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Great reading

I have always wanted to know about how the delivery giant UPS became the company it is today. This book tells all! It tells from the small two person delivery company in Seattle Washington to the present UPS in Louisville, KY. I would highly recommend this book!

This is great to learn about UPS back ground and history, I would recommend for any UPS employee or fan.

Nice to read about a successful company. After working thirty years at UPS, a person can see how successful they've always been.

This book is well written and describes the UBS story in detail. Lots of interesting examples of how they succeeded and failed in various stages of their corporate history. But it is a bit dry sometimes.

Well written and informative

Everything about the book, Driving Change, is meticulously done. Would you expect anything less from UPS? The jacket cover-brown and white with the UPS logo-is perfect. Then if you take away jacket, the hard back cover is also brown! Nicely done!

The book begins with an overview of the history of UPS. It explains how Jim Casey, an enterprising teenager, saw a market need in 1907 for delivering messages in his native Seattle, Washington. Casey then branded his service as cost competitive with any service in town, and his agents as dependable and hard workers. These traits would follow him as American Messenger Service turned into Merchants Parcel Service. That in turn morphed into United Parcel Service in 1919.

Beyond just history, the reader is informed how this company with the ubiquitous brown trucks is very innovative in providing better service at a more reasonable price. Before reading this book I would not have used the word "innovative" in the same sentence as UPS, yet UPS has been an industry leader in the package delivery business worldwide! My perception of UPS was challenged as the authors delved into how such a large corporation could embrace change. UPS could even miss the signals that the market was changing, as they did in the overnight delivery business and global expansion movement, but in an effort to "catch-up" could even surpass the competition.

What is the competitive edge that UPS has that other companies lack? Loyal employees who believe and enjoy the work that they do are that "secret ingredient." UPS is a company with a corporate culture like no other, although they have not been perfect. The book has done a beautiful job in explaining those lessons learned.

This book is well written, well researched, and surprisingly engaging. At the end of each chapter is a quick summary that synthesizes the major points of the chapter. I found this very helpful.

Armchair Interviews says: For anyone with an interest in organizational change, this book is a must read.

We've all seen the UPS commercials that ask, "what can Brown do for you?" That's a question that gets answered in Mike Brewster's book titled Driving Change, which takes us inside "Big Brown" to provide us with intriguing insights into operations management, logistics and its unique human element. Soundview recommends this book for any process-oriented business that wants to optimize its operation for the good of its customers, because Driving Change shows us how Brown does that every day. According to the author the secret revolves around UPS' people and it starts with every driver - that's the critical customer interface or "the heart and hands" of the UPS process. However, the technological "brains" for the company's global, package-shepherding service hums along as it processes data for more than 15 million packages every day in a Jersey suburb. But beyond these seemingly disparate yet vital UPS components lies a systemic ingenuity focused on delivering the goods - both figuratively and literally. For example, in Egypt UPS packages are delivered by mule while in Zambia, UPS relies on canoes to traverse the Zambezi River for its customers. Ultimately this book helps convey a sense of passion that the vast majority of UPS employees exhibit on the job - who knew passion preferred to wear brown!