The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force that Transforms Performance

10. Subcultures and Global Strategies

United Parcel Service’s foray into Germany, its first outside North America, in 1976 was accompanied by high hopes at company headquarters in Greenwich, Connecticut. After all, the German market was growing, and UPS’s biggest potential competitor, the Deutsche Bundespost, “didn’t care much about service.”¹ Germans were perceived as having much the same work ethic and basic values that had made UPS so successful in the United States. These qualities included punctuality; industry; the ability to work in a carefully engineered “time and motion” process consistent with the philosophy of “Taylorism,” which was popular at the time the company was founded in the early twentieth century; and strong loyalty to the ...