COMPANY MAN
David Abney in uniform for one of his first
UPS jobs, in Mississippi, in 1977.
e-commerce battle and the longer
hours it demands. Amazon and
FedEx use lower-paid contractors
for many home deliveries. Abney
says that some UPSers told him
that the company should just
let big customers hire their own
contractors for weekend deliver-
ies. “My answer was, ‘Hey, we’re
not gonna have to worry about
Monday through Friday either if
we don’t transform to seven days
a week,’ ” he says.
At a company known for its in-
house nurturing of talent, Abney’s
willingness to hire outside the
ranks no longer seems as jarring
as it once did. One-third of UPS’s
12-person senior management
team is now made up of outsid-
ers, including Price. “I don’t know
what that number might be five
years from now,” Abney says. But
he emphasizes that he’s an “avid
supporter” of promoting from
within and that he’s supplement-
ing, not replacing, the practice.
Despite the growing pains,
UPS is maintaining its lead in
the delivery wars—and Abney’s
moves may well help the company
sustain it. Amazon is likely to
remain more of an opportunity
for UPS than a true threat, at least
for the next few years. Dave Clark,
Amazon’s senior vice president
of North America operations, is
spearheading the delivery push,
which he’s said may take three
to five more years to come to
fruition. “It’s a fun space to be in
for the next few years,” he told
Amazon workers at a recent staff
gathering, reported by Business
Insider. But as of now, the Seattle
juggernaut has a fleet of 20,000
trailers, an equal number of local
delivery vans, and fewer than 50
planes; UPS has five or six times
as many vans and owns five
times as many planes.
What’s more, Amazon’s deci-
sions to offer more next-day de-
liveries and to dump FedEx have
benefited UPS financially while
reinforcing Abney’s transforma-
tion plan, says Hartford, the Baird
analyst. He expects the mutually
beneficial coexistence to persist
for quite some time. “Amazon
has given UPS the opportunity to
make their network more flexible
and profitable,” he says.
As it turns out, working for
Amazon may make UPS even
better at competing with Amazon.
Abney says UPS is taking what it
learned from making Amazon’s
e-commerce deliveries more ef-
ficient and using those lessons to
help all its other retail customers,
especially smaller and midsize
businesses. “The real key is to help
them compete with Amazon,”
Abney says. “We would never sacri-
fice the ability to meet the needs of
those customers based on any one
customer. It’s all about balance.”
UPS is known for its
in-house nurturing
of talent, but Abney
has been willing to
reach outside the
ranks for key hires.
COURTESY OF UPS
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