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This was not my first close encounter with a wild Alaskan bear. Each meeting was a visceral experience, evoking wonder, awe and fear. The beasts were ever breathtaking, yet deadly. All sinew, fur and teeth, these were nature’s most ruthless hunting machines.

The beast before me was a polar bear. Ursus maritimus, the lethal arctic ghost. My mind raced, my pulse quickened. What to do? Fight or flight? Play dead? No, there could be only choice: the baby bottle.

Alright, I’m no Steve Irwin. Or Jim Fowler. I’m not even Marlin Perkins, who sat in the Wild Kingdom TV studio while Jim did all the dangerous stuff in the field. My previous Alaska bear encounters were in a hotel parking lot and behind a fence at a wildlife refuge. But I did see them, they were close, and the legends will continue to grow!

But back to the polar bear cub. She’s fierce, as in fiercely adorable. Her name is Qannik (pronounced Ken-nick), which is native for Snowflake. It’s also the name of the oil field where she was found. She’s five months old, weighs 50 pounds, has soft white fur and black button eyes; and UPS just helped move her from Alaska to Louisville, Ky.

Qannik somehow got lost from her mother in mid-April near Alaska’s northern coast. Alaska Fish and Wildlife experts rescued her and took her to the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage until they could find a permanent home for her.

After a rigorous, global selection process, that home was determined to be the new Glacier Run arctic exhibit at the Louisville Zoo.

Of course, that created a Qannik quandary. How would this endangered little bear travel several thousand miles from Anchorage to Louisville? Well, it just so happens that Louisville is the home of UPS Airlines. And Anchorage is UPS Airlines’ jumping off point for Asia. We fly multiple jumbo jets between the two cities every day.

Now, ordinarily, we only ship living things under very specific conditions. But we do love a logistical challenge and a good cause. So, we decided to make a rare exception and agreed to move the cub to Louisville. Under the code name Operation Snowflake, UPS assembled a team of about 20 logistics experts, ranging from veterinarians to pilots to load handling experts.

Led, by my esteemed colleague Jackie Blair, the team spent a feverish three weeks coordinating a myriad of details: finding and assembling safe crating for Qannik; creating a 30,000-foot den suitable for a 747-400; devising special handling methods; scheduling the aircraft; determining special flight routing; obtaining government permits; arranging security; shipping veterinary supplies, etc., etc. etc.

Have you ever sat in a meeting about absorbing pads for in-flight bear urine? I now have.

I’ve also had the privilege of working with many of the logistics experts on the team for years, so I knew every detail of Qannik’s big adventure would be properly addressed. And they were.

On June 27, we gently put Qannik in her portable den at Alaska Zoo, caravanned her to the UPS cargo facility at the Anchorage airport, and put her aboard our polar bear express flight to Louisville. Qannik spent the 5 ½ hour trip resting comfortably in her crate, arriving at Worldport, our international air hub, at about 2 a.m.

After we arrived in Louisville, the precious package was delivered to her new Kentucky home at the Louisville Zoo, where Qannik will be in quarantine for a short time before enjoying the southern hospitality of her state-of-the-art exhibit.

As for my next outdoor adventure? My wife says it’ll probably involve a lawnmower and the tall grass in the backyard. 

Interested in more on the polar bear cub and how we moved her? Check out the attached video.

Could a pricing gun be wielded as a weapon? When I was a poor college student, I thought so every semester at book-buying time.

I knew $60 for the new edition of the medieval history textbook was a ripoff. As an honors student, I was pretty sure medieval history hadn’t changed in, like, a thousand years.

Then there was the business class where we had to buy a $50 textbook at the beginning of the semester – just to tide us over until the professor’s own text came out at mid-term, at another $50. The good news is, both books said pretty much the same thing, so at least our professor knew what he was talking about!

After tuition and living expenses, textbooks are often the single largest cost for college students. Hundreds of dollars a semester are the norm. One former Iowa State University student, Aayush Phumbrha, was so unhappy with the high cost of textbooks that he decided to do something about it. He launched a business.

In 2007, Phumbrha started Chegg.com, an online bookstore that allows students to rent textbooks rather than buy them. Phumbrha says that a $100 book typically rents for $35 to $45.

Chegg, number one in online textbook rentals, has a catalog of millions of books. They also feature fast shipping and free returns, provided by their friends at UPS.

Chegg established its main warehouse near Louisville International Airport in Shepherdsville, Kentucky to be in close proximity to UPS’s main air hub, Worldport. Chegg’s location allows it to deliver student’s orders quickly and efficiently within the requested shipping time.

And Chegg shares UPS’s passion for sustainability. Their bright orange boxes are reusable, and they plant a tree for every book purchased. To date, they’ve planted over 3 million trees worldwide tougher with their tree planting partner, American Forests.

All of those trees beg a philosophical question from my liberal arts education: If a tree doesn’t fall in the forest because a college student got a really good deal from an online textbook rental company, shouldn’t you look into how UPS can help you get your business idea out of the woods?

