Success Quote by Ross Perot

For a businessman like Ross Perot, this isn’t an airy defense of “creativity.” It’s a shot across the bow at bureaucracy: the kind that turns motion into paperwork and replaces judgment with compliance. “Written reports” aren’t just documents in Perot’s world; they’re a management technology. They codify responsibility, create an audit trail, and make every decision legible to people far from the work. That’s exactly why he distrusts them. The more you force a living operation into standardized prose, the more you reward caution, wordsmithing, and career safety over improvisation.

The line works because it turns something that sounds virtuous - documentation, accountability - into a quiet villain. It implies that creativity isn’t a magical spark but a fragile organizational condition: speed, autonomy, and the freedom to be wrong without having to narrate your wrongness. Reporting pulls attention away from the customer and toward the internal audience: the boss, the committee, the system. Once the audience is internal, the incentives flip. You stop inventing and start covering yourself.

Context matters: Perot built his reputation on hard-charging execution and direct lines of responsibility, then ran for president railing against a political class drowning in process. The subtext is populist in a corporate register: real work happens on the ground; paperwork is the tax extracted by people who don’t do the work. It’s not anti-intellectual. It’s anti-friction.