10 ms·
Yes, at FedEx, we considered that problem for about three seconds before we noticed that we also needed: (1) A suitable, existing airport at the hub location.
by graycat 12y ago
Yes, at FedEx, we considered that
problem for about
three seconds before we noticed
that we also needed:
(1) A suitable, existing airport at
the hub location.
(2) Good weather at the hub location,
e.g., relatively little snow, fog,
or rain.
(3) Access to good ramp space, that
is, where to park and service the
airplanes and sort the packages.
(4) Good labor supply, e.g., for
the sort center.
(5) Relatively low cost of living
to keep down prices.
(6) Friendly regulatory environment.
(7) Candidate airport not too busy,
e.g., don't want arriving planes
to have to circle a long time
before being able to land.
(8) Airport with relatively little
in cross winds and with more than
one runway to pick from in case
of winds.
(9) Runway altitude not too high,
e.g., not high enough to restrict
maximum total gross take off weight,
e.g., rule out Denver.
(10) No tall obstacles, e.g.,
mountains, near the ends of the
runways.
(11) Good supplies of jet fuel.
(12) Good access to roads for
18 wheel trucks for exchange
of packages between trucks
and planes, e.g., so that some
parts could be trucked to the
hub and stored there and
shipped directly via the planes
to customers that place
orders, say, as late as 11 PM
for delivery before 10 AM.
So, there were about three candidate
locations, Memphis and, as I recall, Cincinnati
and Kansas City.
The Memphis airport had some old
WWII hangers next to the
runway that FedEx could use
for the sort center, aircraft
maintenance, and HQ
office space. Deal done --
it was Memphis.
That's how the decision
was really made.
Uh, I was there at the time,
wrote the first software
for scheduling the fleet,
had my office next to that
of founder, COB, CEO F. Smith.
- cheeseprocedure 12y agoI had never considered altitude as a factor in takeoff weight limits. How much load would a typical FedEx flight need to shed to operate out of Denver?
- WalterBright 12y agoI did after once flying out of Denver, and the luggage had to be removed because the airplane was overweight for the altitude and air temperature. Next time you're flying out of Denver, notice how long the takeoff roll is. When my father flew jets out of Denver, he'd hang the tailpipe over the back edge of the runway so he'd have every last foot of runway to get airborne.
- saryant 12y agoThe difference in Denver is so significant that United actually swapped all the Houston-based 737s that came over from Continental in the merger with the Denver-based A320s from United. The 737 base moved to Denver and the A320 base moved to Houston. The 737 has better performance with high-altitude takeoffs.
- ars 12y agoHow does the pilot know the weight? Do they weight each piece of luggage individually, or are there sensors in the wheels?
- teraflop 12y agoGood question! Here's some information from aviation.stackexchange: http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/9975/do-additional-passengers-impact-on-weight-and-balance-of-a-domestic-airliner http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/9975/do-addition... Checked luggage is weighed when you drop it off, so presumably the exact weights are available to the pilots. For passengers themselves and their carry-on baggage, accurate weights aren't available so statistical averages are used, based on the number of passengers and their baggage allowances. Airliners do have "squat sensors" in the landing gear, but they're not capable of accurately measuring the aircraft's weight. They're just binary-valued sensors that check whether the gear struts are under stress, to prevent the gear from accidentally being raised while the plane is on the ground.
- WalterBright 12y agoI wonder if gluing strain gauges to the landing gear struts would be accurate enough once calibrated. There has been at least one crash due to mis-estimating the weight of the passengers + luggage + cargo. A strain gauge on the struts, even if inaccurate, could provide a backup sanity check for the weights.
- DanBC 12y agoThey could put something in the ground - a weigh station - that the plane travels over before getting to the runway. That avoids the need for modifying airside equipment which is a bureaucratic nightmare.
- graycat 12y agoSignificant. I'd have to go upstairs, find the right box, get out the flight manual (Fred had a guy send me while I was doing my Ph.D.), and learn how to use it again to answer. But, yes, hot air at high altitude hurts jet engine thrust, a LOT.
- eventualhorizon 12y agoI believe that pilots refer to this as density altitude. It factors greatly into allowable takeoff weight, takeoff distance and ability to climb over obstacles in the takeoff path. Pilots are or should be very aware of the density altitude on very hot days especially at high altitude.
