When Raj Subramaniam became only the second CEO in FedEx’s history — stepping out from under legendary founder Fred Smith, who died in 2025 — he did something telling: he wrote his own job description, and one central line in it was “guardian of the culture” Smith built. His promise, as Matt reads it, was that technologies, acquisitions, structures, and people may all change, but the cultural core will not. Matt’s skeptical by default of glossy CEO profiles (he says he’d want more data, and is only half-joking that he might just email Subramaniam and ask for an interview), but the sentiment lands, because it names the hardest problem in growth: when you start a company, your DNA, heart, and values are in it — and keeping that alive as you scale from five people to a thousand is brutally difficult.
The thing most worth protecting, Matt argues, is trust — and it matters most precisely when you’re small and nimble. With few layers between you and your people and clients, the link between high trust and fast growth is close to causal (he points to Great Place to Work data, cited by Fortune, suggesting dramatically higher revenue growth in high-trust smaller companies). So how do you preserve it as the bureaucracy thickens? Through storytelling and aligned action. The stories we tell around the campfire reinforce our values — this is who we are, this is what we stand for — which is why PR isn’t all noise, and why the narrative has to be backed by behavior that matches it. Matt loves the small proof in the FedEx piece: their new DataWorks business traced back to an unsolicited white paper from a young employee, a thread from the past the CEO recognized and pulled forward. Get the story and the actions right, and you can change almost everything about how you operate without touching why. His weekend question is the one that ties the whole run together: everything else is fungible, so what are the few things in your enterprise that absolutely are not — and have you started making artifacts to preserve them?
