United Parcel Service and the Management of Change

Step inside the familiar brown trucks, the logistics centers and the corporate boardrooms of the United Parcel Service in this lively and informative look at UPS's attempt to transform itself from an operations-oriented company with a focus on efficiency to a customer-oriented one with a focus on quality. You'll be hard pressed to find (on the Web) a better, more detailed history of one company's change initiatives. The four students who submitted this paper (for a management class at the University of Louisville) apparently had inside access at the company, including interviews with then CEO Kent C. "Oz" Nelson and a "status of change survey" conducted among one group of UPS employees. They set the stage with detailed background on the company's history, corporate culture and philosophy, then move on to the quality initiatives instituted by Nelson and UPS management in the mid-90s. It's an in-progress report (from 1997) on one tradition-bound organization's efforts to transform itself from top to bottom.
Originally reviewed in Harvard Management Update's "Web Sites for Managers."