At the UPS management conference in April 1975, Big Brown's founder, Jim Casey, heaped praise on his team for the company's growth from coast to coast. And then the 88-year-old patriarch hurled a challenge.
In "Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS," Greg Niemann, a retired member of UPS management, reprises how Casey paused for a moment after dispensing that praise, struck a visionary pose and added:
"But you know we're only serving 5 percent of the world's population!"
The UPS managers took that remark as throwing down a gauntlet, Niemann writes. It was a call for the company to extend its range internationally.
"The long-awaited coast-to-coast UPS service was barely realized — not fully in place — and here was Jim Casey already looking beyond the borders of the United States," Niemann writes. "Casey could have been 11 years old again, staring out over the Puget Sound at an unseen world that was even then delivering goods from far, far away. He wanted UPS not just to have a piece of the action but to be the action."
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Casey would not live to see that vision come to fruition. He died in 1983 at the age of 95, when UPS was struggling to adapt the workaholic culture that brought the company so much success in the United States to the culture of Germany, its first European target.
"UPS learned the hard way that you can't shove everything that works in the United States down the throats of citizens from different cultures. They learned that adaptability was paramount, Niemann writes. "Luckily, the company had taken on only one country, because a multi-country expansion would have been disastrous. As it was, there were still a few lessons to be learned."
The author shows UPS learning those lessons and spreading into most of Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
"Today, in more than two hundred countries, all of UPS global transportation services combined, which include UPS Supply Chain Services … can reach over 4 billion people, or about double the portion of the world's population that can be reached by a telephone network," Niemann writes.
UPS has 58,000 employees in locations outside the United States, and they deliver more than 1.5 million packages and documents a day, Niemann writes. The company adapts to the norms of the culture it works in without totally discarding the quasi-military management style and work ethic that has spurred the company's growth and made many UPSers either millionaires or exceedingly well fixed for retirement.
To achieve that in China, for example, Niemann writes, UPS recruits Chinese nationals who are in the United States earning graduate degrees. It indoctrinates them in "the UPS way" and allows them to adapt the essence of it to fit their culture.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of a small delivery service in Seattle by Casey and a few associates that evolved into the Atlanta-based behemoth it is today — a company with almost half a million employees that serves 7.9 million regular customers, delivers 15 million packages every day, averages about $4 billion in profit every year and operates the world's ninth-largest air fleet.
"Big Brown," therefore, achieves a level of credibility many corporate histories don't attain. Amid the hyperbole, there is more information than most non-UPSers could imagine wanting to know.
About the book
"Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS" by Greg Niemann; Jossey-Bass, 256 pages ($24.95)