Making the Grade

There’s a famous story about Fred Smith at Yale submitting for class a business plan for what would one day be Federal Express, and getting it back with a C and a comment from the professor: “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.”

That’s such a delightful story that it really ought to be true; but here’s what Smith himself says about it:

The first phase really started when I was an undergraduate at Yale in 1965. I wrote a term paper for an economics class in which I simply observed that as society became more automated, companies like IBM and Xerox that sold early computer devices needed to make sure that their products were dependable. … How do you get your computer parts quickly when your system goes down? You couldn’t depend on the post office. I believed you’d need a faster, more dependable, and more far-reaching kind of delivery system. That’s what the paper was about; it was not a full-blown business plan.

Today that paper is kind of famous, and it’s because of a careless comment I once made. I was asked what grade I got on it, and I stupidly said, ‘I guess I got my usual gentlemanly C.’ That stuck, and it’s become a well-know story because everybody likes to flout authority. But to be honest, I don’t really remember what grade I got it. I probably didn’t get a very good one, though, because it wasn’t a well-thought-out paper.

From which I infer that the famous quotation (never attributed to any professor by name) is, alas, inauthentic.