INSIDE UPS united parcel service "brown'

The creation of a performance anatomy

—all high-performance businesses, including UPS—follow a specific pattern.

First, the company's leaders must have stable values that they can draw on to guide the company through good times and bad, and through periods of both rapid change and relative calm.

Second, those values must be brought to life via strategic messages—the rituals, lessons, images and stories that top management uses to show how the values translate into action.

Finally, the strategic messages become, over time, shared mindsets about critical aspects of the organization—mindsets about the balance between strategy and execution; the cultivation of talent; the strategic importance of information technology; the need to measure performance selectively; and the drive for continuous innovation and renewal.It is the combination of these three elements—leadership values, strategic history and shared mindsets—into a performance anatomy that makes it possible for the organization to build on past successes while adapting to future challenges.

The results:

Today, the elements of that anatomy inform every aspect of UPS, a company with more than 400,000 employees and revenue of some $42.6 billion in 2005. As a result, the world's largest package-delivery company also delivers superior financial performance: Its average pre-tax operating profit margin of more than 14 percent was higher than that of its major competitors over three-year and five-year spans (2002–2004 and 2000–2004)

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