This is UPS's growth story from its birth in 1907 in Seattle, Washington when nineteen-year-old Jim Casey started a messenger and home delivery service for city department stores. Today UPS is a global public company with more than $36 billion of revenue, and operations in over 200 countries and territories.

This chapter will discuss how UPS grew organically and explain how UPS's culture and internal processes have relentlessly focused the company on growing organically. We will attempt to answer the following questions: How does UPS keep evolving? Why has it not become arrogant, complacent, or insular? How has UPS institutionalized organic growth into its culture, processes, and business model?

What is UPS?

UPS is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and employs 384,000 employees worldwide. Of these, approximately 40,000 work in countries other than the United States and fewer than 40 of those 40,000 employees are US expatriates. UPS is the fourth largest employer in the United States.

UPS's worldwide revenues of $36 billion are derived primarily from the delivery of packages and documents. In the last five years, UPS has expanded the scope of its services to provide freight forwarding, customs clearance, inventory management, pick and pack, export financing, and customer returns and repairs so as to be a service provider along the entire supply and distribution chain.

UPS is a vertically integrated company. For example, it operates the world's eleventh largest airline, maintaining its own air fleet of 569 jets and employing over 2,500 pilots.