On Wings of Eagles

by Ken Follett

She was clinging, he thought. She had not liked his being in the military, she did not like his having hobbies which took him away from her, and she did not like his working for a boss who felt free to call on him at all hours of the day or night for special tasks.

The customer did not want the machine, he wanted the fast, cheap information it could provide. Yet, too often, the customer spent so much time creating his new data processing department and learning how to use the machine that his computer caused him trouble and expense instead of saving them. Perot’s idea was to sell a total package – a complete data processing department with machinery, software and staff. The customer had only to say, in simple language, what information he needed, and EDS would give it to him. Then he could get on with what he was good at – banking, insurance or manufacturing.

The chairman of IBM, Tom Watson, met Perot in a restaurant one day and said: ‘I just want to know one thing, Ross. Did you foresee that the ratio would change?’ ‘No,’ said Perot. ‘The twenty cents looked good enough to me.’

If you go through life thinking about all the bad things that can happen, you soon talk yourself into doing nothing at all.

success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. In