Part IThe Story
On the night of February 20, 1992, a small man with a 1950s crew cut and ears that his New York Times obituarist would later liken to Alfred E. Neuman's sat across from Larry King on CNN and explained, in a nasal East Texas twang, that he did not want to be president. It was his fourth appearance on the program since 1991. He was sixty-one years old and worth something like $3 billion. King kept pressing. Was there any scenario in which he would run? Ross Perot, who had built his fortune by being quicker than everyone else to say yes, found a way to say no that sounded exactly like yes. If ordinary people signed petitions and put his name on the ballot in all fifty states, he said, he would run.
It is possible he meant it as a polite impossibility. Fifty states meant fifty sets of rules, fifty sets of deadlines, fifty sets of county clerks. New York alone would demand 20,000 signatures from voters who had not cast primary ballots, gathered in a five-week summer window, with at least 100 from each of half the state's congressional districts. The two parties had spent a century arranging things so that nobody outside them could do this without enormous money and patience. Perot had the money. Patience was another matter.
On March 12 he set up a phone bank in his Dallas office. He refused contributions larger than $5. After he appeared on The Phil Donahue Show, 18,000 calls came in at once. At one point the switchboard logged 30,000 calls in a single hour, and MCI reported more than a million in the first ten days. Volunteers answered them. Perot, who liked to say he had never in his working life employed an administrative assistant, now had a nation of them.
So there it was, in the first weeks of the most improbable presidential campaign of the century: a man who had spent forty years refusing to stand in anybody's line, who had quit the Navy partly because he could not bear waiting in the queue for promotion, who had walked out of IBM and later General Motors because the people in charge would not listen fast enough, asking millions of strangers to line up behind him. By May 25, Time would put him on its cover under the words "Waiting for Perot," a nod to Beckett's play about a man who never comes. Perot came, and left, and came back again. The waiting was the part he never learned.
By the Numbers
The Arithmetic of an Independent
77Times EDS was turned down before winning its first contract
$1,000Seed capital for EDS, supplied by Margot Perot
$65,000Perot's annual salary, unchanged from the 1968 IPO to the 1984 sale to GM
$445MPaper value of his EDS stake erased on April 22, 1970
$700MGM's 1986 buyout to get him off its board
19,743,821Votes cast for Perot in 1992 (18.9% of the total)
0Electoral votes won, in two presidential campaigns
Two Names and One Pair of Shoes
He was not born Ross. The boy who arrived in Texarkana on June 27, 1930 — in a town that sits astride the Texas-Arkansas line, as if it too had never decided which side it was on — was named Henry Ray Perot. He later took the name of an older brother, Gabriel Ross Perot Jr., who had died as a toddler in 1927, and became Henry Ross. In his twenties he changed the pronunciation of the surname as well, from the family's PEE-roe to puh-ROE, because, he said, he was tired of correcting people. The press eventually attached an initial to the front of it all — H. Ross — and he never liked that one. Two self-revisions, then. Both accepted. The third, imposed from outside, resented for the rest of his life.
His father, Gabriel Ross Perot, was a cotton broker and a horse trader, a man of contracts and handshakes. The son was working by seven, selling garden seeds door to door, and later breaking horses for his father at a dollar a head, which is how he broke his nose. At twelve he took a Texarkana Gazette route on horseback through the poor neighborhoods other carriers avoided, soliciting subscriptions and building the route from nothing for the extra commissions. He did well enough that his boss tried to cut those commissions. The boy went over the man's head, to the publisher. The boss backed off. File that away. It is the first recorded instance of Ross Perot deciding that the chain of command was a suggestion.
He joined the Boy Scouts at twelve and made Eagle in thirteen months, in 1942, a pace that became part of the striver's legend. His teachers, according to the Times, attributed his good grades less to brilliance than to persistence, which would have irritated a lesser man and seems to have delighted this one. He spent the rest of his life telling audiences that average people with scar tissue beat geniuses who had never lost.
The Depression gave him his parables. Decades later, standing before students at Kansas State University in January 1995, he told one about walking into the kitchen a few days before Christmas and finding his mother crying. She never cried. "Your dad just sold his horse," she told him — the horse the boy and his father rode together every afternoon after school — so that Ross and his sister could have Christmas. The father never mentioned it. "It would not have been appropriate to talk about it," Perot said. He waited until he was a grown man to say thank you. Gabriel Perot died when his son was twenty-five.
There is a grammar to the story that never changed. The sacrifice is private. The complaint is never voiced. Money is a horse you sell for your children, and if you talk about it, you have spoiled it.
After two years at Texarkana Junior College he went to the Naval Academy in 1949, on an appointment he claimed had been telegraphed to him by W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, the former governor and senator. He was a mediocre student and was elected class president anyway, and he helped establish the Academy's honor system — a detail worth holding onto, given what came later. He graduated in 1953 and spent four years aboard a destroyer and then an aircraft carrier, sailing around the world without seeing combat. Two things about the Navy stayed with him. The first was that he, who had only ever owned one pair of shoes at a time, was issued several — "possibly my first example of government waste," he called it. The second was the line: military advancement was a queue, and he loathed queues. In the Mediterranean he walked down to a yacht basin to see, for the first time, how the very rich spent their afternoons. "Not a one of them was smiling," he recalled. He thought of family picnics in the Texas woods and concluded that the yacht owners were fools.
As a midshipman docked in Baltimore he went on a blind date with Margot Birmingham, a Goucher College student. They married in 1956. When he got out of the Navy, they drove into Dallas with everything they owned in the trunk of the car.
The Waste Was the Inventory
In 1957 Perot went to work for IBM in Dallas, selling computers, and he became, by every account, very good at it. How good depends on whom you read. One version has him filling his annual sales quota in two weeks; the Times obituary says three. The discrepancy is small and telling, the kind of thing that happens to men whose lives become campaign material — the legend accrues days off the calendar each time it is told.
What is not in dispute is that he kept walking into his supervisors' offices with ideas and they kept declining to hear them. He had noticed something that IBM, in the business of selling as many machines as possible, had no incentive to notice: its customers were using their enormously expensive computers badly. The machines sat idle. The software was an afterthought. What those customers needed was not more hardware but someone to run the hardware they had. He urged the company to get into software and technical support. The company was uninterested.
He left, and on June 27, 1962 — his thirty-second birthday — he incorporated Electronic Data Systems in Dallas. The starting capital, by his own account, was $1,000 from Margot. He was turned down seventy-seven times before landing a contract.