- ubernostrum 12y agoHeat is a factor too. Every couple of years, there'll be a day or two in summer when temperatures at the airport in Phoenix get above the maximum takeoff temperature for a lot of the smaller regional jets, and chaos ensues as all those flights (it's a US Airways hub) delay or cancel.
- advertising 12y agoAn example of this I was recently explained: There's a leg connecting Tokyo and Mexico City. The Tokyo flight goes direct to Mexico City however the Mexico City flight stops in Hermasillo on the way to Tokyo. Due to the higher altitude of Mexico City, it takes more fuel to get off the ground and requires a pit stop in hermasillo to get all the way to Tokyo. Disclaimer I'm only partially sure that I'm remembering the whole story correctly.
- omaranto 12y agoYou mean Hermosillo.
- eastbayjake 12y agoThis was fascinating! > That's how the decision was really made. How much did Fred Smith being from the Mississippi Delta -- just an hour south -- have to do with picking Memphis?
- graycat 12y agoThere is some question about that. But actually FedEx (Federal Express) was started in Little Rock. Fred had bought Little Rock Airmotive, a corporate aircraft interior decorating, customizing, repair, and lube and tune shop. He dreamed of FedEx, and in a back room got a Dassault DA-20 Fanjet Falcon, popular executive jet, 28,660 pound max take off weight, two GE aft-fan turbo jet engines (originally designed for drones; used in the F-5; but with an aft-fan), a relatively rugged airplane, e.g., no frame fatigue life, worked on the modifications to make it into a suitable cargo plane, rewrote the official flight manual for the modifications, and got the FAA to approve the modifications and issue the appropriate certificate. FedEx rushed to 33 such Fanjet Falcons; that was the initial plan for the full fleet, serving 90 US cities. The fleet schedule I did with my software and Roger Frock one night was for the 33 and 90. That schedule overcame some Board objections that were blocking some crucial equity funding, pleased the Board, "Solved the most important problem facing the start of Federal Express" (Fred, at a senior staff meeting), enabled the funding, and saved the company. When I joined, the company was still in Little Rock. Yes, the fact that Fred knew Memphis well was likely also relevant. But fully likely FedEx would have been in Little Rock if it had had a suitable airport. There were some concerns about the Ohio valley: The whole place could get socked in with fog, quickly, nearly unpredictably. For the hub location, I observed the decision making; the description I gave here is accurate enough; my criticism that the site selection was not just a geometry problem is fully correct; but I was not involved in the decision itself.
- mtVessel 12y agoPlease feel free to regale us with tales of that experience!
- graycat 12y agoYou mean the time FedEx towed one of its airplanes to the other side of a hanger to keep it out of sight of a sheriff with a lock and a chain sent to lock down the airplane as collateral for unpaid fuel bills? You mean when some angry union people showed up objecting to FedEx pilots handling packages? You mean the time two barrels of liquids in the shop got confused and maybe some bad stuff got pumped by mistake into the hydraulic systems of some unknown number of airplanes? The time I used the differential equation y'(t) = k y(t) ( b - y(t) ) to please our two representatives of Board Member General Dynamics, have them unpack their bags and stay after all, and, thus, saved the company? The time after midnight in my office I was practicing violin and, as I left, noticed that Fred, in the next office, had been working late? The time at a top employee basketball game, in the locker room with Fred I asked him if he would do it again and got his answer, a more colorful version of investors don't like risk. The time Fred, in the Dassault DA-20 Fanjet Falcon he saved as the company executive jet, was flying, kept finding airports closed, kept flying, and finally landed but flamed out from no fuel on the runway -- cutting it close. How the planning had said that we could fly the airplanes half full and print money but actually flew the airplanes packed solid, doubled the rates, and still were losing money -- not good planning. How Fred wanted to have containers to fit the inside of the plane, like regarding the inside of the cargo part of the plane as a big sausage and cutting it into a few identical slices. Then have ball rollers on the floor of the plane for moving the containers. Then to move the containers on/off the plane, have a truck with a platform in front, about the right size for one container, able to be raised and lowered with hydraulics, drive up, next to the opening for the cargo door, and on/off the containers. Well, Fred described all this on the phone to a guy in CA who got a truck chassis, did the welding and hydraulics, and drove the thing, chassis, no body, to Memphis. Actually, at least as a prototype, it was okay. And the basic idea was important in production. Still, that the thing had been designed in a phone conversation upset some on the Board. There were a lot of such war stories. But, in total the experience was a good lesson in doing a startup.
