People in Trucking: FedEx Freight’s Moving Force Tries to Settle Into Retirement
By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the May 31 print edition of Transport Topics.
FORT MYERS, Fla. — Douglas Duncan has spent a lifetime as the first guy in the office, the only guy working on a Saturday and the last guy to go home at night.
He has uprooted his wife and son 13 times during his career as he advanced from trucking sales and marketing to overseeing operations all over the United States as the president and chief executive officer of FedEx Freight.
He has spent countless hours brainstorming ideas to bring technology to the forefront of less-than-truckload carrier operations and has kept a packed bag for last-minute trips to Washington, D.C., to bend the ears of the key politicians.
So you might think the recently retired Duncan, 59, would be enjoying relaxing afternoons on the golf course.
You’d be wrong.
“I’m sitting in the pro shop,” his wife of 37 years, Pam, said in a recent phone interview with Transport Topics after joining her husband for a round of golf. “Doug was not real happy with his game today. So he decided to go to the driving range to work things out. He’s very, very focused.”
“He’s doing this retirement like he did his job,” she added.
Duncan said he originally planned to retire at age 50 but put if off when he was offered the challenge of building FedEx Freight from the ground up.
He left FedEx in February but still seems to be a driven man who likely will have a hard time doing retirement the way most folks do.
“I’ve been very much a workaholic,” Duncan told TT. “I pursued my career aggressively. One of the ways I was able to advance in the business was, anytime they had an opportunity, I said ‘yes,’ no matter where it was.”
Although retirement will provide time for his passions of boating and golf, Duncan plans to keep a hand in the business world. He currently serves on the boards of two large corporations — Benchmark Electronics Inc. and J.B. Hunt Transport Services — and does part-time government relations consulting work for FedEx.
He said that, when he was recruited to join the board at Benchmark three years ago, he realized he would be able one day to stay in touch with the business world while spending more time on the golf course and taking trips on the family’s 59-foot Marquis cruiser.
“I think that’s when I got the idea that I could be pretty happy serving on a couple of boards of directors and having a lot more free time,” he said. “I’ve really enjoyed being involved in the business from an oversight perspective but not involved in the day-to-day management of the business.”
As the founding CEO of FedEx Freight, Duncan steered a one-time struggling regional less-than-truckload carrier acquired by FedEx in 1998 to the national $4.4 billion trucking industry player it is today.
Duncan is admittedly a quiet, shy man, known to shun large social gatherings, and he seldom wears his thoughts on his starched shirt sleeves. He gained a reputation as
an intelligent and forward-looking leader but seems uncomfortable talking about his personal life and career accomplishments.
“But internally, I still worried about it, thought a lot about it,” he said, “but I wouldn’t say I was a ‘Type A’ personality.”
FedEx gives Duncan a lot of the credit for shepherding the growth of its Freight division, which is geared toward moving next-day and second-day shipments a maximum of 600 miles.
“As the founding CEO of FedEx Freight, Doug helped build a $4.4 billion company in the less-than-truckload industry, a market sector FedEx did not serve eight years ago,” Debra Phillips, managing director of communications for FedEx Freight, told TT. “FedEx Freight changed the landscape in the LTL industry.”
Company officials also credit Duncan for launching a number of customer improvements, including a no-fee, money-back guarantee for LTL shipments, FedEx Freight A.M. service and next-day service between the United States and Canada.
Not only did Duncan put FedEx Freight on the map, he was instrumental in getting technology deployed in the LTL industry, Satish Jindel, president of SJ Consulting Group, told TT.
Duncan played a key role in creating the company’s “advanced notification” policy, the idea of notifying customers when their freight wasn’t going to be delivered on time, Jindel said.
“I think he was a very effective leader in the sense of not micromanaging,” Jindel said. “He also was very much engaged in looking at the broader challenges of the LTL trucking industry.”
“He seemed like such a perfect fit in a leadership role at FedEx because he was not only a really smart, capable businessman, but he was also a guy who understood how important looking to the future was, how important it was to be malleable,” said Bill Graves, president of American Trucking Associations.
Duncan has served on the executive committee of ATA and was chairman of the American Transportation Research Institute.
“He was great as the chairman of the American Transportation Research Institute because again he had a real passion for stimulating discussion and thought about the kind of research that we need to do to benefit this industry going forward,” Graves added.
Duncan also was part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce task force to “rebuild America” and recently received a lifetime achievement award from shipper organization NASSTRAC.
Many of his industry peers told TT of their admiration for Duncan.
Paul Greene, retired Roadway Express Inc. senior vice president, said he saw great promise in Duncan early on and offered him an assistant vice president of sales position in Akron, Ohio.
“Doug was always a very forward-looking fellow, looking to see where he would like to take the organization,” Greene said. “He had great interpersonal skills, and he always had the best interests of the people that worked with him at heart.”
Duncan also gets kudos for being a tenacious industry advocate, spending long hours traveling the United States and paying visits to political leaders in Washington, D.C.
“He was willing to take personal time — time he could have been at home with his family or on vacation — and channel his energy into going to conferences and speaking to broader audiences and participating in some of the chamber’s activities on infrastructure,” said Janet Kavinoky, director of transportation infrastructure, congressional and public affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Kavinoky got to know Duncan well while working with him trying to convince Congress and businesses that congestion and the eroding state of the U.S. highway system ultimately would have dire consequences.
“He is really passionate about the future of this country and the potential that infrastructure has to really bolster this country’s competitiveness,” Kavinoky said.
“He’s one of the hardest-working guys you will find,” said Larry McKee, a former Alcoa Inc. executive whom Duncan calls his best friend. “He will not go into anything unprepared.”
Duncan confesses to always being a bit of a loner and recalls that, when he was an only child growing up in Hampton, Va., his friends — many of them military brats — kept moving away.