The early deal that survives in the company's own histories is almost comically elegant. Southwestern Life Insurance, in Dallas, had unused computer time. Collins Radio, also in Dallas and expanding quickly, needed computing it didn't have. Perot, who knew the inside of both companies from his IBM days, sold one company's slack to the other. No new machine. No new factory. Just the recognition that an idle hour on a mainframe was inventory, and that the people who owned it didn't know they owned it.
It would become the whole business. EDS pioneered what was then called facilities management, which meant, in practice, that it became the IT department for companies that didn't want one. It processed billing and payrolls, insurance claims, check-clearing for banks. And in the mid-1960s, as Lyndon Johnson's Great Society created Medicare and Medicaid, it began handling the paperwork for the federal and state programs in Texas — the first of the government contracts that made a man who would spend his political career denouncing Washington very, very rich on Washington's business. The Times noted, with some relish, that Perot did business with every administration from Johnson's onward.
— Ross Perot, Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, January 24, 1995My little company got its foot in the door and got started because we would do in 90 days what every established company in the computer industry took 18 months to do.
He had a line about this, too. God created the heavens and the earth in six days and took the seventh off. It did not take forever to do great things. The ones who needed eighteen months spent the first year planning to do it and thinking about doing it.
The Fifty-Fourth Employee
In 1966 a twenty-eight-year-old named Morton Meyerson joined EDS. He was its fifty-fourth employee.
Meyerson had been born in Fort Worth on June 3, 1938, to a Jewish family whose people had come from Belarus. His mother was a pianist who volunteered at the Fort Worth VA hospital; his father ran an insurance agency. When Mort was ten, his brother Sandy died of cancer. He played football at Paschal High, sang in the choir, was senior class president, studied economics and philosophy at the University of Texas, and served as an Army officer with a specialty in automatic data processing. The biography rhymes with Perot's almost too neatly — the small-town Texas achiever, the class presidency, the uniform, the dead brother in childhood — except for the piano, and the philosophy, and the fact that Meyerson would spend his old age giving away money to a symphony hall.
In 1967 Meyerson proposed the model that the industry would later call outsourcing — not selling a client computer time or a software package, but taking over an entire function and running it, for years, under contract. He helped Perot win and execute a contract to process Medicaid claims for Texas Blue Cross Blue Shield. The growth that followed was exponential. By 1975 EDS was booking more than $100 million a year; by 1979, when Meyerson was named president, revenue had reached $270 million, the company had 8,000 employees, and it carried no debt.
Perot told the story of that promotion many times, and it is worth telling the way he told it, because it is the only story in the Perot canon in which he is not the protagonist. Meyerson's grandfather, Perot said, had fled Russia because he was Jewish, passed through Ellis Island, and lived for two years in a Brooklyn attic working as a tailor, speaking no English, until he had saved enough for a train ticket to Fort Worth, where he worked as a tailor for the rest of his life. When Mort was made president of EDS, the company arranged, as a surprise, for the grandfather — then ninety-five — to be in the room. After the announcement, the old man came up and hugged his grandson.
— Mort Meyerson's grandfather, as recounted by Ross Perot, January 24, 1995Through you, Mort, I have realized the dreams I had as a young man when I came to America.
"No matter how bad my memory gets as I get old," Perot said, "one thing I will never forget." He was sixty-four when he said it, and he told it to a room of Kansas undergraduates as a parable about the country. It was also, whether he intended it or not, a parable about the company — the thing he had built was a machine for turning other people's grandfathers' dreams into stock certificates, and he was sentimental about that in a way he was sentimental about almost nothing else.
Meyerson also figures in Perot's favorite war story. Sometime after EDS had grown to "substantial size" — Perot never named the client — the largest procurement in the history of the computer industry came up for bid. When the field narrowed to two, it was, in Perot's telling, "the Bad News Bears, my company, and the New York Giants, IBM." IBM assigned 350 people and a five-acre computer center to what was expected to be a two-year contest. EDS assigned fifteen people and no computer center. Thirty days in, Meyerson walked into the room where the fifteen were working and heard them saying they couldn't win but it would be a good experience. He did not chew them out. He went to the front of the room, wrote from memory the seven criteria by which the bid would be judged, and said: "We are going to beat them seven to zero." Then he left.
The fifteen reorganized themselves into seven two-man teams. Two years later, they won. "Our competitor had a four-three philosophy," Perot said, and the joke landed every time.
Short Hair, Long Options
It is easy to make EDS sound like a cult and easy to make it sound like a commune, and the maddening truth is that it was both.
The dress code was not subtle. Men wore conservative suits and short hair. Women did not wear slacks unless it was freezing. Marital infidelity was grounds for dismissal. Employees were, at various points, subjected to moral codes and lie-detector tests — the honor system of Annapolis, one might say, with the honor removed and the system retained. The campaign press of 1992 would later describe the company as run in a militaristic fashion, built on loyalty and duty, and nobody who worked there seems to have disputed it.
And yet. Before EDS went public, Perot distributed stock broadly through the ranks, and he was prouder of this than of almost anything. "I have computer operators that are multimillionaires," he said. "I have guys that worked in the loading dock in the early days; they are millionaires." On the day the company went public he announced he would never raise his own salary again. He was making $65,000 a year. When he sold the company to General Motors sixteen years later, he was making $65,000 a year.
He had no briefers and no administrative assistants. His theory: anyone good enough to be his assistant would rather be doing honest work somewhere. He kept no fixed schedule, so that any employee could come see him at any time, which had the useful side effect of forcing every manager in the chain to keep his own door open. He ate in the company cafeteria, typically alone at a table with three empty chairs, which anyone was welcome to take. The ideas that made EDS successful, he insisted, came from people "too young, too inexperienced, and typically since he or she was an engineer, too inarticulate. Because engineers mumble a lot." In the middle of the mumbling was a diamond.
The discipline ran the other way, too. Anyone who lied, stole, cheated, or got ahead at the expense of a colleague — "a corporate politician," in Perot's vocabulary — won what he called a free trip to Dallas, anywhere in the world, to be fired by the founder in person. "Talk is cheap," he said. "If you ever say it you better live it."
The recruiters went to schools like Kansas State rather than the Ivy League, on the theory that the best students at state universities were as good as the best anywhere and expected to get their fingernails dirty. "Bring me people with a history of success since childhood," he told them. "Bring me people who love to win." When one wise guy asked what to do if they ran out of people who loved to win, Perot said to bring him people who hated to lose. EDS had unusual luck hiring music majors, who had learned to manipulate abstract symbols at six years old. The only screening method that ever worked, after years of tests and fads, was the team interview: if a candidate could convince five of the company's best engineers, the candidate was in.
