Word: perots
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Throughout his career, Perot has endeared himself to Main Street America partly by the enemies he has chosen. The son of a small-town cotton broker in Texarkana, Texas, Perot attended the U.S. Naval Academy, spent four years in the Navy and then in 1957 joined the white-shirted brigades of IBM as a computer salesman. The Perot myth was born when he broke with the rigid corporate culture and inflexible commission system of IBM in 1962 to found EDS -- and became a just-folks billionaire seven years later, shortly after he took his company public. During the 1970s, Perot...
...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...
Judging solely from the bottom line, Perot's record probably would not qualify him for a performance bonus. General Motors -- bloodied, but unbowed -- only now is facing up to the need for far-reaching internal reform. No living MIA has ever been found in Vietnam. Texas enacted some of Perot's educational reforms (no pass, no play; reducing class size), but on Friday night far more students are still cheering touchdowns than prepping for calculus exams. But embedded in these crusades are important -- and not always reassuring -- clues as to how Perot might behave if handed the toughest challenge...
Resting in a place of honor in Perot's office is a thin business self-help book, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. It serves as a small reminder of the management style that made Perot a billionaire. "If you're in his way, he'll run over you," says a close associate who prefers anonymity to Perot's wrath. "He does not compromise well. Ross has two modes: your way and my way -- and we're going to do it my way." The problem is not that Perot refuses to listen; he in fact delights in bypassing the chain...
Even at General Motors, where he ridiculed other board members as "pet rocks," Perot had his fans. "I've never seen an executive so accessible to his own people," says former 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...