Eskew: We celebrated our 94th anniversary this year. Jim Casey, the founder of UPS, was a teenager when he founded this company. His father died a few years earlier and he had to care for his two younger brothers and a younger sister. He had to work hard just to put enough food on the table. This experience formed the values that UPS is still bonded to: integrity, trustworthiness, excellent and diligent services. 94 years of trust means a lot to us. We do new things today, like supply chain management, but our values haven't changed: Integrity and excellence are still at the core of all we do: In a field stock location like Atlanta Airport, we have Compaq, IBM, Apple and Dell computers side by side, but each of our clients can be absolutely sure that we don't share any information with anybody else. We are an innovative company, we move fast and can change fast, but those anchors that our founder inspired still give us the guidance and formula to make the right decisions.

Eskew: A lot of our staff, workers as well as managers, have been here for nearly 30 years. They have learned this business from the ground up. That's the fundamental part of it. We do our best never to overpromise and undercommit and, as set out in our value charter, "to take each customer and each delivery as serious as if it were our only one."

Eskew: We strive to be a responsible and well-regarded employer by providing our people with an impartial, rewarding, and cooperative environment with the opportunity for advancement. We strongly believe that people do their best when they feel pride in their contributions, when they are treated with dignity, and when their talents are encouraged to flourish in an environment that embraces diversity. I think they believe in what we do and how we do it. Whether in Germany or in China, whether in the UK or in France, you see that same spirit. From time to time, top management goes out to help delivering packages. This way we get to see how valuable a driver is to his customers, to the community. Secondly we experience that people understand the value of service, the value of a delivery of an urgent package. We are trying to enable global commerce in a very personal, maybe even intimate way. With no tricks and no fuss, we try to make our customers better businesses. That is an easy spirit to catch.

Eskew: Things like honesty and integrity you either have or you don't have. The kind of things we really stress are that our customers' information is important and that the things we do are important - that's part of the way we train our people from their first day on.

Eskew: Jim Kelly's been giving me good advice for 22 years, and the advice Jim gave me 22 years ago and what he tells me today is pretty consistent: Do the right thing, not the easy thing and not the cheap thing, and not the one that's going to make you look good. Don't be afraid to make a change if you need to make a change. Take care of the people and the organization. Basically there are 360,000 people working at this company. I'm just one of those people and like them I'm going to keep on doing things the way that we learned a long time ago.

Eskew: Let me tell you a story to illustrate what I mean. Some years ago, when I was head of industrial engineering for our air business, one day I got a phone call. American Airlines was selling its fleet of 747s. They were getting out of the cargo business and we had the chance to buy six freighters, but we had to take all or none and we had to decide right away. There was nobody around, it was early morning, and the planes cost $25 million each. I decided to go ahead with the deal, though I couldn't sleep or eat for a couple of days, but the partners here backed me and made it all work. We quickly built up a network planning group for all our aircraft schedules. We generated more business. Now we own 336 planes and we lease another 384 or so small aircraft. In fact we're the eleventh largest airline in the world. But it all started with that snap decision, backed up by partnership. Basically that's what partnership at UPS is all about.

Eskew: It certainly is. I think that's what makes us special. Recently the CEO of a well known major corporation wrote a personal letter to our CEO. Basically, it said "You made my day! My wife ordered something and it was going to be late but your driver handled it first class. Thank you." This person who makes multi-billion dollar decisions, chooses to use us for a lot of business reasons and because of what we did for his wife. That probably meant as much to him as anything. And our driver intuitively made the right decision.

Eskew: We make sure people understand that the things they do matter. The challenge for us is to demonstrate that they are important, each one of them. Whether they wash a package car, drive a package car, load a package car, handle technology or write programs, whatever they do, they're important. And they fit, and they link, and they create, and they drive the business together.

Eskew: Not long ago, for example, we rented an office building in Hong Kong and with the building we got 13 parking spots for the managers who worked there. Soon after, the employees asked the managers not to come in until 9 o'clock or take the bus in, because they needed the space to sort packages. Then they brought in the trucks and loaded them there. Nobody told them to do it. They just figured that they could be on the street with the customers sooner in the middle of Hong Kong than they could from other places.

Eskew: We have a charter in which we talk about our values, our mission, our strategies, and we spent a lot of time on that. Values never change. Strategy and mission may change, but values don't. We have a policy group. We have a code of business conduct. We have places for people to go if they see things that are wrong, and we encourage them to do so.

Eskew: I mean just what I say: Our values never change. Our strategies change, they change all the time. Our mission changes occasionally. Our purpose, even, has changed minimally. We used to say that we picked up and delivered packages; that essentially was our purpose. Now we're able to build up commerce. So there is a change in our purpose. But our values don't change. The things that Jim Casey taught us, they were well thought through and they still fit us today. In my opinion, one of the core tasks of top management is to keep these values alive and to pass them on from one generation to the next.

Eskew: We coach and train our people. We try to keep people in the right place, we try to work with them and give them the right mentors, and cross train them by job rotation. But of course not everybody stays for 35 or 40 years. If you want the limelight, if you want star power, this is not perhaps the place for you. We don't offer instant gratification.

Eskew: Number one, everyone has a supervisor they can go to. Number two, there is openness. You can talk to anyone - younger, older, higher, lower, and ask them questions, find out what they think about values and role models. That way you learn things. That's the value of diversity. You learn things not just from people who look like you and think like you, but from people who look different and think different. It's not just a question of male or female, or race, or ethics, but age, too. You can talk to younger people from different parts of the world and find out how they feel. Those kind of things are awfully valuable.

