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His Delivery Outshone Others


Investors Business Daily, March 26, 2006

By Laurie Lande


James Casey was upset.

At the end of each day, Casey regularly sat in his sparse office and went through paperwork at United Parcel Service, the package delivery chain he founded.

On this particular day in the early 1940s, however, he realized that street addresses were being written out in full rather abbreviated. That wasted staff time.

Wasted time meant lost money. So the Candelaria, Nev., native immediately sent out an order to start using abbreviations, saving hundreds of man-hours a year. Later, he further honed the process by listing 80 names on route sheets instead of 40.

This laserlike focus on efficiency is evident in almost every aspect of UPS, which Casey built from a Seattle messenger service founded in 1907 to a global enterprise serving more than 200 countries.

Take its driver guidelines, which instruct drivers to buckle their seat belts with the left hand while inserting the key in the ignition with the right hand to save time.

Casey (1888-1983) was long an advocate of efficiency. At his first job, the 11-year-old Casey was assigned to help the driver of a wagon deliver items for a Seattle department store. The driver pointed out that even-numbered houses were on one side of the street and odd-numbered ones on the other, and the packages were organized to reflect that.

Forced to quit school when his father died, he had to work to support his three younger siblings. So when he saw a way to double his $2.50 a week salary by delivering tea 11 hours a day, he jumped at the opportunity. A few years later he joined the American District Telegraph Co. in Seattle, which provided a messenger and delivery service.

At age 15, he decided he could do the job better, so he and two friends opened a rival messenger service. But business was quiet, so he went to Goldfield, Nev., to join a similar service capitalizing on the gold rush.

Unsuccessful, he returned to Seattle a year later to try his hand at founding another company. He and some friends set up American Messenger Co., with Casey at its head. With few phones or cars in 1907, messengers were the most efficient form of communication and package delivery.

To garner customers, American Messenger posted cards near public phones with its slogan, "Best service and lower rates," a theme Casey would drum into his workers the rest of his life.

To distinguish his firm from competitors, its six bicycle messengers wore matching uniforms. Casey trained them to never promise delivery faster than they could realistically travel. The company stayed open all night and on Sundays, even though there was little business at that hour. Casey figured this was the best way to earn the firm a reputation for dependability.


"Anyone can deliver packages," Casey said. "But the one thing we can offer that others will not always have is quality."

To ensure quality, Casey and his partners emphasized hard work and attention to detail. The strategy paid off as American Messenger grew in size and scope. In 1913 the firm purchased its first delivery truck and began a regularly scheduled package delivery service for Seattle department stores.

In 1919, it acquired a delivery service in Oakland, Calif. There, a competitor's similar name inspired Casey to rename his company United Parcel Service. Building on his success, in 1922 he extended service to Los Angeles. By 1927 brown UPS vehicles — which were easier to keep clean than black ones — served the West Coast centers of Portland, San Francisco and San Diego.

Even during this time of rapid growth, Casey kept his company focused on service and planning. He assigned his first drivers regular delivery routes so they'd get to know their customers and their habits. It's a policy still followed today: the UPS "Standard Practice Manual" tells drivers to know receivers' daily routines, such as what time and where coffee breaks are taken.

"Use this knowledge to complete the delivery with the least amount of effort and to provide the highest level of service," the manual instructs. Index cards given to workers remind them, "Remember to always say 'good morning' and 'good afternoon.' "

As the company grew to service most of the country, Casey brought top managers in on all decisions. "The most serious mistakes I have made were when I failed to consult other people," he told the in-house newsletter Big Ideas in 1968.

He introduced participative management, in which managers at several levels of responsibility discuss a problem to reach a consensus on action to be taken. Casey felt this made them more committed. At such a meeting described in a 1947 New Yorker article, managers discussed the pros and cons of lowering the cab floor of trucks by 2 feet. That way a driver who stepped into the cab 200 times a day would save himself 60,000 foot-pounds of energy.


Casey served more as a moderator than decision maker, leaving the meeting before a decision was reached. He felt employees then had more of a sense of ownership.

Casey believed that a business owned by its managers would create an entity whose employees think and act as partners rather than employees. "The basic principle which I believe has contributed more than any other to the building of our business . . . is the ownership of our company by the people employed by it," he said at a 1955 managers meeting.

Casey urged employees at every level to learn to drive a route and deliver packages to help them understand the operation.

Once a driver or package handler was promoted to supervisor, he or she became a partner and was permitted to own stock, which could be sold back to UPS upon retirement. Most supervisors own shares, and it was an intense debate in 1999 when UPS opted to sell 10% of its shares to the public.

Casey rewarded loyalty in other ways too, steadily promoting efficient workers. William Bixby, briefly profiled in the 1947 New Yorker article, worked his way up from a car washer to a driver, eventually becoming a vice president in charge of UPS' fleet of vehicles. The current vice president of investor relations, Teresa Finley, joined in 1984 as an accountant, working her way up to her current post.

As UPS grew, Casey shunned the spotlight, preferring to share the credit with others. He told the author of the 1947 New Yorker article, "No single individual should be given a disproportionate share of the credit for the development of UPS." Twenty years later he still followed that mantra. "I've had the spotlight far too much. Others, now active on their jobs, deserve it more than I," he said in the 1968 in-house newsletter.

Casey died at age 95, just a few months after leaving the board of UPS. The company now employs more than 407,000 and serves 7.9 million regular daily shipping customers worldwide.

 


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