- lucio 12y ago>"for about three seconds" The "get things done" attitude resonates with me. Your short comment is more interesting than the original post.
- ssully 12y agoI agree completely with it resonating. I saw it less as get shit done and more of just a perfect example of how things work in the real world. The model mentioned in the article is great, but it means shit when you bring it into the real world and find a huge list of problems like graycat mentioned. As others mentioned, such a great comment. Thanks for sharing graycat.
- engi_nerd 12y agoIt's also a great example of how a well-trained human brain can take in a large amount of information, crunch it together, and spit out a solution that closely approximates a detailed analysis, all in a few seconds. That kind of clarity and intuition is what drives so much technical decision making, because you rarely have the time and information you would want to make a decision.
- icefox 12y agoI am guessing the scheduling has become significantly more complex as the company has grown. The conveyor system in the Memphis facility alone looks to be an interesting problem. Is there stuff you want to have, but just don't have the time to do it?
- graycat 12y agoFor the conveyor, and the work from the time the planes arrived at the hub until they left, was an issue. We had a guy, Mike Basch, Senior VP Planning, from Rapistan, big in conveyor systems. I got involved for a while: I tried to do a continuous time, discrete state space Monte Carlo simulation, but it got too big to do at all easily and we dropped it. So, the hub design was done with just back of the envelope arithmetic and engineering. It worked fine for years. Over the years, the fleet scheduling problem went through various phases. The first phase that worked at all well was just my software. The last time I checked (I'd left for my Ph.D.), the package volume was high enough that one of Fred's ideas became the solution: At noon, have all the planes at distant cities. Then, in the evening, loaded up, all the planes fly to Memphis. Nearly all the flights are non-stop -- one plane, one flight, one city served. So, net, first cut, no scheduling problem at all. Maybe there could still be problems for scheduling maintenance, considerations for remote sort hubs and/or international service, but that was all after I left.
- Yakimoto 12y agoI'm in love /w this post! Not only is it informative but it clearly expresses the differences between decision making in real-world scenarios and delving deep into the data for an 'on-paper' optimal decision.
- graycat 12y agoOptimization, e.g., from operations research can at times make a good contribution, but such work is not always easy, and typically the first challenging step is problem formulation where address considerations such as I listed. Indeed, at one point I was starting to address the fleet scheduling problem with integer linear programming set covering, talking with G. Nemhauser, now at Georgia Tech, then at Cornell, etc. With current software and computers, what I was trying to do, for just the 33 Falcon airplanes and 90 US cities, should be nicely easy to do. Another problem, though, could be the mix of aircraft types: Early on FAA and CAB rules boiled down to the Dassault DA-20 Fanjet Falcon with Fred's cargo modifications. Why? Because, e.g., wanting to be able to operate both airplanes and trucks, FedEx was flying as an unscheduled air-taxi, maybe intended for little Mom and Pop operations, but then could not fly planes with max gross takeoff weight (GTOW) over 25,000 pounds. Fred went to Congress and got his 28,660 GTOW approved as an exception. Later Alfred Kahn deregulated airfreight and, thus, let FedEx fly nearly anything they wanted. At that point, there would be an issue of what mix of airplanes? But that was after I had gone for my Ph.D.
- WalterBright 12y agoReminds me of this scene in economics class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlVDGmjz7eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlVDGmjz7eM
- graycat 12y agoThat clip is one of my favorites, especially because I used to be a B-school prof! That clip is way too close to reality for too much of B-school.
- DiabloD3 12y agoThis is maybe the best comment I've read on HN in the past month, I love stories about how major companies got started. Like, I'm a total sucker for stuff like folklore.org.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoI literally called to my wife across the room and said, "Honey! You've got to see this HN comment!" Thanks graycat for taking the time to comment!