“I am a very quiet person, and still quite shy in a lot of ways,” Duncan said. “Some of the public requirements I had as the CEO of a corporation and industry advocate probably would lead you to believe I wasn’t a quiet person. I really am.”
His wife, Pam, said she has long marveled at his sense of strength and determination.
When he was in his late 20s, his parents passed away within two years of each other.
“He’s an only child, so he had no brothers and sisters to share it with,” Pam said. “He’s had a deep family sadness due to his parents’ deaths.”
Pam believes their deaths caused him to “sort of turn himself towards his career.”
“But when we were young, first getting started, I knew this man was going places,” Pam said. “He would take out a little 3-by-5 index card and at the top of it, he’d write, ‘Goals.’ And then, he’d list about five or six goals. That list was completed every single time, because he worked at it to make sure it was.”
Ironically, Duncan got into the trucking industry by accident. Unlike many trucking bosses, he didn’t have a father who was a truck driver nor had he ever worked the trucking docks while going to college.
He wanted to be an accountant, so he got a business degree at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va.
Almost straight out of college, he took a job selling computers for the former business equipment manufacturer Burroughs Corp.
He liked the work.
“It was a good fit because computers were basically payroll and general ledger applications back when I got out of school,” Duncan said.
But Duncan said he eventually grew weary of the travel, so in 1976, strictly by chance, he answered a newspaper ad to be a management trainee for Roadway Express.
He got the job.
“My peers tease me that I got into the trucking business as a way to get out of sales and traveling,” Duncan said, “but I ended up doing a lot of sales and traveling.”
Duncan stayed with Roadway and its affiliated companies for nearly two decades, mostly in sales and marketing positions, but he also took every chance he had to also learn the operations side of the business.
From 1976 to 1998, he served as vice president of sales for Roadway Express, vice president of sales and marketing for Caliber System Inc. and vice president of sales and marketing for Viking Freight, a 10-state regional LTL.
Duncan remembers those years fondly.
“Leaving Roadway Express after 19 years to go to the parent company was probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” Duncan recalled. “It was like I grew up there, and I loved the company and the management team and the boss I had. It turned out to be a great decision, but at the time it was very, very hard for me.”
In 1998, Duncan was selected president and CEO of struggling LTL Viking Freight and was asked to “help stabilize the business and return it to profitability,” he said.
“While we were stabilizing Viking, the parent company, Caliber Systems, was acquired by FedEx,” he said.
That was in 1998, and FedEx kept Duncan at the helm of Viking.
During Duncan’s tenure with Roadway, Greene perceived him as “reserved.”
“He’s not an extreme extrovert,” Greene said. “He’s not a guy who would walk in a room and light up a place.”
On the other hand, Greene said, Duncan could be very persuasive.
“He was like a bulldog,” Greene recalled. “He and I had some discussions, and he was hard to dissuade. He was a spirited debater.”
Duncan said that early on during his tenure as chief of FedEx Freight, his philosophy was to concentrate on the packages that didn’t arrive at their destinations on time and not the ones that did.
“You can’t look at service failures and say 99% is as good as it’s going to get,” he said. “Look at the failures. Early on we were doing 60,000 shipments a day. A 1% failure meant we had 600 customers upset every day.”
For instance, a 2002 survey showed that about 30% of the service failures were caused by flat or separated tires.
“What we found out was that 60% of the tire failures came on a tire that was recapped for its fifth time,” Duncan said. “So we started disposing of tires after the fourth recap, and it improved service, reduced our failures by 20% simply by one little change that you could do on the equipment.”
In 2001, Duncan spearheaded the acquisition of American Freightways Corp., an LTL serving the central and eastern United States.
“FedEx didn’t want just a 10-state western carrier, so we went on an acquisition hunt to expand to the rest of the country,” Duncan said.
A year later, American Freightways and Viking were combined, rebranded and renamed FedEx Freight.
Those were exciting times, Duncan said, because he had the “financial strength” of FedEx to gobble up carriers that fit into the FedEx game plan.
“Putting American Freightways together with Viking allowed us to really offer a service product that had never been offered before in the industry,” Duncan recalled. “We really did bring absolutely, positively [overnight deliveries] to the trucking industry.
“We delivered a scheduled network, with 99% on-time service.”
Duncan said both Viking and American Freightways “had great cultures” and were “very people- and customer-oriented.”
“They didn’t need to be fixed,” he said. “They just had to be integrated.”
In 2006, Duncan engineered another milestone, the acquisition of longhaul specialist Watkins Motor Lines, throwing down the gauntlet before the large, unionized carriers that dominated the longhaul LTL market. Watkins was renamed FedEx National LTL.
Duncan, who served on FedEx Corp. founder Fred Smith’s strategic management committee, calls his former boss “one of the greatest entrepreneurs” he’s ever seen.
Smith’s emphasis on technology and looking ahead rubbed off on the company’s management, Duncan said. “He always challenged us, always came up with new ideas, was always thinking about the next hill to climb.”
Although retired, Duncan undoubtedly still will be climbing hills.
He’ll be a spirited debater for the trucking industry — still attempting to convince Congress to allow the industry to put more triples on the interstates, to allow heavier trucks and to make plans to improve the nation’s roads.
“I don’t like the image that the trucking industry gets cast with a lot,” Duncan said. “I think it’s very much underappreciated. I hate that part of it.”
He also remains concerned about the future of the congested U.S. highway system.
“We built an interstate freeway system that was the marvel of the world,” he said. “Since then, we have done precious little, other than use it up.”
He also said he remembers when it was considered a huge compliment for a motor carrier to go 200,000 miles without an accident.
“Now our companies routinely go a million miles between accidents,” Duncan said. “And the accidents are less severe because of the technology.”