Perot told one more hiring story in Kansas, and it is the most revealing thing he ever said about luck. At General Motors he had met a factory worker named Don Effland. Effland had been accepted to MIT out of high school and could not afford to go. He was then accepted to West Point and failed the eye exam. Perot, by contrast, would never have been admitted to MIT, "and I am not being modest"; he had gotten into Annapolis by blind luck and passed the eye exam. "Now I do not have a lot to do with how good my eyes were at that time," Perot said. "Don did not have a lot to do with how good his eyes were." One man got every opportunity; the other spent his life on the factory floor. (Effland, Perot added, was now retired and lectured at MIT.) It is the only moment in the recorded Perot oeuvre where the Horatio Alger story is interrupted by an optometrist, and he seems to have understood exactly what it meant.
The book of maxims later published under his name, Ross Perot: My Life & the Principles for Success, distills much of this into rules. The rules are real. So were the polygraphs.
April 22
EDS went public in 1968, and within days the stock went from $16 a share to roughly ten times that — $160 in one account, $162 in another. At the offering it traded at 118 times earnings. Fortune put Perot on its cover as "the fastest, richest Texan." In December 1969 his shares were briefly worth $1 billion. He was thirty-nine.
Then came April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day. EDS had strong earnings, but a price-to-earnings multiple of that altitude makes a company a target, and much of the float was held by fast-performance mutual funds — "weakly held" was the phrase — prone to sell at the first tremor. The stock began to fall, likely under heavy short selling, and the funds ran for the doors. By the close, the value of Perot's stake had dropped by $445 million. The newspapers called him the biggest individual loser in the history of the New York Stock Exchange, and the Guinness book of records dutifully recorded it. The average computer stock would fall 80 percent from its late-1968 peak; University Computing lost 93 percent. Kent State was two weeks away. It was not a good season to be a symbol of anything.
The loss was on paper, and Perot treated it that way. What cost him real money was Wall Street itself. In 1970, working with David Rockefeller and Chase Manhattan, he led the rescue of duPont Glore Forgan, a major brokerage drowning in debt and back-office paperwork — exactly the kind of mess he believed EDS existed to clean up. He sent Mort Meyerson to run it; Meyerson was chief executive from 1971 through 1974. Perot lost some $65 million. Time called his exit, in February 1974, an "orderly retreat." Around the same time New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was defending state contracts awarded to EDS against critics who found the family connections a little too cozy. The Texan who would later run against insiders had, for a while, been inside.
"Failures are like skinned knees," he liked to say, "painful but superficial." In Kansas he expanded the metaphor: honest mistakes were like skinned knees on little children — painful, superficial, learning experiences that heal quickly — and "your best people are covered up with scars." At EDS the standing policy was that whoever made an honest mistake got put in charge of the next project, because nobody makes two in a row.
On April 22, 2009, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Perot was made an honorary Green Beret. It was thirty-nine years to the day after the crash. There is no evidence he noticed the date. It is the kind of coincidence a novelist would cut for being too much.
The Private Army
The folk hero was born at Christmas 1969. After months of speaking about the plight of some 1,400 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam — and after a trip to Laos made at the White House's request, in which he met senior North Vietnamese officials — Perot chartered two jetliners, loaded them with thirty tons of food, medicine, and gifts, and flew to Southeast Asia. A wire photograph from Tokyo shows him aboard one of the planes. Hanoi refused to let them land. The mission failed on its own terms and succeeded on every other: the spotlight embarrassed the North Vietnamese government and, by most accounts, led to better treatment for some of the prisoners.
Ten years later came the episode that made him a character in a bestseller. EDS had built the Iranian social security information system under the Shah. In the last weeks before the 1979 revolution, the Iranian government imprisoned two EDS employees — in a contract dispute, one account says; for ransom, says another. Perot organized and paid for a rescue. The team was led by Arthur D. "Bull" Simons, a retired Army Special Forces colonel. When the team could find no way to extract the two men, it waited for revolutionaries to storm the prison. A riot was orchestrated at the gates, according to the Times; in the chaos, some 11,800 inmates escaped, the two EDS men among them. The team took them overland across the border into Turkey.
Ken Follett told the story in On Wings of Eagles, and in 1986 NBC turned it into a miniseries with Burt Lancaster as Simons and Richard Crenna as Perot. (Crenna endorsed Perot in 1992, which is either loyalty or method acting.) State Department officials who had been in Tehran at the time questioned whether the Perot team had truly been responsible for the prisoners' release, and suggested the account had been exaggerated. The version everyone remembers is Follett's.
Governors noticed. In 1979 Republican Bill Clements asked him to lead a Texas war on drugs; the result was tougher sentencing laws. In 1983 Democrat Mark White asked him to overhaul the state's public schools, and Perot raised education taxes, raised teacher salaries, cut class sizes, and — the reform that made him genuinely unpopular in football country — barred failing students from school sports. A man who could get a Republican and a Democrat to hand him the keys in successive terms had reason to think he might one day get the whole country to.
But the private army had a shadow. Perot came to believe that hundreds of American servicemen had been left behind in Southeast Asia, and that government officials were suppressing the evidence to hide a drug-smuggling operation that had financed a secret war in Laos. In the late 1980s he conducted unauthorized back-channel talks with Vietnamese officials, to the fury of the Reagan and Bush administrations. In 1990 he reached an agreement with Vietnam's Foreign Ministry to become its business agent if relations were normalized — the POW crusader, positioned to profit from the peace. He launched private investigations of, and public attacks upon, the Pentagon official Richard Armitage. He investigated members of the Bush family. He had called Reagan a great president in 1986 and pledged $2.5 million to his library; in 1987, disillusioned over the POW issue and over Iran-Contra, he took the pledge back.
The same instincts that got two men out of a Tehran prison — trust no bureaucracy, hire your own colonel, act before the committee meets — made it very hard for him to tell a conspiracy from an institution that was simply slow. He once distilled his whole philosophy into a single sentence, and it is not hard to see how it could serve a man well in Iran and badly in Washington.
— Ross PerotIf you see a snake, just kill it. Don't appoint a committee on snakes.
