Digital Competition - Laurie A. Tucker

Laurie A. Tucker hates to do anything that runs the risk of demotivating the people she works with, but one day last year, she did just that. She decided to kill a product that they had poured hundreds of thousands of hours -- and hundreds of thousands of dollars -- into developing and marketing. She had hesitated on making the call for nearly six months. "Every time we had the gun out, someone would come up with a new idea to improve the product or market it better," says Tucker, senior vice president of electronic commerce and customer services at Federal Express. For a time, Tucker's innate optimism won out, and she encouraged her employees to do what they could to save the product.

But by fall 1998, it was time to pull the trigger on FedEx's groundbreaking VirtualOrder software, which had helped hundreds of companies wade into the waters of e-commerce. Although Tucker's group had a big first-mover advantage, FedEx's sales force wasn't suited to selling e-commerce software. It was better at convincing logistics managers to funnel more packages to FedEx. New entrants like Broadvision and Intershop were more determined about developing e-commerce software than FedEx could ever be. Tucker decided that it would be preferable for FedEx to partner with these players rather than to compete with them, and she told the VirtualOrder team to move their customers to other e-commerce platforms.

It was a short-term shock to FedEx's systems people. But the real shocker is that Tucker, in recounting the demise of VirtualOrder, doesn't so much as wince. Her speech, tinged with a slight Southern accent, is as quick and upbeat as always. "I suppose we could have focused on how many dollars we wasted, but instead I asked, 'What did we gain?' If we had put those dollars into advertising and PR, would we have gained the same credibility and developed the same skills in our IT group? I encourage my people to look at it as a project that cost us money but that generated huge benefits."

Making sense of radical change, false starts, and strategic missteps is an unavoidable part of Laurie Tucker's job -- although the word "failure" is absent from her vocabulary. "What Laurie demands of us is that we make an educated guess," says Dottie Berry, a FedEx vice president who has worked with Tucker for 20 of Tucker' 21 years at the company. "Nine times out of 10, you're wrong -- but how are you supposed to find the one approach that's exactly right? The worst thing you can do, in her world, is not do anything."

That's because Tucker's world is one of relentless, high-stakes change at one of the world's most visible companies. Inside FedEx, Tucker wrestles with two of the defining agenda items for 21st-century competition at every company: how to design a compelling customer experience, and how to embrace the transforming power of the Web. She (along with the seven vice presidents and 6,000 employees in the units that she runs) is responsible for the FedEx customer experience on the Web, on the phone, and at the company's 1,400 World Service Centers. That means that Tucker is responsible for challenging the status quo at FedEx. "It's my role to offer challenges to the existing way of doing business," she says. "This group is the future of the company."

Focus on Customers -- for a Change

You don't have to be an outsider to be a change agent. Navigating her black BMW sedan from FedEx's headquarters at the Memphis airport toward one of the company's newest call centers, Tucker recalls joining FedEx at age 21, the week after she graduated from the University of Memphis with an accounting degree. It was 1978, the same year that FedEx went public. The company paid for her MBA in finance, and by the time Tucker was 26, she was the company's manager of pricing, on her way up to the ranks of director, vice president, and senior vice president.

"Our paths first crossed about 20 years ago, in the finance department," says Dennis Jones, 47, executive vice president and chief information officer at FDX Corp., FedEx's parent. "Laurie has such charisma and enthusiasm -- and incredible adaptability. She leads people to a conclusion that wouldn't be a natural path for them. She's able to get people to march in the same direction."

At the call center, Tucker displays her trademark mixture of company pride and a powerful desire to shake things up. Last November, when she was handed responsibility for the company's 16 domestic call centers, she was appalled to learn that the employees there didn't have access either to the FedEx's public Web site or to the company's intranet. So while any FedEx customer with Web access could search a comprehensive database of FedEx's service centers and drop-off locations, the call-center reps couldn't.