Like sports rivalries, corporate rivalries are fun. Think about the TV ad campaigns inspired by the competition between Microsoft and Apple. FORTUNE once put the Roger Enrico, who was then the CEO of PepsiCo, inside a Coke bottle on the cover of the magazine, and the Pepsi people didn’t forgive us for years.
These days, to my delight (and, I hope, yours), big companies are battling over which one is more sustainable. I’m sure Michael Dell wasn’t happy to read that Hewlett Packard landed atop Newsweek’s new sustainability rankings of the S&P 500 companies, even though Dell was right behind at No. 2. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo monitor each other’s environmental initiatives nearly as closely as they vie for shelf space at Wal-Mart, which, not coincidentally, keeps an eye on the greening of all of its suppliers.
Now UPS and FedEx, longtime and intense rivals, are going at it.
Last week, as soon as I sat down with UPSers Scott Wicker, who runs the plant engineering group and oversees sustainability, and Lynnette McIntire, director of global reputation management, to talk about UPS’s new sustainability report, they made a point of telling me that UPS is doing a more thorough job of measuring its carbon footprint than FexEd and that UPS runs a more efficient, and therefore less polluting, fleet of aircraft than its rival.
Describing UPS’s carbon-footprint rivalry with FedEx, McIntire says: “We never used to talk about the competition. We’re over that now….This is a big deal for us for a lot of reasons.”
It apparently matters to FedEx, too. The company supplied me with a quick response to UPS, which I’ve attached below. I’ve also agreed to sit down with FedEx’s sustainability people to give them a full opportunity to tell their story.
More is at stake than bragging rights. Forward-thinking customers will want to do business with the more sustainable firm. The environmental back-and-forth also ties in to a bigger reputation battle between the two firms over labor issues being fought out in Congress. (See, for example, brownbailout.com, FedEx’s anti-UPS website.”) (more…)