Teaching the Elephant to Tap Dance
In 1984 General Motors bought EDS for $2.5 billion in cash and stock — the figure varies slightly by source, $2.4 billion for a controlling interest in one telling, $2.55 billion in another — and the deal made Perot GM's largest shareholder and put him on its board. The theory was that the world's biggest automaker would absorb the discipline of the world's most aggressive computer-services company. The theory lasted about as long as lunch.
He told the lunch story often. The first time the GM delegation, chairman included, came to Dallas, Perot suggested they eat, and walked them downstairs to the cafeteria. "They just went pale," he said. They stood in line. One of them expressed amazement that Perot stood in line. "Most of these guys are bigger than I am," he said. "I do not have an option." And when they remarked that the food was surprisingly good and asked how he managed it: "I eat here." He had never said a word to the cook. "Life is too short to serve bad food where the boss is eating, right?"
At his first GM board meeting, Perot asked whether the company's pension funds were fully funded. EDS's was overfunded. He was told GM had three — one for executives, one for white-collar workers, one for union workers. He asked if all three were fully funded. "One is," they said. "Need I ask which two are not?"
The GM chairman, Roger B. Smith, found him insufferable, and the feeling was mutual. "Revitalizing G.M. is like teaching an elephant to tap dance," Perot said. And: "It takes five years to design a new car in this country. Heck, we won World War II in four years." Doron Levin wrote a book about the marriage and called it Irreconcilable Differences. In 1986 GM paid Perot about $700 million to go away. He took it.
He did not go quietly and did not go far. The year before, Forbes had ranked him the second-richest man in America, with $1.8 billion, behind only Sam Walton — a man ten years older who, Perot later recalled with evident envy, stood in the aisles of his own stores listening to customers almost until he died, and flew himself around in a Cessna because he preferred it to a 747. When Walton grew too old to fly, "only his dog would fly with him." Perot loved him for it. They were the same species, the billionaire who insisted on remaining a small-town merchant.
In 1984 his foundation had bought a very early copy of the Magna Carta, one of the few ever to leave the United Kingdom, and lent it to the National Archives, where it was displayed alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. (In 2007 the foundation sold it to David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group for $21.3 million, earmarked for medical research, public education, and wounded soldiers. It is still on display.) In 1986 he paid $10 million for the naming rights to the new Dallas symphony hall, then under design by I. M. Pei, and asked that it be named for Mort Meyerson. The building opened in September 1989. Perot's name is not on it.
When Steve Jobs lost his power struggle at Apple and founded NeXT, Perot became his angel, investing more than $20 million — partly, Walter Isaacson reported, because he had passed on the chance to back a young Bill Gates and did not intend to make that mistake twice. In Kansas he told Jobs's origin story as a morality play about garages versus grants. The investment did not pay off the way Microsoft would have. Neither did the elephant.
And on June 1, 1988, Perot and eight associates founded Perot Systems in Plano, Texas, and staffed it by raiding the old EDS executive pool. In 1992, when he needed someone to run it, he called Meyerson, who became its chairman and chief executive. In 2009 Dell bought Perot Systems for $3.9 billion, paying $30 a share, a 61 percent premium. He had built the same company twice.
Ross for Boss
The anger was already there, waiting for a vessel. In Florida in 1990, a retired financial planner named Jack Gargan had begun buying newspaper ads that borrowed Howard Beale's line from Network — "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" — to denounce a congressional pay raise at a time when ordinary wages were flat. He started a group called Throw the Hypocritical Rascals Out. Perot supported it. He opposed the Gulf War, lobbied senators to vote against the resolution, lost, and began, by most accounts, to think about running.
George Bush had broken his promise not to raise taxes. The Cold War was over, which meant Bush's great strength, foreign policy, suddenly mattered less. The economy had actually been growing for months, but voters did not feel it. And into this came a billionaire who talked like a feed-store clerk and said the things the parties would not. On March 18, 1992, at the National Press Club, he said the thing that everyone would remember.
— Ross Perot, National Press Club, March 18, 1992This city has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don't ever accomplish anything. We need deeds, not words, in this city.
By May he led the polls in Texas and California. In the Oregon primary, without campaigning, he was written in by 13 percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans. In June a Gallup poll put him at 39 percent, ahead of Bush at 31 and Bill Clinton at 25. A Time poll had him at 37, with Bush and Clinton tied at 24. No candidate outside the two parties had been in a position like this since Theodore Roosevelt.
What happened next is a case study in what happens when a founder hires professionals and then declines to be managed by them. At the end of May he brought on two of the most respected operatives in the country, one from each party: Hamilton Jordan, who had run Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign and then served as his White House chief of staff, and Ed Rollins, who had run Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide. He hired the pollster Frank Luntz. He hired Hal Riney, the adman behind Reagan's "Morning in America." When Riney walked him through what television advertising would cost, Perot reportedly flipped out. "Why would I spend that," he asked, "when I could go on the Today show for free?" Riney made several ads. They never aired.
Then the unraveling, compressed into a few weeks of July. Reports surfaced about Perot's private investigations of the Bush family. Volunteers were asked to sign loyalty oaths. Before the NAACP he ignored the speech his press man, the former Chicago Tribune editor James Squires, had written and delivered his own, and referred to his audience as "you people." Afterward he worried that members of the New Black Panther Party were plotting to assassinate him. His managers begged him to be specific on policy and to cede some control; the Washington Post reported their disillusionment; his numbers slid to 25 percent, and they warned him he would fall into single digits. On July 15 he fired Riney, and Rollins quit, later saying someone in the campaign had accused him of being a Bush plant with ties to the CIA. Support fell to 20 percent.
On July 16 he went back on Larry King Live and withdrew. He said he did not want a split Electoral College to throw the election into the House of Representatives. He had spent $12 million of his own money. His advisers told the Times he had refused to spend on the things that mattered, including a proposed $150 million advertising campaign, that he was obsessed with his image, and that he had lost interest once the coverage turned negative. One supporter called his office to say that "the tears have not stopped." A volunteer in Florida filed a class-action suit to force him back into the race, then dropped it. Newsweek ran a cover that called him "The Quitter."
"Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success," Perot liked to say. "They quit on the one-yard line."
