Success Quote by Ross Perot

Perot’s line is corporate populism distilled to a barn-burner: a vivid threat, a clean instruction, a jab at the people who turn danger into paperwork. The snake is deliberately primitive. It bypasses policy nuance and goes straight to the nervous system, where “kill it” feels like common sense and anything slower starts to look like cowardice or self-dealing. That’s the rhetorical trick: he frames bureaucracy not as caution but as procrastination masquerading as process.

The subtext is a critique of institutional incentives. Committees exist to distribute blame, protect careers, and generate the appearance of action without committing to risk. Perot, the businessman-outsider, sells the opposite ethic: decisive accountability. If the outcome is bad, at least it’s your bad decision, made fast. In that worldview, delay is the real sin, because it compounds costs and invites the snake to multiply.

Context matters: Perot rose as a 1990s anti-establishment figure during a period of high frustration with Washington gridlock, corporate bloat, and management-speak. His appeal was that he sounded like a guy in a boardroom who’d actually met a payroll. The quote flatters ordinary competence against professionalized governance: you don’t need experts to recognize a snake.

It also reveals the hazard in Perot’s brand of clarity. Snakes aren’t always snakes; sometimes they’re complex systems, unintended consequences, or problems where “kill it” creates a bigger mess. The line works because it’s funny and combative, but it also dares you to prefer speed over deliberation - and to treat deliberation itself as a kind of moral failure.