave me alone in the
front. That's a relatively new
development. But having said that,
I think I pride myself in the fact
that I've built a team of folks
who are unafraid to tell me
what they're thinking.
I'm a very active listener
and I kind of keep my mouth
shut for a long time when people
can have the conversations.
And over a period of time,
these thought processes and different
viewpoints come on the table.
And honestly, having the
chairman around, I mean,
he's constantly thinking,
pushing the edge of where we
need to be thinking about.
So there's no danger of being
stuck in the comfort zone.
You don't have to worry about
that for one second with me.
Even despite the role,
I don't feel like that I'm being stuck
inside a comfort zone at all in whatever
manner.
It's on the contrary between a
visionary chairman and a very active
executive management team. I got
enough to keep my brain going here.
Well, I think it says a lot
about you and your leadership.
I've known you for many years.
I know some of those people on that team
that are holding you accountable and
who are not afraid to
share what they think,
but I think that you've built an entire
career throughout your childhood to now
that is all about taking in diverse
points of view and perspective says a lot
about the way that you lead and the
legacy that I think you're leaving
behind.
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