- EToS 12y agome too, theres a good series of books within the "at work" series, such as founders at work, euro founders at work etc http://www.apress.com/at-work http://www.apress.com/at-work
- larrys 12y ago"Uh, I was there at the time" Can you verify what I was told in business school in the late 70's (Wharton). I remember reading a case study that said that Smith was considering flying passengers on the deadhead by installing seats between freight runs. Was there any discussion of that?
- graycat 12y agoI never heard any talk about flying passengers. When I was there, there wasn't much of a 'deadhead' problem, and I doubt that there ever has been: Or it's roughly 8 PM in Seattle, SF, LA, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, NYC, DC, Atlanta, Miami, etc., and the planes are all at such cities. Packages from those cities are loaded, and the planes fly to Memphis, getting there ballpark at midnight. The packages are sorted and the planes loaded. The planes fly back to the cities and get there ballpark 6 AM or so. So, so far no deadhead flights. Well, might have a lot of lower priority packages didn't move from the origin cities, so load those on, fly to Memphis, sort near noon, load the sorted packages, and fly back to the remote cities. Still no deadhead flights. At times, for some extra revenue, FedEx did some airmail flights for the USPS and/or some cargo charter flights, and, then, sure, there could be some deadhead flights, but such flights were so rare and unpredictable that getting human passengers would not have been promising.
- dingaling 12y agoFedEx tried off-peak passenger carriage in the early 1980s when they received their first 737s. The seats were on pallets installed through the cargo doors. UPS tried the same idea with 727s in the early 2000s but in both cases it proved too disruptive to normal operations. However several European airlines today operate the inverse service with quick-changers, primarily passenger service and remove the seats at night for mail carriage.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rdl 12y agoWhen was it clear internally that FedEx was going to be one of the most significant companies of the century? (I'm trying to calibrate how much visibility insiders have into this, vs the public)
- graycat 12y agoWhen? That was the intention from the beginning. The first goal was to serve 90 US cities. Broadly there was nothing seriously wrong with the plan. The idea, now common in the VC community, that can't plan such things accurately enough is absurd. Once virality started to take hold and the package volume grew, standing in the sorting center was an enthralling experience: The astounding, mind-bending variety of what the US economy wanted to ship with high priority was beyond comprehension and belief. Early on, time critical legal papers? Sure, there were plenty of those. Okay. A cubic foot of some specific small metal fasteners a big production line needed ASAP or shut down at some cost of thousands of dollars an hour. Fine. But bricks? Yup: A brick oven could send some samples to an architect, or an architect could send the samples to a customer. Spare parts for computers, etc.? Yup. But baby chicks? Yup. Medical samples on the way to a medical testing lab? Yup. A live baby bear? It happened. The variety was beyond all belief and comprehension. No question about the need, definitely a must have -- a large fraction of the customers would have paid nearly anything, often beyond all reason.
- beachstartup 12y agoi can't remember if we used fedex or ups but the most expensive shipping i've purchased was the result of an oversight. booth equipment, about 200 pounds, overnight from LA to denver in order to make a trade show. cost us nearly 2 grand but the cost of not shipping would have been much greater!
- rdl 12y agoI've seen the same $20k bobcat skid steer air freighted express multiple times, due to weird accounting issues. And "the world's largest plane" chartered to ship ballots. Exotic/live animal transport is probably the weirdest, though.
- jasode 12y agoGreat reply with interesting details. However to be fair to the author, I don't think he was passing off his mathematics as a realistic business decision matrix. In the The College Mathematics Journal[1], a lot of presentations are of the "assume a spherical cow" type of stuff. It's presenting scenarios for education exploration that are more complicated/interesting than highschool algebra of "two trains leave the station, when do they meet?". That's why the paper's scope is limited to a Euclid geometry exercise. To model the extra factors you listed, it is a complex multi-constraint optimization NP problem and I suspect the author probably knows that. He just didn't put that disclaimer explicitly because he didn't anticipate that the non-journal audience (e.g. savvy HN readers) would pick it apart. In the same spirit, the Levenshtein distance can be studied for simple spell checking algorithms. Even though we know the more sophisticated ones can utilize machine learning with massive datasets, we can still explore Levenshtein for teaching purposes. [1]http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/college-mathematics-journal/college-mathematics-journal-contents-may-2010 http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/college-mathemat...
