A golden account of Big Brown

The brown uniforms and brown trucks are so much a part of everyday America "" they've appeared in movies, sitcoms and books. This year is special, though. Already, two books have been released that don't just mention UPS: they are about the package delivery and logistics giant.

Greg Niemann's Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS was out first, in February. But UPS doesn't even acknowledge the existence of the book. Instead, it has thrown its considerable weight and reputation behind Driving Change: The UPS Approach to Business, which hit the stands a few months later and whose authors Mike Brewster and Frederick Dalzell were given "unprecedented access" to Big Brown's global facilities, its workers and archives. The result is an engaging history of a company that prides itself on its culture and professionalism, has taken its share of knocks and thrived, and is at the forefront of an industry that will become only increasingly important in a global economy (the volume of business handled by UPS and rival FedEx is considered an indicator of American business health). You won't find any startling insights into strategy or operations management, but ignore the slightly starry-eyed style and you may just find yourself entertained.

The American Messenger Company started out exactly 100 years ago in the basement of a saloon in Seattle. Its founder was 19-year-old Jim Casey who borrowed $100 to help pay for the two telephones and a bicycle that were to become the firm's lifeline. Casey and his partner Claude Ryan soon built up a reputation for dependability and honesty "" not least because they hired squeaky clean boys from good families to act as messengers. In 1919, as the company looked to expand along the West Coast, its partners renamed it United Parcel Service. That didn't really help "" the struggle to establish a national presence continued till well into the 1980s. Still, UPS had declared its intentions "" it had moved on from merely passing on telegraphic messages to delivering large packages for retail chains.

UPS's USP, according to Brewster and Dalzell, is the dauntingly high standards the company sets for itself and its employees. Even when FedEx was nipping at its heels in the 1980s with its next-day delivery, UPS's profits were six times more and its revenues double. Rather than rest on its laurels, the company used that high-growth phase to recreate its business model to include global deliveries.

This is also a company that takes time very seriously. I guess you can't afford to slack off when there are 15 million packages to be delivered every day. Still, UPS goes way beyond the usual start-meetings-on-time routine. It has conducted studies on how its drivers should hang their truck keys on their fingers. It has studied the optimum speed at which to walk 100 feet from a truck ("package cars", in UPS-speak). Now, it is working out routes that will minimise left-hand turns and, in turn, reduce fuel wastage and idle time.

But it is UPS's culture that is the real winner, according to the authors. The uniform and trucks are brown so dirt won't show, but the dress code calls for clean, ironed shorts and shirts, while the vehicles are washed every night. Drivers can't smoke on duty and are inspected every day, but are encouraged to buy the company's stock and promotions are from within "" every CEO of the company has risen through the ranks.

Of course, everything doesn't always turn up roses. UPS got its timing spectacularly wrong when it launched air services just before the 1929 stock market crash. It nearly went belly up in its first international operations, in Germany "" among other miscalculations, the trade-mark uniform was disconcertingly similar to the Brown Shirts of Nazi Germany. (For the record, UPS changed the uniform in Germany to tan shirts with light pinstripes.) In perfect hagiographic style, though, Brewster and Dalzell turn these bad decisions into learning curve speedbumps, just as they try to dismiss the 15-day strike in 1997 as the work of a union leader with a personal agenda.

Still, there's no denying that UPS isn't a company easily dismissed. Driving Change offers readers a glimpse of its 800-pound gorilla status through tidbits strewn casually through the book: It operates the world's eighth-largest airline fleet and is the biggest user of cellphone minutes. Its world technology headquarters at Mahwah, New Jersey, processes 27 million instructions a second, and has more than 4,000 software engineers on the rolls. But only one janitor.

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DRIVING CHANGE
THE UPS APPROACH TO BUSINESS

Mike Brewster and Frederick Dalzell
Hyperion
Pages: 289; $24.95