And I'm accessible on issues and concerns that transcend the traditional boundaries of work and the company. Not long ago, for example, I got an e-mail message from one of our new senior associates. The news was urgent: his father-in-law had just been diagnosed as having cancer and he was going off the Net for the next two days. I e-mailed back immediately that the company would stand behind him any way we could. The next day I got another e-mail message: it was worse than they had thought; they were in a small Texas town, and they didn't know who to go to for help. I e-mailed back with the name of a doctor at Southwestern Medical School who referred them to the best help they could find.

Today I tell the people in Perot Systems that this is the path that we have chosen. It's the path we'll all be on for the rest of our lives. It has no destination. There is no sense of arrival. It's a continuous process.

In a world where the lines between companies, industries, and even nations get blurred, a leader builds an effective organization around values and work style. And a leader learns to define success in business as both producing financial strength and generating a team of people who support and nurture each other.

Sidebar: My Intro to Leadership Course

In 1967 Ross Perot gave me my intro to leadership course at EDS. I had just joined the company in January 1966 and already I was going to Ross about once a week with a new way I thought we should change things. He rejected every idea. He even wondered aloud if I belonged at EDS. Finally he offered me a chance to be the leader of a five-person project, working with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas on a system that processed Medicare insurance claims. This was Ross's original customer, the client he had had when he was with IBM before he founded EDS. That told me it was highly important; I assumed that this was the test. At the time I didn't know the reason there was an opening for a project team leader. Much later I learned that the five people on the project had told Ross that if he didn't remove the project leader they were all going to quit. Nobody told me that. But it was clear when I walked in the door and announced I was the new team leader, I had entered a tense situation. One of the team members told me that he was 10 years my senior, had already been on the project a year, and that he should be the team leader. Why was I even there?

Somehow it worked. This project was the first of its kind. We developed a brand new system in a brand new language working with a brand new computer in just 90 days: over one year's work crammed into 3 months. In the process we took project revenues from $16,000 a month to $400,000 a month. We took it from a breakeven project to 80% pretax profitable.

That began my training as a leader at EDS. Then in the summer of 1967, Ross gave me the two-week crash course in sales and leadership. We had a major opportunity for a contract with Blue Shield to process their Medicaid claims. It was my project to lead. But I didn't know the first thing about putting together a proposal.

I went to Ross and asked him: How do you price a contract? He said, "Why don't you go back and make a proposal, figure it out, and then sit down and give me the options?" The next week it was time to present it to the customer. I'd never done that either, so I asked Ross: How do you present this? He said, "Why don't you go make an outline and then come back and show me your proposal?"

So I did. Then the day came to meet the customer. At 8 a.m. I went to meet Ross so we could make our 9 a.m. meeting with the customer. When I got there, Ross's secretary told me he had left town. I had never met the customer. I had never made a sales pitch in my life. But I didn't have any choice. When I sat down in front of the customer's executive vice president, I was so scared I literally couldn't talk.

Fortunately, the manager of the customer's unit I'd been working with sat next to me. I had a written offer in my hand, and he took it away from me and started reading the proposal aloud. In an act of charity, the executive vice president listened to the offer and then asked me a question about the technology. I was very comfortable with the technology, so I could answer that. Finally I loosened up and at the end of an hour the executive vice president signed the contract.

Within three years we took the 5-person group I was leading and grew it to 1,500 people. That became the health care business of EDS -- at that time the financial engine of the company.

In 1979 I became president of EDS. It was roughly a $200 million company. Five years later we reached $1 billion in revenues. That same year General Motors suggested that they buy us for $2.5 billion; the deal was closed in October 1984. I was the lead manager for the next two years when EDS went from $1 billion in revenues to $4.4 billion. So I went from managing 5 people in 1967 to managing 45,000 people in 1986. When I left EDS, it was the largest computer services company in the world.

Mort Meyerson (morton.meyerson@2m.com) is chairman and CEO of Dallas-based Perot Systems. He joined EDS in 1996; From 1979 to 1986, he served first as president, then as vice-chairman.

Sidebar: The Two Faces of EDS