This year is my 30th anniversary here at FedEx. The Company is 35 years old, so you can imagine I've seen, experienced and been through a lot of change. In that time I've been fortunate to grow my professional career to a point where today I serve as vice president of FedEx Customer Information Services customer service operations. I have had the opportunity to hold many different positions throughout the company which has given me the ability to grow and learn.
As with any culture, FedEx has developed it's own unique language over the past 35 years. It's a part of who we are as an organization. The FedEx Blog Team has talked a great deal about whether we should discourage bloggers from using "FedEx lingo" in their posts.
In the end, we felt that asking bloggers to "translate" their posts would run counter to the goal of giving readers an inside look at FedEx. So, you will often see MEM instead of "Memphis" or the HUB instead of "the airport facility" or PEAK instead "the holiday season" ... consider it a foreign language credit.
From the earliest days of FedEx, we understood that our business was all about trust. We realized our customers were giving us more than just packages — they were entrusting us with important pieces of their businesses and sometimes important parts of their lives.
It's 1:45 a.m. and on a Saturday morning and I am at the center of FedEx's World HUB. For those of you not familiar with the terminology, the World HUB is FedEx's original package sort facility in MEM which sorts over 1.4 mm packages a night. Tonight there are about 12,000 employees here who will take care of our customers shipments while most of our customers are sleeping.
I was fortunate to start here as a hourly employee 28 years ago and through hard work and our great promotion from within philosophy I am now the Vice President of this facility. This is home for me.
When I started my career with FedEx as a courier in Philadelphia more than 34 years ago, I never thought that one day, I would play a role in designing the international networks at FedEx.
Of course, I never thought I would get into social networking either, but here I am entering the blogosphere.
I guess you could say that I am really into networks. It is the central focus of my job these days – designing the global FedEx network of the future – both on the ground and in the air.