By September his volunteers — who had kept working without him — had placed him on the ballot in all fifty states. On October 1, he got back in. He brought no professionals this time, only people whose loyalty was beyond question: Orson Swindle, a former POW he had known since the 1970s, as top aide; his son-in-law Clay Mulford as legal counsel; Sharon Holman, who had worked for him since 1969, as press secretary; his friend Murphy Martin as media chief. He spent $34.8 million buying half-hour and hour-long blocks of network time and filled them with himself at a desk in front of a bookshelf, working through two dozen charts with a metal pointer he called his "voodoo stick." The first aired October 6 and drew 16.5 million viewers. "We got into trickle-down economics," he told them, "and it didn't trickle." The shows beat sitcoms in the ratings. Political professionals called the format groundbreaking, which was the kind of praise Perot enjoyed most because it came from people he had fired.
In the last month he left his Dallas headquarters only for the three debates and seven rallies. "He wanted to do it just like he could go to the office every day," one aide said, "run for president, and go home and eat dinner."
The debates were his. In St. Louis on October 11, asked about his lack of government experience, he said: "Well, they've got a point. I don't have any experience running up a $4 trillion debt." In Richmond four days later he told the country to listen for the "giant sucking sound" of manufacturing jobs heading to Mexico, and blamed the deficit on "an extraterrestrial that's doing this to us, I guess," since both parties denied responsibility. Frank Newport of Gallup concluded that Perot had convincingly won the first debate. Luntz, by then an ex-employee, put it best: "When Ross Perot uses his head, he's unbeatable. He's focused, straightforward and compelling. When he uses his heart, sometimes his emotions get carried away."
His running mate did not fare so well. James Stockdale was a retired vice admiral who had spent seven and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, won the Medal of Honor, and served as president of the Naval War College. He had been named an "interim" running mate in March because twenty-five states required a vice-presidential name on the petitions; Perot tried to replace him with the NIH director Bernadine Healy, who declined, and so Stockdale stayed. At the vice-presidential debate in Atlanta he opened with the question "Who am I? Why am I here?" — the philosopher's inquiry of a man who had survived years of torture partly by reading Epictetus, heard by a television audience as confusion. It was the most unfair moment of the campaign. It was also, in its way, the most honest.
Late in October, on 60 Minutes, Perot finally explained the July withdrawal. Republican operatives, he said, had threatened to release digitally altered photographs to sabotage his daughter's wedding. He had reported it to the FBI. No evidence of wrongdoing was ever found.
On the last night, outside his headquarters in Dallas, he thanked his volunteers. "What you've been through hasn't been pretty," he said, "but by golly, you're taking your country back." The campaign song played. It was Patsy Cline's "Crazy."
He received 19,743,821 votes, 18.9 percent of the total, the best showing for anyone outside the two parties since 1912 and nearly double George Wallace's record raw total. He won no states. He finished second in Maine, with 30.44 percent to Bush's 30.39 — in the state where Bush summered — and in Utah. He carried counties in states that went for Clinton and counties in states that went for Bush. His best county in the nation was Loving County, Texas, where he took 46.88 percent. Exit polls found that 35 percent of voters would have voted for him if they had believed he could win. Republicans spent years insisting he had cost Bush the election. The exit polls said his voters would have split almost evenly. FiveThirtyEight, in 2016, called the spoiler theory "unlikely."
Let Me Finish
He stayed in the public eye, which was both the point and the problem. His campaign organization, United We Stand America, became a lobbying group, and its main target was the North American Free Trade Agreement. In November 1993 Vice President Al Gore challenged him to debate the treaty on Larry King Live. Sixteen million people watched. Gore came armed with a framed photograph of Senators Smoot and Hawley. Perot kept pleading, in his Texas drawl, "Let me finish," and the phrase became a punchline for a decade. Support for NAFTA went from 34 percent to 57. CNN would later call Gore's performance "the beginning of the end of Perot as even a semi-serious public figure."
It was a strange end for the sentence. Perot's whole career had been built on not letting other people finish — on going over the head of the newspaper boss, on walking out of IBM and GM before the committees reported, on killing the snake before the meeting could convene. Now, for the first time on national television, he wanted time, and nobody would give it to him.
In 1995 the grassroots state organizations that had put him on the ballot banded together into a party. "Independent Party" was the preferred name but was already taken, as were its variants, so they settled for Reform. The first chairman was Russell Verney, who in the early 1990s had been treasurer and then executive director of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, before joining Perot in 1992 as spokesman and top adviser. Verney called the founding of the Reform Party "the most significant thing that's happened in American politics in 130 years."
Perot said he would not seek its nomination. The only credible person who stepped forward was Richard Lamm, the former Democratic governor of Colorado, who remained a registered Democrat because, he pointed out, there was no Reform Party in Colorado to join. Lamm had been assured Perot would not run. On July 9, 1996, Lamm announced. On July 10, Perot went on Larry King Live and announced too. The Federal Election Commission had ruled that only Perot, by virtue of his 1992 showing, was eligible for federal matching funds; any other nominee would have to raise money without them, and Perot could legally give such a candidate no more than $1,000. The logic was airtight and the optics were terrible.
The primary was conducted by mail, telephone, and computer, supervised by Ernst & Young, and about 1.4 million people were eligible. Some 49,266 voted. Perot won 32,145 to Lamm's 17,121. Lamm carried Colorado, Minnesota, Alaska, and the District of Columbia. Lamm supporters complained of ballots that never arrived and of voters who received several. At the Long Beach convention, Lamm gave a speech about how "no nation has ever borrowed its way to greatness," received a standing ovation, and congratulated the winner. He said he was not angry and was not sure he would vote for Perot. In 1997 a faction convinced the primary had been rigged broke off to form the American Reform Party. Its chairman explained the split in a sentence: they had "discovered [that the Reform Party] was a top-down party instead of a bottom-up organization."
In 1996 Perot accepted about $29 million in public funds, which limited his own contribution to $50,000 — the self-financer, financed. The Commission on Presidential Debates excluded him on the ground that he had no realistic chance to win, under criteria he could not have met in 1992 either. He was reduced to buying half-hours again. He got 8.4 percent, 8,085,294 votes. It remains the last time a candidate outside the two parties has cleared 5 percent, and the showing earned his party $12.5 million in matching funds for 2000 — money that ensured the fight over the corpse would be vicious.
It was. In 1998 the former wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota as a Reform candidate, and soon after gave an interview to Playboy that led Verney to demand he leave the party. Ventura's ally Jack Gargan — the "mad as hell" planner, now a Reform man — took the chairmanship and accused Verney of running the party dictatorially. Verney, hoping to blunt Ventura, courted Pat Buchanan, then led a walkout when Buchanan tried to turn it into an ideologically pure right-wing party. Donald Trump briefly sought the 2000 nomination and withdrew, complaining that the party now included "a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani." Perot, according to the Times, backed the faction that most strongly opposed a Trump candidacy. Buchanan won the nomination and 0.4 percent of the vote. Four days before the election, Perot went on Larry King Live one more time and endorsed George W. Bush.