Want to learn more about Chegg and UPS? Check out this video we did last year.

Want to see a shooting star every two minutes? Come out to Louisville International Airport (SDF) around midnight. When you peer into the night sky, its deep blackness is perforated by twinkling points of light stretching to the horizon.

Then you’ll notice something — the lights are moving, rapidly coming right at you. What is this astrological phenomenon? A close encounter? Some kind of cometpallooza? Nope, it’s the nightly arrival of the UPS air fleet at Worldport.

About a hundred times each night, those shooting stars transform from a distant glimmer to 65 tons of global commerce touching down at SDF, a million shipments ready for sorting, processing and otherwise distributing to 200 countries and territories around the world.

The 2 million metric tonnes of cargo that UPS flew into SDF in 2009 have made the airport a star in its own right – a star on the rise.

Louisville International now ranks as the world’s seventh busiest cargo airport, jumping up two spots in the recently released annual ranking by the Airports Council International.

Louisville is a great case study about the benefits of global commerce. Among other benefits, engagement in the world economy creates jobs, improves education and enhances healthcare.

In Kentucky, UPS air express operations have created nearly 30,000 jobs. Over 10,000 residents of the Bluegrass have participated in our Metropolitan College program, which pays full college tuition for students who work in overnight operations at Worldport. And Louisville’s booming medical sector is now reaping the further benefits of our growing healthcare logistics services.

It’s all enough to put stars in your eyes!

Sometimes, business decisions are painful. This is the case as UPS Airlines begins furloughing pilots this week.

We understand the impact of furloughs on our employees and their families, which is why we spent the past year working exhaustively with the pilots’ union on voluntary alternatives to save jobs, such as short-and long-term leaves of absences and job sharing.

UPS is not a culture where job cuts are the norm. This pilot furlough is the first in our 22 years as an airline. Our thoughts go out to the crewmembers involved, as well as the 15 million Americans seeking work in this still-challenging economy.

Simply stated, we are undertaking this furlough because we have more crewmembers than we need to operate our airline.

• Due to permanent fleet retirements, we are flying 48 fewer aircraft than we used to.
• We are operating fewer flights as we continue to feel the impact of the recent recession.
• And the Federal Aviation Administration’s 2007 ruling that changed mandatory pilot retirement age from 60 to 65 has allowed many of our senior crewmembers to remain on the payroll. 

We have absorbed quite a few pilots into our active fleet types, such as retraining about 100 former DC-8 crewmembers. At an average employment cost of $185,000, crewmember salaries are an expensive cost factor. In any economic condition, it’s tough to keep staff when the work is not available.

We remain in belt-tightening mode at UPS. Even though the economy has begun to recover, conditions remain fragile, and we still need to watch our costs. This pilot furlough is just one example of $1.4 billion in cuts – ranging from capital expenditure reductions to management salary freezes – that UPS has undertaken in the past year.

No one wanted this furlough, but it’s the decision we needed to make to sustain our business. We look forward to better days in the future, when business conditions improve to a level that will allow us to bring our crewmembers back into the UPS fold.

I have been guilty of bombast. But sometimes, I just can’t help it. When your topic is larger than life, it’s easy to get a little overblown. Worldport, our all-points international air hub, is definitely one of those subjects.

When Worldport opened in Louisville in 2002, I wrote: “You are looking, ladies and gentlemen, … at the Versailles of global commerce. The Biltmore of shipping technology. The St. Peters of innovation.” How’s that for big talk, for bombastically bold brick-and-mortar braggadocio?

Well, in the words of another larger-than-life Louisville figure, Muhammad Ali, “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.” And Worldport can live up to those comparisons, now more than ever.

This April, UPS finished a four-year, $1 billion expansion of our high-tech air hub, and its mammoth measurements are now even more ginormous. We enhanced Worldport’s sort capacity by 37 percent, from 304,000 packages per hour to 416,000. We increased its footprint 30 percent, from 4 million square feet to 5.2 million square feet under roof. We increased the conveyor belt miles 41 percent, from 110 to 155 miles.

We set a very tight construction timeline, came in ahead of schedule, under budget, and with recognized programs for safety and employing minority and women-owned construction vendors.

Throughout all the upgrades, Worldport has remained a technological wonderland in which packages are smart enough to sort themselves in just 13 minutes over a network of 31,000 conveyors. Its brain knows exactly where each package is at all times and can process 59 million database transactions per hour.

Hard to get your head around all these colossal numbers? Think of it metaphorically – Worldport is basically a massive computer, like the one you use to access UPS.com to track a package or schedule a pickup. But instead of being a 10” x 12” laptop with an air card and thumb drive as peripherals, it measures 7.1 miles in perimeter and interfaces with 70 aircraft.

Darn, that was a little bombastic, wasn’t it?

