South Florida ORBIE Leadership Award recipient: For World Fuel's Jeff Smith, innovation and a people-first culture are key to making an impact

Business Journals

06-06-2025

Jeff Smith, who retired as chief operating officer of World Fuel Services at the end of 2023, has been named the recipient of the 2025 South Florida ORBIE Leadership Award. The honor recognizes a global career built on pioneering digital transformation and cultivating high-performing teams.
Smith's leadership philosophy centers on a simple, yet powerful, idea: Talent and culture are the true differentiators of great companies. As COO of World Fuel Services, he turned that belief into action, cultivating efficiency and dexterity in how the company responded to challenges using LEAN principles and people-first decision-making.
That operational precision was forged over more than 35 years of experience across continents and industries — from semiconductors to finance. Smith's career highlights, which he'll share during a keynote address at the South Florida ORBIE Awards celebration June 13 at The Diplomat Beach Resort, are a case study in iteration. At IBM, he led a global IT organization of 20,000 and spearheaded the company-wide Agile transformation. At Allied Signal/Honeywell, he launched a global SAP rollout across 17 countries, cutting projected timelines by more than half through an international team rooted in diversity of thought and unified by a shared goal. At Suncorp, following the economic downturn that started in 2008, he architected a transformation of the company's digital insurance self-service platform. His teams built it using the cloud, making the financial services provider one of the first to use cloud technology.
In every challenge, Smith consistently applied what he learned early in his career at LSI Logic: that shared sacrifice, collective learning and scalable simplicity often outperform hierarchical command-and-control.
'My view is you should always give preference to the people doing the work over people leading the work,' he says. 'We're paid a premium to lead, so we should be homing in on creating a productive environment for them.'
Smith breaks it down further: 'What does great mean? Is that small teams that are building great software? Does that mean great customer service? Does it mean that we can take a problem and break it up? I've spent my career kind of chasing that — the more you can make it clean and simple, the easier it is to scale.'
His formula for high-performing teams prioritizes building diverse teams who are engaged by meaningful work. The work must be distributed at a sustainable pace, and finally, results must be continually measured and tracked. At IBM, he implemented a quarterly leadership review system that evaluated every leader on six tangible dimensions — team formation, work distribution, measurement, talent development, learning from others and influence. He also published Net Promoter Scores for leaders, asking direct reports whether they would recommend their manager or their squad to a peer. The transparency raised expectations and elevated performance across the organization.
Smith's influence is still felt globally. He currently serves on the boards of ANZ Bank, PEXA and Sonrai Security. A native of Ohio and graduate of Miami University and San Jose State University, he's lived and led in the U.S., Australia and around the world. And while his accomplishments are many, what sets Smith apart is his ability to scale not just systems, but people.
His advice to business leaders aspiring to be true community partners is to believe in the potential of people. He recalls a transformative insight from Steve Jobs, who once shared how Pixar hired musicians and artists to become software engineers because they had the grit and logic to succeed. 'We applied that in South Florida, too,' Smith says, 'creating career paths for people with nontraditional backgrounds. Don't look at it as a cost or as a contribution, that you're there to help people with money. You're there to help them find a great career and have a happy life. If you build the right environment, anyone can thrive.'
Asked what makes a great leader, Smith advises not to get caught up in the noise of the company landscape. 'You want to create clarity of purpose, put together a good, productive environment, and inspire people to do great things. It's pretty simple.'
From building software that transformed a global semiconductor industry, to reshaping IT at IBM, to coaching next-generation talent in Miami, Smith's legacy is one of clarity, compassion and continuous reinvention. The 2025 South Florida ORBIE Leadership Award celebrates not just a career, but a mindset — one that will continue to shape teams, cultures and companies for years to come.