In April 2001 the Times found Verney still clinging to one fragment of the wreckage. He would leave the party eventually, he said, but "I would never really leave Ross." And then: "I love the man. He's my hero."
That same year EDS, long out of Perot's hands and freshly independent after GM spun it off, had launched a new logo with a Super Bowl commercial. It showed cowboys herding cats. It won awards.
Eagles Don't Flock
The rest was ceremony, money, and the long afterlife of ideas that outlived the man who carried them. He endorsed Mitt Romney in 2008 and again in 2012, launched a blog about entitlements and the national debt complete with updated charts, testified in Austin in 2005 in favor of laptops and e-books for students. He was silent in 2016. On the day he died, Politico's editor called him "the father of Trump," and it was hard to argue with the genealogy — the self-financed businessman, the television, the trade, the contempt for professionals — even if the father had once backed the faction that kept the son out of his house.
In 2010, for his eightieth birthday, Texarkana named a bridge for him. In 2011 the Perot Museum of Nature and Science announced a newly identified species of horned dinosaur, Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum. The honors piled up — the Sylvanus Thayer Award from West Point, the William J. Donovan Award from the OSS Society, the Boots on the Ground Award — nearly all of them military, as if the institutions he had been happiest inside were the ones that had never had to take orders from him.
Visitors to his Dallas office found a bust of Theodore Roosevelt, a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, and a collection of Norman Rockwell originals — the barbershops, the ballparks, the Main Streets where you leave the doors unlocked, the America he had promised to restore in 1992. And a plaque engraved with his favorite saying. "Eagles don't flock," he told visitors. "You have to find them one at a time."
Gerald Posner's 1996 biography, Citizen Perot: His Life and Times, is the fullest attempt to reconcile the eagle with the flock he spent a decade trying to lead, and it does not entirely succeed, because the man did not entirely succeed at it either.
He died of leukemia at home in Dallas on July 9, 2019, less than two weeks after his eighty-ninth birthday, worth about $4.1 billion. He had been raised a Methodist and had become a Presbyterian in the late 1960s, faithful in attendance at Highland Park Presbyterian. The memorial service was held at Highland Park United Methodist Church. Thirteen hundred people came. He is buried at Sparkman-Hillcrest.
Mort Meyerson outlived him by six years. He died in Dallas on August 5, 2025, at eighty-seven. The hall with his name on it is still ranked among the finest in the world; its seventy-four concrete reverberation doors, each as heavy as two and a half tons, still open and close to tune the sound.
EDS lasted longer than anyone might have guessed, and less long than its founder would have liked. It grew to $22.1 billion in revenue by 2007 and was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2008 for $13.9 billion. It lost a £3 billion British tax contract after delayed payments to hundreds of thousands of people, and a leaked internal memo about a child-support system it built described the work as "badly designed, badly tested and badly implemented" — the kind of sentence that would once have earned someone a free trip to Dallas. In 2009 it stopped using its name. In 2017 what remained was merged into something called DXC Technology.
The headquarters had been built in Plano on 270 acres in a development called Legacy, which EDS itself had created: two eight-story buildings joined by an upper-level bridge of office space, 3.5 million square feet, four Tier IV data centers, a command center, a fitness center, a service station, a hangar, and four helipads. After the company was gone, various owners tried to sell it or lease it. Nobody wanted it.
On the morning of August 9, 2026, it came down by controlled implosion — the bridge between the two towers first, then the rest, folding in on itself in a few seconds in a cloud of North Texas dust — to clear the ground for the new global headquarters of AT&T.
A phone company. On the site of the company that a phone bank had once, briefly, made the most important man in American politics. When the dust settled, the lot was empty, and the telephone lines were already on their way.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is not a manual for becoming Ross Perot, which would be inadvisable, but a set of operating principles extracted from a career that produced two enormously valuable companies and two failed political movements using, recognizably, the same toolkit. The value lies as much in the second half of that sentence as the first. Perot is one of the rare founders whose methods were tested in two radically different environments, and whose failures are as instructive as his successes — perhaps more so, because he kept such meticulous records of what he believed.
The principles
- 1.Treat other people's waste as your inventory.
- 2.Count rejections as tuition, not verdicts.
- 3.Compress the calendar until it hurts the incumbent.
- 4.Make everyone an owner, then cap yourself.
- 5.Put everyone in the same line.
- 6.Recruit for appetite, not pedigree.
- 7.Give the next project to the person who just failed.
- 8.Hire your complement and hand over the chalk.
- 9.Route around the gatekeepers — but know what you're giving up.
- 10.Never confuse a command structure with a coalition.
- 11.Author your own retreat.
- 12.Build the thing that survives your absence.
Principle 1
Treat other people's waste as your inventory
The founding insight of EDS was not technical. It was an accounting observation made by a salesman: IBM's customers were paying fortunes for machines they used badly, and the idle hours on those machines had value that nobody was capturing. The Southwestern Life–Collins Radio deal is the cleanest expression of it. One Dallas company had unused computer time; another needed computing. Perot knew both from the inside and sold one's slack to the other without buying a single piece of hardware.
The pattern recurs throughout his career, often in more self-aggrandizing form — the extra pairs of Navy shoes he called his "first example of government waste," the three GM pension funds, the "vacation home in space" he mocked in his 1992 budget. What distinguished the young Perot from the older one is that the young one monetized waste rather than merely denouncing it. The shift from arbitrage to outrage tracks, not coincidentally, the shift from wealth creation to political frustration.
The deeper lesson is about position. Perot could see the waste because IBM's incentives blinded IBM to it: a hardware seller does not want its customers to discover they need less hardware. The most durable opportunities live in the gap between what an incumbent sells and what its customers actually need.
Tactic: List the three most expensive underused assets inside your customers' operations, and ask what business would exist if someone took responsibility for running them.
Principle 2
Count rejections as tuition, not verdicts
Seventy-seven refusals before a first contract is not a statistic most founders survive. Perot converted it into doctrine. His Kansas State lecture returns again and again to the idea that "the most successful people I have ever known were too dumb to recognize when they failed," and that the average student who has learned to recover from disappointment has a structural advantage over the gifted one who has not.