It’s a must-see television event, a sweeping tale showcasing man’s epic struggle against nature, high-tech gadgetry, international big business and a nation’s army on the move.

Sounds like pretty good TV, huh? What is it, you ask? The latest blockbuster from Jerry Bruckheimer? A two-hour “McGyver?” A very special episode of “Blossom?”

Actually, it’s the latest installment of the History Channel’s excellent series, “Modern Marvels,” and it features Worldport, UPS’s international air hub. Starting tonight, the show will air on cable and it might be worth your while to watch.

Periodically, UPS is approached by documentary channels about shows featuring our complex global operations. We love to showcase Worldport, our air fleet, our Supply Chain Solutions capabilities and some of our special deliveries.

It’s always fun, but it’s always challenging, too. Imagine following a cardboard box through the guts of a 5.2 million-square-foot supercomputer in the middle of the night when there’s no time for re-takes.

We’ve had to figure out how to put cameras in boxes flying down belts, drive Segway scooters down tight sorting aisles and deal with matters of state, like we did to get footage of our international shipment of China’s Terra Cotta warriors (one of the topics of the Modern Marvels episode, by the way).

Between the scouting, coordinating people and resources and shooting, we’re usually talking 16- or 18-hour production days.  But hey, around-the-clock logistics is the business UPS is in, right? And the work is always cool. Or, in the case of the Modern Marvels shoot, downright cold.

On the January night we shot the piece, Louisville was hit with a blast of arctic air that drove temperatures down near zero. (For those of you not on the Fahrenheit scale, this translates to “oh my goodness, I can’t feel anything below my knees” degrees.)

Of course, Worldport serves customers all over the globe in all kinds of weather — no thermometer has a measure for a service guarantee. To combat the extreme elements, we have snow melters and de-icers; we implement elaborate bad weather operating plans, and, of course, we dress accordingly.

To stay warm, the key is to layer. I usually wear my winter running gear under my work clothes and parka. Sometimes, if it’s going to be really frigid, I top everything off with my ramp coveralls — think Randy from “A Christmas Story.”

Of course, a successful layering strategy involves actually having layers. That was the problem our History Channel producer was experiencing that 3-degree night. Lawrence and his windbreaker had come from southern California, where it had been 80 (pass me the lemonade and suntan lotion, please) degrees when he left.

Now, Lawrence was a great guy and clearly talented at what he did.  But his light jacket wasn’t exactly up to the 77-degree temperature swing. We were supposed to be working on an episode of “Modern Marvels,” but he probably felt like he was working on “Ice Road Truckers.” Indeed, the marvel that bitter night wasn’t Worldport, but that we were able to complete the shoot.

True to the UPS spirit, though, Lawrence proved to be a trooper. He hung tough and was able to get some really great footage and interviews.

I can’t wait to see the finished episode, entitled “Deliver It,” when it starts airing soon. If you’d like to see it, too, check your local TV listings and pull up a chair in front of the History Channel. You won’t even need longjohns!

“One good turn deserves another.”  I’m sure you are familiar with that old proverb. Well, at UPS, we have recycled that old saying: “One right turn deserves another … and another … and another.”

We’ve proven that three right turns are often more fuel-efficient than one left, and we’ve reengineered our entire delivery network around this green idea.

We also believe strongly in multiple right (or good) turns through our charitable activities, with the environment being one of our primary areas of focus.

In my hometown of Louisville, Ky., we’ve aligned ourselves the past two years with Brightside, a public/private nonprofit that unites people in clean and green activities to beautify the city and foster community pride.

In the spring and fall, we are sponsoring Brightside’s Community Cleanup. We like to say “Big Brown is going green in the Bluegrass.” Our employees are among the 7,500 volunteers who hit the streets to pick up tons of food wrappers, beverage containers, cigarette butts and other trash carelessly strewn around the city.

Personally, I’ve scoured sidewalks, policed up park grounds and passed out poplar saplings for Brightside. It’s a dirty job, but it can sure help clean your conscience.

And it doesn’t take that much time to make a difference in the environment. That’s something we’ve demonstrated recently as an airline when we began slowing down our flights from Louisville to the U.S. West Coast. We’re flying these three- and four-hour flights two to 11 minutes slower than we used to – with no impact to our customers.

A few minutes doesn’t sound like much, right? Well, those couple of minutes are saving us millions of dollars each year, significantly reducing fuel burn and curbing jet engine emissions.

A few minutes can make a big difference. Have you considered making a few minutes for some right turns in your community?

In the 1970 stop-motion Christmas classic “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” Kris Kingle saves the day by singing the song “One Foot In Front of the Other” and saving Sombertown from the evil Winter Warlock and Burgermeister Meisterburger. Quite literally, that song is music to the ears of Zappos, the e-retailer best known for selling shoes on the Internet.

Of course, there is no stop motion during the busy holiday shipping season for Zappos and UPS, when the two businesses work together like Santa and his elves to serve millions of customers from Zappos’ end-of-runway location near Worldport.