Success Quote by Ross Perot

Perot’s line is a jab at the lazy reflex of American business: when competition heats up, everyone reaches for the blunt instrument of price. Cutting prices is easy because it’s instantly measurable, instantly marketable, and instantly destructive. It’s a move that lets leaders look decisive without doing the harder work of inventing, improving, and taking responsibility for quality.

The intent is classic Perot: sell competence as a moral posture. “Brains” isn’t just IQ here; it’s discipline, engineering rigor, and a willingness to invest in the unsexy parts of capitalism: process, reliability, design, service. In that framing, the “better article” becomes a kind of civic contribution, not just a product. You win by building something that deserves to exist, not by racing to the bottom and calling it strategy.

The subtext also bites at executives who treat customers as purely price-sensitive and therefore interchangeable. If you believe people only shop on cost, you’re admitting your product has no soul, no edge, no reason to be chosen. Price cuts are an implicit confession: we can’t differentiate, so we’ll discount.

Context matters: Perot came out of a mid-century, production-and-systems worldview, the era when American firms competed on manufacturing prowess and managerial logistics, then watched that confidence get rattled by global competition and outsourcing pressures. The quote is a small manifesto against the spreadsheet-first mentality: you can’t cost-cut your way into excellence. You have to build it.