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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 for a presidential hopeful who would have to deal with a federal bureaucracy that is even bigger, more rigid and more expert at sidetracking would-be reformers.
A major reason for the failure, say other directors, is that Perot never tried to build coalitions within the board or even to draft a detailed plan for reform; he just carped and nagged. A senior executive who agreed with many of his criticisms says he was rebuffed when he tried to work with Perot. His explanation: "I learned that you can't be 90% for Ross Perot. You have to be with him all the way." GM in 1986 got so fed up with Perot that it paid him $700 million for his stock just to get him out and shut him up.
In the political arena, as at GM, Perot is coming under heavy fire for relying on exhortation without offering specific programs. But Perot thinks a leader's job is to set goals and drive his followers to reach them by any means necessary. His formula at EDS was "a teaspoon of planning, an ocean of execution." Subordinates setting out to reorganize a customer's data- processing procedures were told only to "do what makes sense." That approach succeeded spectacularly at EDS, where goals could be simple and Perot could rely on well-understood rewards and punishments. It is questionable whether it would work in government, where goals can be complex or even contradictory (design a health-care system that covers everybody but holds down costs) and President Perot could not fire the leaders of Congress for failing to get desired legislation passed.
STRONG ARMS AND SKULDUGGERY
Still more disturbing is Perot's abiding belief in paramilitary, and often secret, action that is, to put it politely, not overly finicky about staying within the confines of the law. He denies suggesting that Dallas police cordon off sections of minority neighborhoods and conduct house-to-house searches for drugs and weapons, an idea that would seem prohibited by constitutional rules on searches and seizures. But reliable journalists insist that he did advocate such a sweep, and more than once. Moreover, it is of a piece with his openly stated belief that a war on drugs should be fought as a genuine, literal war. He has at various times suggested blowing up drug-carrying ships and bombing heroin producers in Southeast Asia. Perot also had an association with Bo Gritz, an ex-Green Beret. Gritz has contended in a book that Perot once told him he had government clearance to hire an antidrug operative. According to Gritz, Perot said, "I want you to uncover and identify everyone dealing cocaine between Colombia and Texas. Once you're sure you've got them all, I want you to wipe them out in a single night like an angel of death." A Perot spokesman denies the two were ever associated in actual operations, and dismisses some of the other stories.