This was not motivational filler; it was a hiring and management philosophy. It explains his preference for state-school graduates, his suspicion of "the best and brightest," and his contempt for managers who never ventured onto the front lines. The one-yard-line maxim — people give up just before they win — was his most repeated epigram for a reason.
The irony, of course, is that Perot himself quit on the one-yard line in July 1992, at 20 percent in the polls and on the ballot in two dozen states. The principle was real. Its author was not immune to the failure it describes, especially when the rejections came from the press rather than from customers.
Tactic: Keep a written tally of rejections with the specific objection behind each, and review it monthly for patterns rather than for discouragement.
Principle 3
Compress the calendar until it hurts the incumbent
"We would do in 90 days what every established company in the computer industry took 18 months to do." Speed was EDS's original wedge, and Perot understood it as a quality strategy, not a cost-cutting one: teams with ninety days skip the year of "planning to do it and thinking about doing it" and, in his telling, produce better work. His rhetorical flourishes — God's six days, winning World War II in four years versus designing a car in five — were ways of making tempo a moral category.
The bid against IBM is the purest case. Fifteen people against 350 and a five-acre computer center. Speed and focus against mass. The small team did not try to match IBM's resources; it reorganized itself around the seven criteria that would decide the outcome and ignored everything else.
The limitation shows up in the political record. Washington runs on a different clock, and Perot never adjusted. The man who wanted to "kill the snake" had no patience for the committee on snakes, and the committee — which in a democracy is sometimes called Congress — is not optional.
Tactic: For your next major initiative, set a deadline one-fifth the length your industry considers normal, and use the constraint to strip out every step that exists only to reduce someone's personal risk.
Principle 4
Make everyone an owner, then cap yourself
Two decisions, taken together, made EDS's culture credible. The first was distributing stock broadly before the IPO — to computer operators and loading-dock workers who became millionaires. The second was freezing his own salary at $65,000 on the day the company went public and never raising it through the sale to GM. The first created enthusiasm; the second made the enthusiasm impossible to dismiss as a founder's trick.
Perot framed it simply: "It was not my company; it was our company." And the salary cap, he said, "kept my head straight," forcing his attention onto growth and profitability rather than compensation. The gesture had costs — it meant his wealth was entirely hostage to the stock, as April 22, 1970, demonstrated — but it aligned him with every other shareholder in the building.
$
The Alignment Stack
How EDS tied the founder's incentives to everyone else's.
| Lever | What Perot did | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Equity breadth | Stock program for everyone, including the loading dock | Employees treated the company as theirs |
| Founder pay | $65,000 salary frozen from IPO to sale | Wealth tied entirely to shareholder value |
| Pre-IPO fairness | Distributed shares before going public, "not a few guys at the top" | Legitimacy of the culture at liquidity |
| Debt | Never borrowed; bootstrapped from $1,000 | No lenders' agenda competing with owners' |
Tactic: Before your next liquidity event, publicly commit to a personal compensation ceiling tied to a company milestone, and make the equity pool broad enough that the lowest-paid employee has a meaningful stake.
Principle 5
Put everyone in the same line
The cafeteria and the pension funds are the two best stories Perot ever told about organizational design, and they make the same point. At EDS, the chairman stood in the lunch line and the food was good because he ate it. At GM, executives had separate dining arrangements and separate pension funds — and the two funds the executives did not belong to were the two that were underfunded. "If you just had one pension fund at General Motors they would all be funded, right?"
The principle is that tiered systems degrade the tiers the decision-makers don't occupy. It is not about egalitarian virtue; it is about information. When the boss eats the same food, gets the same health plan, and draws from the same pension, the boss's self-interest becomes a quality-control mechanism for everyone.
G
Two Operating Systems
Perot's own account of the EDS–GM culture collision, 1984–1986.
| Practice | General Motors | EDS under Perot |
|---|---|---|
| Pension plans | Three, by class of employee; two underfunded | One for everyone; overfunded |
| Lunch | Executives "went pale" at the cafeteria | Chairman in line; three open seats at his table |
| Calendar | Executives scheduled every 15 minutes | No fixed schedule; open door to all |
| Approvals | Committees | "I did not have any committees" |
| Product cycle | Five years to design a car | 90 days versus the industry's 18 months |
Tactic: Identify every benefit, perk, or process that exists in more than one tier at your company, and collapse the tiers wherever the only justification is rank.
Principle 6
Recruit for appetite, not pedigree
Perot's recruiters were told to bring back "people with a history of success since childhood" and "people who love to win," and to find them at state universities rather than elite ones. The final filter was a team interview: convince five of the company's best engineers and you were hired. The company discovered that music majors made excellent systems engineers and refused to require college degrees for engineering roles, recruiting "the Don Efflands of the world."
The method rests on a claim about signal. Elite credentials, Perot believed, measured a genetic gift and a smooth path; what predicted performance was drive and resilience, which showed up in odd places. The team interview, meanwhile, distributed judgment to the people who would have to work alongside the hire — a form of peer accountability that no personnel department could match.
It is worth noting the shadow side without flinching: the same recruiting apparatus that looked past pedigree also screened for conformity, with dress codes and moral codes that selected for a very particular kind of person. Appetite was welcome. Deviance was not.
Tactic: Replace at least one credential-based screen in your hiring process with a peer panel of your strongest performers, each holding a veto.
Principle 7
Give the next project to the person who just failed
EDS's standing rule was that anyone who made an honest mistake would be put in charge of the next project, because "you were not going to make two in a row." Perot described his real challenge after a failure as psychological: great people take honest mistakes hard, and the leader's job is to restore their nerve, not punish them.
The policy is a direct attack on the most common pathology in large organizations, which Perot described with precision: the executive who never goes to the front lines, sends "some naive character" out on point, takes credit if it works and blames the scout if it doesn't — and, "literally," can become chairman that way without knowing what to do upon arrival. By rewarding exposure rather than penalizing it, EDS tilted the incentive toward people covered in scars.
Tactic: The next time a capable person on your team fails honestly on a visible project, assign them the next comparable one within thirty days, and say publicly why.
Principle 8
Hire your complement and hand over the chalk
The best thing Ross Perot ever did for EDS may have been hiring Mort Meyerson, and the second-best was letting him run it. Meyerson brought the outsourcing model that made the company exponential; later he became president, ran duPont Glore Forgan through its crisis, served as GM's chief technology officer, and led Perot Systems. The seven-zero story is Meyerson's, not Perot's — and Perot told it as the definitive example of leadership.
