Neal Patterson

Neal L. Patterson
Nationality	USA
Occupation	CEO of Cerner

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 in South Central Kansas 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.

Patterson served in the Army National Guard during Vietnam, though only served on active duty during basic training.

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

Patterson is infamous for an e-mail 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 market cap fell by over 22% from a high of $1.5 billion USD.

In April 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.

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