Eskew: Generally what they like is the fact that we're innovative and that we listen. Not long ago we had a pretty standard offering, it was all priced the same, it was all approached the same. But the innovations that we've made in the past few years have really raised our standards. Our customers develop new needs and they come to us to tell us about those needs. That's a compliment. They have confidence that we're going to solve their problem. We're going to find new ways of being innovative and fast-paced, and we're going to do it around the world.

Eskew: First we invest in and continue to grow our core business of worldwide distribution and logistics. Then we build additional competencies in the integration of goods, funds, and information flows around the globe. We harness the appropriate technology to create new services and to strengthen our operations and networks. We continually study customers' behavior, anticipate their needs, and design our products and services to exceed their expectations. We believe that attention to our customers' changing needs is central to the success of UPS.

Eskew: Yes, the trusted partner, that is the concept we like to be.

Eskew: Our strategy will change to satisfy our customers' needs. We see three key parameters. First, speed: Things are happening so quickly. Second, consumer power: consumers now have the power to call what they want, when they want it, from whoever they choose. The old-style push model in the sales sector, whereby manufacturers would simply supply goods to their dealers, has been replaced by a pull model, whereby consumers order direct from the manufacturer over the Internet, to their own specifications. Third is globalization. Our job is to bring those parameters together, while always trying to be the trusted partner that we've been for 94 years.

Eskew: Of course we need specialists in logistics or in programming. But what you find here is that all of our people at all levels are solving problems and working together in these new fields as well - thinking about what it needs to make this work. They're creative because they know we value their input.

Eskew: Many top corporations are in business just to make money. They don't take care of their employees. They don't take care of their communities. They don't spend the time that it takes to invent new solutions for customers. They are simply out to harvest the type of business they're in.

Eskew: Let me put it this way: If people would spend more time thinking about ethics and integrity, about what's going on in the community, and about taking care of their customers, that would increase consumer confidence.

Eskew: Don't misunderstand me: We pursue a lot of activities concerning corporate citizenship but the first obligation we have to the community is to make money. We've increased our work force by 86,000 people over the last ten years, and if you don't make money, you can't hire people. You can't sustain the things that we've done, and you can't create a viable economic engine that will grow this economy. There is nothing wrong with profit. We need to make money if we're going to take care of the community.

Eskew: The other side of the picture is that people are more socially aware today than they've ever been in the past and they bring those social responsibilities to work. They are environmentally concerned, they are concerned about things in other parts of the world. And we have to make sure that we are doing what we can to respond to those concerns. We also have to give our people a chance to roll up their sleeves and work in the community, rather than just give money.

Eskew: We've been donating money to the community for 50 years now through the UPS Foundation. We've had a UPS Loaned Executive Program running for about 30 years. Different executives are 'loaned' to their community for 12 weeks, working in soup kitchens or whatever, to give them a better feeling for what's going on in the community. We call it the Community Internship Program. On top of that, we've been fortunate to be associated with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the world's largest for kids at risk. Jim Casey founded it and named it after his mother. But it's important that people should not only give money but get involved, and you'll see UPS people volunteering to build homes and work in the community, and doing the kinds of things that they feel are helpful.

Eskew: You have to put the horse in front of the cart. First you have to make a profit and you have to employ people. That's where the emphasis should be. But the world that we live in today is more socially aware, and to overcome the distrust you mentioned, good corporate citizenship is a must. In our case, what we do in the community, we do for a very basic reason. We drive down every street in every town, we knock on the doors, we're the first to see the hungry, the homeless, the undereducated. We see them every day. They're the people who come to work for us, they're our future customers, those folks who live in the community. This is a 94-year-old company and 94 years from now, somebody's going to sit in this chair, thinking of all the things his predecessors did for future generations. We build on our legacy as a caring and responsible corporate citizen through the conduct of our people and company in the communities we serve.

Eskew: There are some things that we can do very well, and others that government does better. We do believe that helping the community is in our best long-term interest, but our help is project oriented and should never substitute official welfare programs.

Eskew: We have to respect different cultures, and we learn from them. It wasn't easy to begin with. When we went to Germany in 1976, I was on the initial team. We wanted to have an open door policy and the same first-name policy that we have here. But that didn't work in Germany. We thought we could impose our informality but ultimately it wasn't important. The important thing was that we, as managers, were easily approachable. We learned a lot of different things. Giving money to the community, for example, wasn't as important, because of the tight social nets in Europe, but being clean environmentally was crucial. So we modify our social emphasis according to different cultural expectations.

Eskew: I split my time into what I call five buckets. There's people, there's customers, there's shareholders, there's creating a climate for the future. And then there's self-renewal. And at the end of the month I evaluate myself in terms of one of those five buckets.

Eskew: I started with relationships in my family, and then after 29 years at UPS I can honestly say that this company has played a big part in building my personal ethics portfolio.

Eskew: People have to fit into our value system, but that does not mean we want to or can ever know them inside out. Shared values are important, but it remains fascinating to see that, although we have so much in common in so many ways, we are so different in others.

Eskew: No, I don't think so. The people I talk to like this culture, although I'm sure it's not for everyone. There are those who want to be free spirits rather than team players - and this is probably not the right place for them. But we've been very successful in attracting terrific talent to do things just the way we want to do them.