This listing is for Driving Change: The UPS Approach to Business Book.  

Publisher: Hyperion; 1st edition (June 12, 2007)

Language: English

Hardcover: 289 pages

ISBN-10: 1401302882

ISBN-13: 978-1401302887

For the first time ever, one of the "World's Most Admired" companies opens its doors for a fascinating, lively, and most of all instructive look at how it does business. We see them everywhere -- those brown trucks with the golden logo, the drivers delivering their share of 14 million parcels handled daily. To most of us, UPS is a reliable fact of life. But to well-informed businesspeople, Big Brown is a company to emulate. Quietly and steadfastly, UPS has earned a reputation as one of the leading companies in America, known as much for its innovative practices as its skill in creating satisfied customers and employees. Just in time for the company's hundredth anniversary, UPS has allowed authors Mike Brewster and Fred Dalzell unprecedented access to their facilities, their workers, and their history -- including their mistakes. What emerges are clear-cut lessons from which any business can benefit. Driving Change is an enlightening, absorbing, and dynamic account of a company at the very fulcrum of global commerce.

Near the outset of this meticulous survey of UPS's history, business journalist Brewster sums up the message he wants businesspeople to take away: that UPS may be seen as at once humdrum and wonderful to behold. But he goes heavy on the humdrum in a book whose clear-cut lessons are too rudimentary for the corporate audience he's courting. It's only when the author focuses on little-known trivia and insider information—gleaned from what the jacket copy touts as his unprecedented access to the delivery giant—that his account approaches the wonderful. In recounting the evolution of the American behemoth from the Gold Rush days when 15-year-old Jim Casey transported everything from bail money to morphine, Brewster turns up some shiny nuggets: the trucks are brown so dirt won't show; in Zambia, UPS uses canoes to make deliveries; in New York City, the company would prefer to offer the city government an annual payment instead of tracking thousands of parking tickets. Like UPS lifer Greg Niemann, whose Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS (Jossey-Bass, Feb.), Brewster heaps praise on UPS, leaving skeptical readers to wonder what remains untold. But Brewster's emphasis on UPS business strategies won't be of much help to the management audience. It's better suited to UPS's beloved everyman Joe. 

Ask anyone to name some Washington State business start-ups and you will most likely hear the names Microsoft and Starbucks, but few realize that United Parcel Service began as a small bike messenger service in Seattle around 1905. Unlike companies such as Kodak, Microsoft, and Xerox, which were built around a break-through product or idea, founder Jim Casey took a basic existing service and reengineered it through modernized equipment and impeccable service. The buttoned-down Boy Scout look of the UPS driver remains a direct reflection of the owner's vision of presenting a clean-cut image that would take the package-delivery service out of the alley and make it respectable. Brewster traces the roots of UPS from messenger service to regional West Coast truck-based delivery service to what it is today, the largest private multinational air parcel carrier with a massive airline fleet and one of the largest and most sophisticated sorting facilities in the world. With unprecedented access to the company's facilities, historical records, and employees, Brewster provides the most in-depth look at this highly regarded company to date.

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