Time & Perspective Quote by Ross Perot

Perot’s advice lands like a jab at corporate self-importance: the most “innovative” thing a company can do is shut up and listen. The line is engineered to puncture boardroom mythology, where customer insight gets laundered through dashboards, consultants, and “voice of the customer” programs until it’s abstract enough to ignore. “Face to face” isn’t nostalgia; it’s a demand for friction. In-person contact forces specificity, catches hesitation, reveals what surveys flatten, and makes it harder to rationalize complaints as outliers.

The second sentence is the real payload. “You’d be amazed” is a folksy hook that doubles as an indictment: companies don’t fail because consumers are unknowable, they fail because they choose not to know. Perot frames listening as a competitive advantage precisely because so many firms treat it as beneath them. The subtext is moral as much as managerial. Listening isn’t merely a technique; it’s a posture of respect, an admission that the market is not a puzzle to solve from afar but a relationship to maintain.

Context matters: Perot came up in an era when big institutions - corporate and political - grew bloated, insulated, and enamored with their own internal logic. His businessman’s populism favored direct contact over ceremony, operational reality over slide decks. Read today, it’s also a critique of digital distance: in a world of analytics, the temptation is to confuse measurement with understanding. Perot’s point is blunt: proximity produces truth, and truth is what complacent companies are built to avoid.