Word: gm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even in business, Perot's authoritarian style did not succeed in organizations he could not totally dominate. After selling EDS to General Motors, he was for two years not only a director of the auto company but also its largest single stockholder. He made many criticisms of the stodgy GM bureaucracy that, like his criticisms of Washington today, were perfectly valid; it was quite true that GM took longer to design and produce a new car (six years) than the U.S. did to fight and win World War II. But he could never make the company move -- a bad augury...
...founder of a large Dallas law firm, Luce was hired by Perot in 1974 to help dig him out of a disastrous attempted bailout of the Wall Street brokerage house of DuPont Glore Forgan. In 1984 Luce helped Perot negotiate the sale of his EDS computer-services company to GM; two years later, Luce settled a bitter dispute over the buyout of Perot's GM shares. To the general public, however, the Dallas attorney is better known for having been Perot's cerebral but lackluster political surrogate: when Luce ran unsuccessfully for Governor in 1990 as a moderate Republican...
...this real-life Crusader Rabbit was just getting warmed up. General Motors -- that ossified symbol of America's industrial decline -- volunteered for the Perot treatment when the giant automaker bought EDS in 1984 and GM chairman Roger Smith looked to this take-no-prisoners Texan to shake up the hidebound hierarchy. Within two years, Perot was going public with his bitter and prophetic denunciations of the GM bureaucracy ("I could never understand why it takes six years to build a car when it only took us four years to win World War II"), and the company ultimately paid...
...executive vice president Elmer Johnson, who negotiated Perot's $700 million buyout. "Maybe it's a little simplistic, like Ronald Reagan could be, but he knows how to prioritize and exactly where he wants to go." But the consensus is that Perot resorted too quickly to guerrilla tactics at GM, lobbing brickbats from the sidelines, rather than ever trying to build support on the board or enunciating a clear road map for reform. David Cole, the director of the University of Michigan's automotive studies center and a close observer of General Motors, says, "With Perot, you're either with...
...ahead the TV talk shows are apt to be filled with Washington insiders harrumphing mightily that, of course, Perot could never deal with Congress; it would be a disaster. This conventional view is buttressed by a strong argument: Perot, the perpetual maverick who could never recruit allies on the GM board of directors, would be facing a Congress of 535 members of the opposition parties. Pet rocks, indeed. But legislators can also read the election returns, or they wouldn't be on Capitol Hill in the first place. As California Democratic Congressman Howard Berman says, "The level of demoralization around...