Five questions with the new president of UPS, Europe

Daniel Carrera talks about leading UPS’s largest region outside the U.S.
d_hero_1440x752_CarreraEUR.jpg tablet_768x760_CarrerraEUR.jpg m_hero_1023x960_CarrerraEUR.jpg

Daniel Carrera is responsible for managing operations and more than 50,000 UPSers across 56 countries and territories. He’s UPS’s second European president and first ever Spanish national.

How would you describe your leadership style?

Customer driven, highly inclusive. I expect all of my team to share my mission to keep the customer front of mind in all we do. Inclusion is critical. Creating an environment where inclusion can thrive is essential.

You can see it every day in any UPS facility. Diversity expands our pool of ideas and makes us more creative and able to respond to circumstances. It helps us anticipate the needs of our customers.

Europe is culturally diverse, and its cities are home to hundreds of languages from all over the world. The diversity of our workforce is an asset – it’s what enables us to connect with an equally diverse set of customers and businesses who count on us to keep moving the world forward by delivering what matters.

We’ve heard the term “inclusive trade” used by UPS as it grows its network. Tell us what that means to you.

I’ve worked to see UPS play an important role in supporting small business growth across the region with initiatives such as the Women Exporters Program in Turkey, which helped over 600 women entrepreneurs, manufacturers and cooperative ventures.

Small and medium-sized businesses represent 99% of all businesses in the EU and in many sectors account for more than 50% of total exports, according to the European Commission.

These small businesses are big sources of growth – and I want my teams to keep servicing that growth and helping that growth.

Tell us a little bit about how vaccine delivery has worked and how the smart global logistics network served the world from Europe.

UPS was involved in the fight against COVID-19 from the very beginning – really, the very beginning. The UPS Foundation shipped 2 million masks to Wuhan in January of last year while the rest of the world was considering the impact of what was yet to be declared a pandemic.

Fast forward to the first vaccine deliveries to Canada and you see a commonality: Our smart global logistics network was up … running and ready. The shipment to Canada went through Europe region’s crown jewel, our air hub in Cologne. Imagining a global response to this pandemic without UPS’s European hub just isn’t possible.

Years of investment in our healthcare network and months of planning and preparation meant we were able to deliver the first shipments of the vaccines across the U.S., Canada, Europe and parts of Asia. Our partners trust our network. We can provide real-time tracking and monitoring, with the ability to pinpoint the location of critical healthcare packages to within meters.

Our European operations, including our UPS Healthcare campus and freezer farms in the Netherlands, have been at the heart of this effort. We’re part of a global coalition delivering vaccines on an unprecedented scale. It’s an honor to be a part of the road to recovery.

Moving our world forward by delivering what matters. What does UPS’s purpose statement mean to you and how you plan to run operations in Europe?

Whenever you make any major change, in business or in life, you have to figure out what matters. The purpose statement was launched last year in the middle of the pandemic, and we have been living by it ever since. And our purpose has never been so compelling.

UPSers have operated as essential workers on the front lines, from delivering laptops for students at home, protective equipment for front-line workers, products for small businesses that suddenly moved their sales online, to life-saving vaccines.

Looking to the future, we have an essential role to play in Europe’s sustainable post-pandemic recovery. But to do so we must be ambitious in our thinking. And our actions.

We know we have a lot to do.

We’ll help the 50,000 UPSers across Europe feel empowered to develop new strategies and solutions. The world is changing before us at an unprecedented rate and to keep it moving forward we must innovate our role as partners to our customers.

Lots of business leaders talk about it, but what does sustainability mean to you?

Climate change affects every corner of our world, and we need to empower and accelerate climate action worldwide in the communities where we work and live. Europe is a leader here.

Creating and investing in sustainable solutions, and the kind of innovative thinking that entails, plays an important role in any business … stirring creativity, efficiency and collaboration.

We launched our first eBike delivery pilot in Hamburg, Germany, back in 2012. Today, we’re working on more than 30 urban logistics projects in cities worldwide. The Hamburg project dispelled myths that sustainability would come at the cost of performance and efficiency. Just look at our new hub in Barcelona, our first facility in Europe to meet LEED energy efficiency standards. It sorts 22,000 packages per hour – more than 2.5 times the facility it replaced.

Now we need to accelerate our efforts. I’m particularly excited by our partnership with Arrival and what the future holds for our fleet, but there are other areas where we can find meaningful gains in terms of not only sustainability, but business performance too.

Let me be clear: Climate action is not just the right thing to do – it makes business sense.v

Related Stories