United Parcel Service Culture
Dusty Atwood
Texas A&M University Central Texas
November 23, 2014
Organizational Behavior

The United Parcel Service, or UPS, is a shipping juggernaut with an annual revenue in excess of fifty billion dollars and nearly fifteen million packages shipped daily. To give you an idea of just how big this shipping giant actually is “UPS looks at the world from the prospective of the world’s largest package delivery company. Two percent of the global GDP passes through our system every day.” (Kuehn 2014) In the field of shipping UPS has remained profitable and relevant in the one hundred plus years since it was founded, but how has it remained amongst the top performers in this field? The organizational culture of the company may be able to answer this.

The Cultural Artifacts of UPS
The artifacts of the United Parcel Service are many and varied, but one above the rest stands alone, that being the color brown. The color itself has been used in much of the other symbology and artifacts of the shipping giant. UPS uses a specific shade of brown which is called Pullman brown. At the time of UPS’s inception in the early twentieth century the height of luxury cross country travel was done by rail. The most luxurious of all the rail line cars were made by the Pullman Palace Car Company, as such brown was associated with luxury. One addition benefit of the color brown for over the road vehicle that frequently travels unimproved roads is that it easily hides dirt and road grime. The color brown has been used in the as a major portion of the marketing strategy of UPS, even so far as using it in a very successful slogan, “What Can Brown Do For You?” You can find their distinctive Pullman brown color in almost everything UPS related, from the uniforms the employees wear, to the vehicles that they drive.
Another unique artifact of the