- graycat 12y agoLet's consider your > a complex multi-constraint optimization NP problem There was a day when I thought that! So, I was thinking non-linear optimization with, say, some of gradients, steepest descent, conjugate gradients, quasi-Newton, Kuhn-Tucker conditions, maybe some Lagrangian relaxation, etc. and saw no hope. And I still remember the day when I got an explanation and learned better! Can make the problem 0-1 integer linear programming but otherwise linear. The non-linearities, really complicated costs, say, have a plane step climb when have a heavy cargo load, and really goofy constraints, e.g., don't fly over any US military bases or the White House, don't fly over residential areas at dinner time, etc., can handle in a simple way before the optimization itself. The technique has some generality and, thus, is a good tool to have in a 'data science' tool kit, especially with current computer hardware, library software, and practical data availability. Here's an outline of the technique: For one period from, say, 5 PM to midnight (again from 1 AM to, say, 8 AM) set up a table with one row for each city to be served, 90 cities, and one column for each candidate airplane trip, tour, from Memphis and back. In this table, for each city and column put a 1 in the table for that city and column if the tour for that column serves that city and put a 0 otherwise. So, generate all such columns; may have some thousands of columns. Considering all fine cost details want to account for, and taking expectations for random costs, say, from weather and air traffic control, find for each of the candidate tours its cost (first cut, assume that if a plane goes to a city, then it completely serves that city). Then for the schedule, want to pick no more than 33 columns (there were 33 planes in the fleet) from the 1000s so that all 90 cities are served and total cost is minimized. So, each column serves, covers, some cities (each city where the column has a 1), and want to pick columns that cover all 90 cities -- so have a set covering problem. Right, it's in NP-complete. So, in particular, we have a linear programming problem: We have one variable for each column. The costs and those variables form the linear function of the variables to be minimized. The constraint matrix is just that table we described. The constraints are that each city is served by some one column. Or in matrix algebra, we have from the table described above a matrix A with 90 rows and some thousands, say, m, columns. We have the variables x, m x 1. We have the m costs, 1 x m c. And we have the right hand side, 90 x 1 b where each component of b is 1. Then we want to find x to minimize cx subject to Ax = b. So, it's linear programming. Then in addition we ask that the variables take on values of only 0 or 1 -- so we have a 0-1 integer linear programming problem. If ignore the 0-1 constraint, then have a fairly routine linear programming problem but will likely end up with some fractional tours allocated. For honoring the 0-1 constraints, on this problem likely could do well enough with branch and bound. As FedEx grew, the nature of the scheduling problem changed. The outline above should have helped save significant bucks at least in the early years. Then, of course, that solution technique could be used to evaluate the few candidate hub locations. With some generalization, the solution technique could also be used to evaluate airplane types to add to the fleet. So, here we have 0-1 integer linear programming set covering; keep it in mind and see if you can find another good application.
- wensing 12y agoAh! The real world! Hello. I enjoyed all the mentions of weather, as Paul T. at the Memphis GOCC is someone I've had the pleasure of talking to about some of those issues. I'm the co-founder of a company whose mission is to synchronize climate and commerce. Would love to find out what you're doing these days as you are clearly a SME (almost beyond belief) and I'm guessing I could learn a lot from you.
- severine 12y agoWhat do you mean by SME? A quick search didn't help, unless you meant "Small to Medium Enterprise", which I wouldn't quite understand either. My own guess would be "Single Man Enterprise", but please tell us.
- idlewords 12y agoWas the seismic risk from the nearby New Madrid Seismic Zone taken into account in the planning process?
- officemonkey 12y agoFrom a cursory review of the article, "no."
- jcurbo 12y agoSince the New Madrid fault hasn't had a major quake since 1812 (or arguable 1895) and other places have quakes far more frequently (e.g. California) I imagine the risk would be considered lower than a lot of other places in the country. According to Wikipedia, seismic monitoring in the area wasn't installed until 1974, so at the time of FedEx's creation in 1971 it probably wasn't on their radar.
- idlewords 12y agohttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/products/conterminous/2014/HazardMap2014_lg.jpg http://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/products/conterminous/201...
