Rosemary Turner

The big idea:

Education as a bedrock business strategy.

"UPSers are planners," Turner explains. "Our whole focus is on how are we going to build knowledge capacity."

Even part-time employees at UPS Inc. receive a higher-education benefit of $3,000 a year, starting on day one. Full-time workers can spend $5,200 a year on classes, up to a $25,000 total.

Depending on the semester, 35 percent to 50 percent of local UPS employees are enrolled in a class - some taught at the company's package-handling facility at Philadelphia International Airport.

The dividends: One is employee loyalty. The average UPS employee in the Philadelphia area stays with the company for a decade.

And loyal, educated employees are innovators, Turner said. The firm's vaunted tracking system and the "diad board" (Delivery Information Acquisition Device) that drivers carry with them to log deliveries both were invented by UPS workers.

"All kinds of the logistical things that we have come up with were the brainchild of UPSers," Turner said. "We believe that people capital is the primary source of our engine that grows us."

She is exhibit A-plus: Turner, who now runs UPS's largest regional division, first joined the company as a part-time telephone operator.

Later, after graduating with a degree in accounting from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, she drove a UPS truck - a stepping-stone on the job track for many management trainees.

"If you're going to work in operations, as I do - and I love this sandbox, by the way - you want to have driven a package car, because the first thing any driver in brown says to you when you walk up in a suit is: 'Have you ever driven a package car?' "

Note that she did not say truck. "We don't like the word," Turner explained. "It connotes that we're just hauling, and we don't think like that. We think of it as moving commerce."

Bob is her copilot: "I have a fabulous husband, Robert, who I really, really like," she said. "Love is automatic, but I really like my husband."

Turner has relocated five times in the last 12 years, to both North and South Dakota, among other outposts. Robert, who is director of development for an information-technology company, gamely pulled up stakes each time. "He's a trouper," she said.

The secret to her success: "I did what my mother told me, quite honestly," she said.

The message from mom was to excel. "My mother didn't allow B.S.," Turner said. In high school, she was nominated for senior class president. "My mother said: 'You should be school president.' "

Ambition, pass it on: Turner belongs to Business Leaders for Education in the 21st Century, a consortium founded by Lisa Nutter that pairs executives with high school students and faculty members as mentors and advisers.

"We are committed to arming our young adults with what it's going to take to take over our jobs," Turner said.

She is also a member of the CEO Council for Growth and sits on the executive committees of the Chamber of Commerce, the United Way and the Urban League.

Big idea she wishes she had had: The personal computer.

Another dream, sadly dashed, is to be a pop diva.

Through an Urban League initiative called the Black Executive Exchange Program, Turner often speaks to students at historically black colleges. "I always start out by telling them, 'I wish I could have been Beyonce, but for some reason the Lord did not give me those pipes and those moves, so I've got to work for a living. I've got to work hard at it.' "