Yellow, which used to advertise primarily in trade journals, is going to great lengths these days to make its brand more visible. The company has produced its first-ever television ads; the "Yes we can" spot features Ray Simon, a truck driver in St. Cloud, Minnesota, who won the 2001 National Truck Driving Championships, making him the event's only three-time champion. Yellow also sponsors a racing team in NASCAR's Busch Series. Beyond network exposure that Reid estimates is worth about $5 million in equivalent advertising, Team Yellow Racing has proven popular with customers and employees alike. For a ground transportation company with about 20,000 union members, says Reid, "This is a big deal."

Apparently, so is wearing orange. Employees don't just wear shirts featuring the Yellow logo to the office or the terminal. Some of them wear more orange than the students at Syracuse University and Clemson University combined. (Why, you ask, does a company named "Yellow" choose orange as its official color? When A.J. Harrell asked DuPont for the color that would be most visible -- and presumably safest -- on the road, Harrell was given "swamp-holly orange.") Without a doubt, vice president Mike Brown is the Cal Ripken Jr. of Yellow fashion. Brown has worn orange socks to work nearly every day -- "99% of the time," he says -- since October 22, 1997. That was the day that he and Reid, another orange-sock devotee, made a presentation on the company's new customer-centric brand to senior management at Arrowhead Stadium. The highlight was a video called How to Kill a Business, which featured movie clips that showed the worst service imaginable. That was the old Yellow.

After going through a serious metamorphosis, the new Yellow began hosting an annual conference in Las Vegas called "Transformation." Each year, 1,000 employees and 500 customers attend workshops on change. The underlying message is that the changes at Yellow are far from over. "Now that people have gotten used to how we do things, I'll tell them, 'Well, it'll be different five years from now,' " says Zollars. "And some of them will say, 'I thought we were done.' But I don't think that you're ever done. You have to keep reinventing the company, because the market keeps changing. If you don't, you end up coasting."

Chuck Salter (csalter@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer. Learn more about Yellow on the Web (www.yellowcorp.com).

Sidebar: Road map for Reinvention

Yellow has become a different company since 1996. It is driven by CEO Bill Zollars and a frontline revolution that emphasizes the customer. The following principles are its road map for reinvention.

Share the new vision every day. Early on, Zollars spent 18 months visiting employees and explaining why and how Yellow had to focus on its customers. Zollars believed that because this was a new way of thinking, employees needed to hear it more than once. They also needed to hear it directly from him so that they could gauge his conviction. "If the people doing the work don't believe what's coming from the leadership," he says, "it doesn't get implemented. Period."

Avoid behavior that undermines the mission. When a new leader joins an organization, actions tend to get magnified, for better or for worse. "For every negative thing you demonstrate to people, it takes 50 positive things to overcome it," Zollars says.

Get out of the office. During his first year at Yellow, Zollars spent most of his time in the field. "It's the only place where you find out what's really going on with customers and operations without any filters," he says. "At headquarters, you don't hear any of the bad stuff."

Don't be afraid to tell the truth. Zollars uses an employee newsletter, YFS Week, to give the staff an honest assessment of its performance and the industry on a regular basis. "We don't just talk about victories. We talk about losing business, about claims problems. We want to give a clear picture of where we were."