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How a little-known executive revolutionized the delivery business
James E. Casey was a most improbable revolutionary. Shy and soft-spoken, in his day he was all but unknown to the public at large. Drawing little attention to himself, he laid the foundation of an industry that is fundamental to the modern world economy—the industry that manages businesses’ long-distance supply chains and allows consumers to obtain almost anything from anywhere with just a credit card and a couple of days’ patience.
In The UPS Man, Marc Levinson provides the first-ever biography of the self-taught executive who started a bicycle messenger service in 1907 and built it into a giant of modern logistics. Casey was associated with United Parcel Service for seventy-six years, introducing innovation after innovation into the stodgiest of industries as UPS conquered the retail delivery market, then reshaped itself into the first company able to collect packages from hundreds of thousands of senders and deliver them when promised to recipients far away, and then changed itself yet again to move parcels around the globe. That more than three hundred thousand packages are delivered somewhere in the world every minute of every day is a monument to Casey’s accomplishments.
While Casey was an inspiring leader, he was also a ferocious competitor and a demanding boss. Under his leadership, UPS frequently acted in ways that it prefers not to include in its corporate mythology. Some of these actions were dubious. Others were flat-out illegal. Certainly some of these actions might not make current employees proud, yet were indispensable to UPS’s emergence as a powerful force in freight transportation. Drawing on previously neglected sources, The UPS Man offers a nuanced portrait of an entrepreneur and executive whose obsession with small parcels still affects our lives today.
— Daniel Stanton, DBA (“Mr. Supply Chain”), author of Supply Chain Management For Dummies and Supply Chain 5.0
"Jim Casey started a modest messenger service (on bicycles and on foot) in 1907. This was the beginning of UPS, the giant parcel and logistics company. It serves 200 countries, delivering over 20 million packages a day around the world. This is the story of a modest man that created a giant delivery company."
— Yossi Sheffi, Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems, MIT
"We live in an age of overnight delivery and frictionless commerce, and most of us have no idea who made it possible. Marc Levinson's portrait of James Casey is a fascinating reminder that the logistical revolutions reshaping our world were built by quiet, determined leaders who thought in decades, not quarters. A timely and important book."
— Rita McGrath, author of The End of Competitive Advantage
"Marc Levinson has the unique ability to piece together mundane artifacts of history to put together an engrossing story about one of the companies and services that we rely on every day – parcel delivery and the story behind UPS. It is a fascinating read for anybody interested in supply chains and logistics and is one that lends historical perspective to a company that many people take for granted."
— Willy Shih, author of Producing Prosperity, Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaisance,
"Marc Levinson writes business history the way it should be written. Rather than searching backward in the past for the roots of UPS’s success, he tracks the myriad of decisions its founders made—sometimes successful, sometimes not, sometimes admirable, sometimes not—as they confronted obstacles posed by the competitive and regulatory environments in which they operated. The result is a surprising history that has much new to tell us about the evolution of American business in the twentieth century."
— Naomi Lamoreaux, author of Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England