Neal Patterson

Neal L. Patterson (born December 1949) is CEO of Cerner Corporation, a Kansas City-;based medical software corporation. He is also an owner of the Sporting Kansas City soccer team.

Patterson grew up on the family farm near Manchester, Oklahoma and received his bachelors and Masters from Oklahoma State University in 1971 and 1972. Following a stint with Arthur Andersen, he and Arthur Andersen colleagues Cliff Illig and Paul Gorup founded Cerner in 1979.^[1]

Patterson was featured in a USA Today article, Scandals lead execs to 'Atlas Shrugged', as a member of a friendly group of CEOs who have a working knowledge of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.^[2] He became a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at Oklahoma State University.^[3]

Patterson is infamous for this e-mail^[4] flaming managers for not coming to work before 8 am and leaving before 5 pm, now a prominent example used when discussing e-mail netiquette. On the day that the email was posted to Yahoo!, the company's stock price fell by over 22%^[5] from a high of $1.5 billion USD.^[6]

In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of "America's Best-Performing Bosses" based on a formula for calculating which executives delivered the best shareholder value relative to their total compensation. Factors included stock performance relative to industry peers over the past six years, annualized stock performance during the leader's total tenure and performance relative to the S&P 500 over that time, and total compensation over the past six years.^{[7] [8]}

On August 31, 2006, Patterson and five other individuals purchased the Kansas City Wizards(Sporting Kansas City), a Major League Soccer team, from Lamar Hunt. The other members of the ownership group at the time of purchase were Cliff Illig, Rock Island Capital’s Robb Heineman, Greg Maday, David French, and Pat Curran, founder of C3 Holdings. The group stated its intention to keep the Sporting Kansas City (Wizards) in the Kansas City area.^[9]

References

1. ^ http://www.bizjournals.com/gen/executive.html?excode=556ec5a235694b648740ba66e73f5d3c&market=kansascity
2. ^ USATODAY.com - Scandals lead execs to 'Atlas Shrugged'
3. ^ Welcome to Pi Kappa Alpha, Iota Theta Chapter!
4. ^ BBC News - Boss's e-mail bites back
5. ^ ITworld.com - Unix security: Proprietary email
6. ^ E-Mail Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policies, Security, and Legal Issues for E-Mail and Digital Communications By Randolph Kahn & Nancy Flynn http://books.google.com/books?id=Q9CbhiflZh0C&pg=PA45&dq=netiquette&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=5jsrxx0u3qWX1_d4KXCl-_4Tc_4#PPA47,M1
7. ^ In Pictures: America's Best-Performing Bosses http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/27/best-performing-chief-executive-compensation-leadership-boss-10-best-performing-ceos_slide_5.html
8. ^ Bang for the Buck http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/27/best-performing-chief-executive-shareholders-leadership-boss-10-bang-for-the-buck.html
9. ^ American Soccer News - Kansas City Wizards (Sporting Kansas City)

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Name	Patterson, Neal
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Date of birth	1949
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