Need a Rescue? Call Ross

He says he is the kind of guy who likes to "stir things up." No one who has marveled at the freewheeling and shrewdly eccentric career of H. (for Henry) Ross Perot will argue with that description. The blunt-spoken, impulsive founder of Electronic Data Systems, who managed last week both to goad mighty General Motors into an expensive estrangement and get his name involved in Washington's Iran-contra scandal, has been variously called a dictator, a superpatriot and an inspiring, unassuming employer-philanthropist. He is also one of America's wealthiest men. His scrappy individualism and spectacular feats of corporate derring-do are the stuff of John Wayne-style legend and its modern equivalent, a television mini-series (NBC's May On Wings of Eagles). Says a close Perot friend, Dallas Oilman Tom Meurer: "Ross likes to carry banners where nobody else will." Agrees Perot's sister Bette: "Ross feels you don't manage people, you lead them."

Perot (pronounced Puh-roe) was born in hardscrabble Texarkana, Texas, the son of a cotton broker and horse trader. He likes to relate that he began busting broncos for money at age eight. As a teenager, he delivered newspapers on horseback in Texarkana's black slums. In 1949 he enrolled at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was inspired by the can-do regimentation of the military. But after a four-year minimum Navy hitch, he resigned to join a firm synonymous with the kind of corporate bureaucracy Perot now claims to disdain, IBM.

Perot says he knew so little about IBM that at first he thought it made only typewriters. Soon better informed, he became a Dallas-based computer supersalesman whose order books bulged so quickly that IBM put a cap on his commissions. In 1962, after five years, he founded EDS with $1,000 in capital as a company to process computerized data for other businesses. EDS quickly found a niche processing medical-insurance forms for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas. In 1968, when Perot took his firm public, its revenues were $7.7 million. He managed to persuade underwriters to float less than 10% of the company's stock for a price that was 118 times earnings. He kept most of the rest of the shares and was deemed a billionaire, at least on paper, by age 39. Now he is believed to be worth at least $2.5 billion.

Perot instilled a version of military-influenced behavior at his Dallas EDS headquarters that prevails to this day. Says a Wall Street analyst: "Perot used to run the company like it was his own private militia." But Perot also fostered a spirit of no-frills egalitarianism that inspired high standards and fierce loyalty from his workers. Executive parking spaces and other perks were banned; Perot and the managers ate in the EDS cafeteria. Perot has described the EDS operation as a place where "people are treated as full partners." But he has also said, "I'm used to being able to say something once, in a whisper, and have committed guys around this country go make it happen."