Tycoon and GM Gadfly Ross Perot Dies at 89

Ross Perot, the Texas tycoon who twice ran for president and relished his disruptive stint as a General Motors Co. director, died of leukemia on July 9 at age 89.

The son of a cotton farmer, Perot became a stellar salesman at IBM, once reaching his annual hardware sales quota in fewer than three weeks. He later built a fortune with Electronic Data Systems Corp., an early data processing service he launched in 1962 with an initial investment of $1,000.

GM hired EDS to integrate its hundreds of unconnected data networks, then bought the company in 1984 for $2.6 billion in cash and stock.

The transaction put the diminutive Perot on GM’s board as the company’s largest shareholder. His get-it-done philosophy and commando-like approach to direct customer service soon clashed spectacularly with CEO Roger Smith and GM’s by-the-book bureaucracy.

Perot fumed that his fellow board members were nothing more than “pet rocks” for management. Trying to revitalize GM, he told Business Week in his high-pitched, Texarkana twang, “is like teaching an elephant to tap dance.”

Perot railed that the company’s system focused too much on process and not enough on results. At EDS, he famously noted, “When you see a snake, you kill it.” At GM, he often said, “You first hire a consultant on snakes, then you form a committee on snakes and then you discuss it for a couple of years.” But no action results, because “the snake hasn’t bitten anybody yet.”

Perot told Fortune he once lectured GM senior management on what he saw as a pervasive lack of people focus. “You don’t like your customers,” he declared. “You don’t like your dealers. You don’t like the people who make your cars. You don’t like your stockholders. And to a large extent, you don’t like one another.”

By 1986, Smith and the GM board had heard enough. In a highly criticized move, they paid Perot $376 million to quit the board and another $376 million to buy back his GM shares.

Unfazed, Perot turned to politics, where he ran unsuccessfully as a third-party candidate in 1992 and 1995, promising to “take out the trash and clean out the barn.”

Perot likened the national debt to a “crazy aunt we keep down in the basement.” He predicted that the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement would cause a “giant sucking sound” of U.S. jobs being lost to Mexico.