FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam on Navigating the Era of Reglobalization

Subramaniam presides over an operation moving roughly 18 million packages a day across 220 countries and territories, and he has coined a term for what he's watching unfold: "reglobalization." For operators navigating tariffs, regional shifts, and supply chain volatility, the playbook underneath is worth studying closely.

Reading the signals before the spreadsheet does

Subramaniam sits on something most CEOs would envy: two petabytes of daily operational data flowing from 3 million shippers to 225 million consumers. That visibility, as Fortune notes, has given him a front-row seat to the geopolitical reordering triggered by tariffs and the war in Iran. U.S. imports fell, U.S. exports rose, and FedEx saw rapid growth in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and India.

His framing — moving from one equilibrium state to another rather than chasing the old normal — is the kind of mental model you can borrow. In my experience, the teams that survive disruption are the ones who stop asking "when does this end?" and start asking "what's the new shape?" You don't need FedEx-scale data to apply this. You need to pick the two or three signals that actually predict your unit economics, and then watch those daily.

Three transformations, one culture anchor

Internally, FedEx is running what it calls "DRIVE" — a multiyear restructuring with three concurrent tracks: a network transformation merging Express and Ground into a single U.S. network, a digital transformation building out FedEx Dataworks as an enterprise product line, and an organizational revamp to support both. The company also spun off FedEx Freight, which began trading on the NYSE on June 1. All of this while delivering billions in structural cost cuts over the past four years.

That's not a transformation story. It's a triage story. And the throughline Subramaniam keeps returning to, in his Fortune interview, is culture. When he took over from founder Fred Smith in 2022 — Smith later died in June 2025 at age 80 — Subramaniam told Smith directly that technology, people, and acquisitions might all change, but the FedEx culture wouldn't. That commitment, he suggests, is what keeps the company aligned when everything else is moving.

The unsexy work of actually taking the reins

Here's the part most leadership profiles skip: Subramaniam admits the transition was harder than he expected. When demands started piling up from every direction, his move was deceptively simple — he wrote his own CEO job description and KPIs. He carved out time to define what actually mattered, then said no to almost everything else.

That discipline is the real lesson. In my experience, new leaders fall into one of two traps: they try to be everything to everyone, or they try to reinvent the wheel on day one. Subramaniam did neither. He protected what was already working, set a small number of clear metrics, and let the rest burn down. As he put it to Fortune, "I always say that I can see far because I'm standing on the shoulders of a giant."

So here's the question worth sitting with this week: if you had to write your own job description tomorrow — the three to five things only you should be doing — what would make the cut? If you can't answer cleanly, the org chart is probably eating your calendar. That's the Subramaniam test, and it's available to anyone willing to sit with a blank page.