"Constructive dissatisfaction"
One word you won’t hear out of Michael Eskew’s mouth too often is "I." Every accomplishment, every achievement, begins with "We." When asked whom he admires in business, his answer is his employees and the eight CEOs who held the post before him.
"I’ve been at UPS for 31 years, so that’s the only culture that I know," Eskew says. "We are a team company, and there are 360,000 of us. I don’t deliver any packages myself anymore. I don’t sort any of them and I don’t develop technology or fly airplanes. It takes all 360,000 to make this place work.
"When all 360,000 understand where we’re going to go and understand our vision and understand we’re one company with one vision, we’ve pulled together great."
To illustrate the UPS culture, Eskew borrows a phrase from UPS founder Jim Casey, who in 1956 told his management team that they always needed to be "constructively dissatisfied."
"It’s part of our DNA," Eskew says. "We don’t want to run ourselves down, but we can never be satisfied, and that’s really what it’s all about. We’ve always had the best service, we’ve always had the best people in our industry, but we have to be constructively dissatisfied. We can get complacent, and Jim would not want us to be."
What also seems to be part of Eskew’s DNA is the ability to adapt to change. From 1913, when Casey’s American Messenger Service was nearly driven out of business due to improvements in telephone service and the automobile, to an increasingly global marketplace today, UPS under Eskew will need to be as nimble in the coming years.
Eskew is looking forward to it.
"A lot of people think they need to change jobs to see different things, and luckily for all of us at UPS, the company keeps changing," Eskew says. "We’re not in the package delivery business anymore; we are a technology company, we’re a supply chain company, we’re an integrated, synchronized commerce company."
HOW TO REACH: UPS Inc., (800) 742-5877 or www.ups.com