- alanfalcon 12y agoI read one comment asking if you've considered a book; I've since been reading your comment history which is the next best thing. I'm convinced that A) I want to read that book, B) you don't need a cofounder, C) you could use a co-author. Your book would live on the long tail, yes, but so do these HN comments and at least the book wouldn't have the same limited shelf life. I hope you consider it: perhaps while vacationing after your startup makes you sufficiently wealthy.
- SteveCoast 12y agoPresumably it was Stapleton airport that was ruled out but these days DIA would be fine? Super extra long runways, land and all that is now available?
- selimthegrim 12y agoHere's my question - what happened to your stock grant?
- graycat 12y agoPart I My offer (from Art Bass, then head of Flight Operations in part because he was, as the FAA required, a pilot) and offer letter said that (A) there would be a stock plan, (B) I would be part of the stock plan, (C) the plan would be based on salary in which case I would be quite high up, (D) the Board was considering the stock plan now and results were expected in two weeks, (E) if the plan were not equitable then the first plane out of Memphis would be full of ex-Federal Express employees. With that, I joined, kept teaching my courses in computer science at Georgetown until the courses were over, at home got a time sharing terminal, a CP67/CMS account, etc., and dug into writing the software to schedule the fleet. Some Board Members, including one with a lot of experience at American Airlines, doubted there could be a schedule. So, the Board wanted to see a schedule, say, for the full, planned fleet of 33 planes serving the full, planned list of 90 US cities. Some crucial funding, some equity, some loans on the planes, were being held up waiting for the schedule. The company was at risk. I wrote the software, finished my teaching, drove to Memphis, and rented a room. So, with the Board having doubts and the company at risk, one evening Roger Frock and I used my software to develop a schedule for the 33 planes and 90 cities. We printed out the schedule, had copies made, and handed them around. Board Member General Dynamics had sent two representatives, one an aeronautical engineer and one a finance guy, to provide, say, adult supervision; those two guys went over the schedule fairly carefully and announced "It's a little tight in a few places but it's flyable" (pretty good from just a little fast work from Roger and I); CEO Fred Smith's reaction at the next senior staff meeting was "Amazing document. Solves the most important problem facing the start of Federal Express.". The funding was enabled. FedEx was saved. Pretty good from typing in 6000 lines of PL/I in six weeks while also teaching two courses! PL/I is a nice language -- good on data types, data manipulations, data conversions, data structures, scope of names, exceptional condition handling, storage management, debugging, etc. E.g., its Based structures, can serve as a poor-man's classes in object oriented programming. Later the Board wanted to see some revenue projections. I didn't want to get involved, but no one had more than wishes, hopes, dreams, intentions, etc. So, I started with the common high school question, what do we know? Well, we knew the present revenue or, if you will, number of packages per day. From our initial long term planning, we knew what revenue we expected with 33 full airplanes serving 90 US cities. So, in some at least a somewhat meaningful sense the desired projections were an interpolation between those two facts we did know. Then the question was, how will the interpolation go? Well, why will the revenue grow? Sure: The revenue will grow as it has been so far, customers to be hearing about FedEx from current happy FedEx customers. E.g., maybe a customer to be gets a package via FedEx. So, we're talking word of mouth advertising or viral growth. So, the rate of growth in revenue per day or packages per day should be directly proportional to (A) the number of current customers and (B) the number of customers to be. That is, the rate of growth should be proportional to both (A) and (B), that is, to their product. So, all downhill from there: At time t, let y(t) be the revenue, say, per day, at time t. Let t = 0 correspond to the present. So, we know y(0). Let b be the revenue per day with a full system, that is, 33 full airplanes and 90 US cities. That is, we know both y(t) and b. So, from freshman calculus, the rate of growth is the first derivative of y(t), that is, d/dt y(t) = y'(t). So, from the proportionality, we have that there must exist some constant k so that y'(t) = k y(t) ( b - y(t) ) So, we have an initial value problem (we know y(0)) for a first order, linear ordinary differential equation. Okay, how to get a solution? Easy, just need freshman calculus, not even a course in differential equations. And, yes, there is a closed form solution, right, with some exponentials. Right, the solution is the famous logistics curve sometimes seen as doing well tracking, say, the growth of TV set ownership in the early years of TV. So, my derivation, as just above, can be seen as an axiomatic derivation (maybe rediscovery, maybe