Perot operated then, as now, in the belief that the eagles would separate themselves from the flock. "You just put them out in the field," he says, "right in the thick of competition, and the eagles emerge." Once they emerged, the challenge was to make sure they reached their potential, which meant piling on responsibility. "Give 'em more. Constantly give 'em more. Just keep them in a little over their heads. But don't drown 'em. The best ones are like corks. They have a lot of resiliency. But everyone has his own thermostat that determines how much pressure he can take, and he can't do a thing about it. People who can't take as much pressure as others wish they could, but they can't. So it's important not to push people beyond the point of no return. Aside from that, we really try to challenge them and have them grow as fast as possible."
Mistakes were forgiven -- indeed, encouraged. "We teach people that mistakes are like skinned knees for little children. They're painful, but they heal quickly, and they're learning experiences. All over corporate America, you get to be chairman of the board by keeping your nose clean and not making mistakes. My people are covered with the scars of their mistakes. They've lived out in the field; they've been shot at; they've been hit in every part of their bodies; and they're real. By the time they get to the top, their noses are pretty well broken. The chances of them getting there with a clean nose are zero. Because they get there by producing, and the by-product is to make mistakes."
It was a grueling regimen. Team members would often get calls on weekends, in the middle of the night, or during vacations, instructing them to report immediately or the next day to help another team on a troubled project. Many of them burned out. Others found the rewards not worth the strain.
But the eagles thrived. "The focus was always, #1, do the job for your customer; #2, make money at it; and, #3, teach someone along the way to do it," Gary Wright recalls. "If you accomplished those, he was eager to let you have your head and do it your way."
"Ross Perot is not a manager -- he's a leader," insists Perot Systems president Pat Horner, who joined EDS right out of the Air Force in 1976. "He works with you to challenge you to reach your highest potential. It's the antithesis of micro-management."
In 1982 Horner was part of a team competing for the biggest contract in the history of the industry, $656 million to build a nationwide computer network for the U.S. Army. Before the competition got under way, Perot called the team together, but not to give instructions. "He said, 'I just want to explain to you how important this is -- the jobs it's going to create, the milestone it's going to be in our evolution toward the world's largest systems integrator," Horner says. "All too often people try to manage the what and the how, but Ross manages the why. He can create a vision of the here and now as a reflection of the past and a turning point for the future."
No matter how much distance Perot kept from a proj-ect, though, he was always there for the customer. Former army project manager Clinton Black recalls that the day the contract was awarded to EDS, Perot walked up and passed him a slip of paper with a phone number on it. "You can always reach me here if you feel we're not living up to our agreement," Perot said. "Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week." Black never forgot the moment. And the EDS team made sure he never had to make the call.
By 1984, EDS was a truly impressive company, earning $81 million net on gross revenues of $947 million. More to the point, it had a reputation as the best in its business and was on its way to becoming one of the premier companies of the twentieth century, a role model for all who wanted to compete successfully in the emerging international economy.
So why did Perot sell it?
"Pride goeth before the fall," say Perot. He is referring to the decline of America's international competitiveness since World War II, but there are echoes of another "fall" in his words. "You can go back to the Bible. This is human nature. Man, when he is successful for too long, becomes arrogant."
Was it arrogance that led Perot to sell his company? Was it pride? Was it boredom? Was it the need for a truly monumental challenge, one that surpassed any he had yet encountered? Whatever caused him to do it, the sale of EDS to GM was perhaps the greatest blunder of his career.
Perot had, in fact, been looking for a major new project, an industrial corporation that would let his people expand on the capabilities they had developed on the army contract. It never occurred to Perot or his people, however, to take on a major automobile manufacturer; they had no experience in that industry. And when Salomon Brothers broached the idea of a friendly takeover by GM, Perot was skeptical. Roger Smith didn't need to buy the company, he argued. Why not just become a customer?
But the GM chairman made EDS an offer Perot couldn't refuse. It wasn't the $2.5 billion; it was the challenge of trying to infuse America's lagging automaker with the code of the eagle, combining GM's resources with Perot's entrepreneurial dynamism to create a giant that would, once and for all, put the Japanese in their place. How could he refuse? Perot signed the letter of agreement on his 54th birthday -- June 27, 1984 -- and the sale went through in October, making him GM's largest stockholder and its best-known board member. His mission: to combine GM's data-processing and communications mishmash into a single lean unit, processing the paychecks and programming the robots.
But something else happened with that stroke of the pen, something that only became evident in the ensuing weeks and months. Perot stopped being a company builder and was instead thrust into the role of corporate politician, a job for whi
