Is UPS really a “big” small company?
I think that’s a good way of putting it. It has a very strong “customer intimacy.” There really is a smal-town aspect to UPS. For instance, there is one driver who has been delivering packages on the same side of West 25th Street in Manhattan for 20 years. He told me that he says hello to 300 people by name every day. Also, what UPS is doing is really one simple core thing. Even though it has expanded its offerings, it is replicating one service several million times a day. It is a small company that has expanded into 200 companies around the world. How did UPS originally go global? At first it was doing so well in the 1970s and 1980s that there was a movement in the company to stay domestic. But the founder, Jim Casey, who even in his 80s was still active in the company, went to West Germany and saw how inefficient the Bundespost (national post office) was. He saw an incredible opportunity—not in service between the U.S. and Germany, but in domestic German service. UPS sent over four
