Driving Change: The UPS Approach to Business - Hardcover

Brewster, Mike; Dalzell, Frederick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1401302882 ISBN 13: 9781401302887

Publisher: Hyperion, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Mike Brewster is a business journalist and the author of the books Unaccountable and King Capital. He lives in New York City. Frederick Dalzell is a historian and consultant whose recent books include Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble. He is a partner in The Winthrop Group, a firm specializing in historical research and archival services, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly

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. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1401302882
• ISBN 13: 9781401302887
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304