original) of the logistic curve. The solution may remain an okay, first-cut approach to understanding viral growth. So, I showed my work to Senior Vice President Mike Basch, likely the one most responsible for getting the projections for the Board, and he liked my work. So, on a Friday afternoon we picked several candidate values for the constant k and drew the corresponding graphs of the revenue projections. We used my HP calculator, reverse Polish notation, stack machine, etc. -- HP should run an ad! We picked a value of k that gave what seemed to be reasonable projections and declared the problem solved. The HP? It's still in my center desk drawer. Checking, right, it's an HP-35. My wife and I paid $400 for it. The next day, a Saturday, at about noon, I was in my office likely working on fleet scheduling and got a call from Roger Frock asking if I knew anything about the revenue projections. Saying I did, he asked if I could come over to the HQ and explain. So, I got into my Camaro hot rod (396 big block, etc.), and drove over. Yes, I brought my HP-35. As I arrived, at one of the old WWII wooden hanger buildings, people were standing around and not happy. Our two guys from General Dynamics were standing in the hall with their bags packed and not happy. Roger led me to a table with the graph, picked a point in time, and asked me to calculate the value on the graph. So, with my HP-35, I punched the buttons, stopped, slowed down, cleared the HP-35, started again, slowly and carefully punched the buttons again, and got the value on the graph. I did that for several points for the graph, and then everyone started to get happy. It turned out that the Board meeting had been that morning; Mike Basch was traveling; I'd not been invited to the Board meeting; the graph had been presented; the two guys from General Dynamics (GD) had asked how the graph had been calculated; and everyone else at the meeting dug in trying to answer. They worked for hours with no results. Finally the two guys from GD lost patience with FedEx, returned to their rented rooms, packed their bags, got plane reservations back to Texas, and as a last chance returned, with their packed bags, to the FedEx HQ to see if anyone could explain the projections. Somehow Roger Frock had guessed that I'd done the projections, called me, and got me to the Board meeting just in time. It was close, but I'd saved FedEx a second time. Right: Some people in FedEx would rather have seen FedEx go under than invite me to the Board meeting. We're talking some severe cases of jealousy, bureaucratic infighting, attacking the guy down the hall instead of the competition outside of the building, goal subordination as in organizational behavior, etc., right? Bummer. Right: Apparently I was the only person at FedEx who still understood freshman calculus. Gads. And I never even took freshman calculus, taught it to myself from a book, and started with sophomore calculus. I never got any thanks for saving the company the second time.
- shoesandsocks 12y agograycat, my dad was one of those first pilots. Thanks for posting about this; makes me nostalgic. (Did you have stacks and stacks of those styrofoam punch-out planes around the house, too?)
- keithpeter 12y agograycat: I have spent an amusing half hour reading your back-posts. Many others are suggesting that you write your memoirs. I'm suggesting a possible format: a professional biography told through the formulas and theorems you have used. Compare with Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. Levi was a chemist and senior manager with a large chemical company who also wrote novels and essays - now known mainly as a writer. His autobiography takes the form of a series of chapters each with the title of an element. Each chapter tells a story that is somehow related to the properties of the element chosen for the title. Levi lived in dire and dangerous times, I think your times were incomparably better but will still provide lessons for those who come later. My suggestion is a professional biography with each chapter based around a theorem or algorithm that you have used to advantage. A brief exploration of the theorem pitched at undergraduate level (perhaps the explanations could be crowd sourced from many here) coupled with one of your anecdotes. A self-published ebook of this would prove popular I think.
- graycat 12y agoThanks. As elsewhere on this thread, I'm doing a startup. What I've posted to HN in this thread and otherwise is about the best I can do for now. For the history of FedEx, there are several books already. Roger Frock wrote one. I've seen none of them, but some friends found me mentioned in one of them. I was also mentioned, with some errors, in an article in Informs, the popular magazine on operations research and management science. No time to retire yet! If I get rich, then I will have several projects to consider. Sure, several projects of the kind *what I wish I'd known when I was 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 22, 30, 40" are candidates.
- jmnickels 12y agoYour experience sounds like you would be an interesting fit for a senior network optimization role at Uber. If you have any interest, drop me a line jmn@uber.com