Perot's theory of this was explicit: the genius who is the brightest person in the room "cannot let you do anything," while the leader who knows his limits hands work out and gets "the multiplier effect" — in his case, a multiplier of over 50,000. The contrast with his 1992 campaign is stark. When he hired the equivalent of Meyersons in politics — Jordan, Rollins, Riney — he would not hand over the chalk. When he re-entered in October, he surrounded himself with loyalists instead of complements.
Tactic: Name the one capability your company most needs that you personally lack, hire the best person you can find who has it, and define in writing the decisions they will make without you.
Principle 9
Route around the gatekeepers — but know what you're giving up
Perot's political genius was distribution. He launched on Larry King, capped donations at $5, used phone banks to convert viewers into volunteers, and later bought half-hour blocks of network time to deliver economic lectures with charts that outdrew sitcoms. "Why would I spend that," he asked his ad man, "when I could go on the Today show for free?" Nearly every insurgent campaign since has borrowed from this playbook.
But going around gatekeepers also means going without their protections. In 1992 the debate commission let him in; in 1996, having rewritten its rules, it kept him out, and he had no institutional allies to object on his behalf. The same independence that made him credible to 19 million voters left him defenseless when the rules changed. A channel you do not own can be closed to you.
Tactic: For every distribution channel that currently bypasses your industry's gatekeepers, identify who could shut it off, and build at least one owned channel that no third party controls.
Principle 10
Never confuse a command structure with a coalition
Everything that worked at EDS — the codes, the loyalty, the founder as final arbiter, the free trips to Dallas — depended on Perot owning the enterprise. The Reform Party was a coalition of volunteers who owned nothing but their consent, and they could withdraw it. When Perot entered the 1996 primary the day after Lamm, the logic was financial and legal. The perception was a founder overruling his own members, and the American Reform Party split off on precisely that complaint: "a top-down party instead of a bottom-up organization."
The lesson generalizes to any founder moving from a company to a platform, an ecosystem, an industry association, or a board seat. Authority that comes from ownership does not transfer to settings where it comes from persuasion. Perot's GM board seat was the first warning. The Reform Party was the confirmation.
R
Same Founder, Different Terrain
How Perot's methods performed in owned versus shared institutions.
| Method | At EDS | In politics |
|---|---|---|
| Founder as final word | Scaled Clear, fast decisions | Risk Professionals quit; members split |
| Loyalty screening | Mixed Codes and polygraphs | Risk Loyalty oaths became a scandal |
| Speed over process | Scaled 90 days versus 18 months | Mixed Brilliant launch, erratic execution |
| Direct channels | Scan Open door to every employee | Scaled Talk shows, infomercials, phone banks |
Tactic: Before stepping into any institution you do not control, write down which of your habits depend on ownership and decide in advance which ones you will abandon.
On July 16, 1992, Perot gave a reason for leaving the race — fear of a House-decided election — that almost nobody believed. Three months later he offered a second reason, the wedding plot, for which he produced no evidence. In between, Newsweek named him "The Quitter," and the label followed him through re-entry and into the 1996 campaign. Retreats are sometimes correct. His may have been. But an unexplained retreat becomes whatever story the loudest observer tells.
The contrast with the business record is instructive. His 1974 exit from duPont Glore Forgan was characterized as an "orderly retreat," and his $445 million paper loss became a record he could joke about. In business, he controlled the narrative of his losses. In politics, he let others write it and then contested it too late with too little.
Tactic: When you must pull back from a public commitment, deliver the real reason, the expected consequences, and the conditions for return in a single communication on the same day.
Principle 12
Build the thing that survives your absence
EDS outlived Perot's tenure by more than thirty years; the Reform Party effectively died within four years of his last campaign. The difference is not that the company was better loved. It is that EDS had Meyerson, a codified culture, a contract base running a decade at a time, and a business model that did not require Perot to be on television. The party had none of these. Even Perot Systems' executives, in 1996, debated whether to rename the company to escape the association with its founder's politics.
The company's post-Perot history also carries a warning. The later EDS — the botched British systems, the leaked memo, the herding-cats ad — suggests that the culture which outlived him did not outlive him intact. Survival and integrity are separate achievements. The founder's job is to design for both.
T
The Durability Timeline
What lasted, and what didn't.
1962
EDS founded on Perot's 32nd birthday with $1,000.
1967
Meyerson proposes the outsourcing model.
1984
GM acquires EDS; Perot joins the GM board.
1988
Perot Systems founded with eight associates.
1992
19.7 million votes as an independent.
1995
Reform Party founded.
2000
Reform nominee draws 0.4 percent; party fractures.
2008
HP acquires EDS for $13.9 billion.
2009
Dell acquires Perot Systems for $3.9 billion.
2026
Former EDS headquarters imploded in Plano.
Tactic: Once a year, run a tabletop exercise in which you are unavailable for six months, and fix every decision, relationship, and norm that breaks.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Ross Perot, as quoted in The New York Times, July 9, 2019Eagles don't flock. You have to find them one at a time.
— Ross Perot, as quoted in The New York Times, July 9, 2019Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.
— Ross Perot, Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, January 24, 1995Brains and wits will beat money ten times out of ten.
— Ross Perot, first presidential debate, October 11, 1992Well, they've got a point. I don't have any experience running up a $4 trillion debt.
— Ross Perot, Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, January 24, 1995Just remember, the most successful people I have ever known were too dumb to recognize when they failed, and their big successes rest squarely on the earlier failures.
Maxims
- Idle capacity is inventory. The fortune is often sitting unused inside someone else's balance sheet.
- Tempo is a quality strategy. A team with ninety days skips the year of thinking about doing it.
- Cap the founder, uncap the team. A frozen salary and a broad stock pool make a culture impossible to dismiss as theater.
- One line for everyone. Tiered systems quietly rot in the tiers the decision-makers don't occupy.
- Hire the hunger. The best student at a state school who hates to lose will outwork the pedigree who expects to be served.
- Reward the scar. Hand the next project to whoever failed honestly on the last one.
- Find your Meyerson. The multiplier effect only works if you actually let go of the chalk.
- Ownership is not persuasion. Habits that work in a company you own will wreck a coalition you merely lead.
- Narrate your retreats. An unexplained exit becomes a label someone else chooses for you.
- Build for your absence. The test of a founder is what still stands, and still behaves, after the founder leaves the room.
