Chapter 1: What is Epic Systems and why is it significant?
In the rolling hills of Verona, Wisconsin, just outside of Madison and far from the usual software epicenters, you will find one of the biggest tech campuses in the United States. It is home to a company called Epic Systems. You may not know Epic, but there is a very good chance that they know you. Over 80 percent of Americans have at least one electronic health record with Epic.
If you've ever used my chart, that's Epic. They make the software used by many of the biggest and best healthcare systems in the U.S., and they now operate in 15 other countries, too. Epic does have rivals like Oracle and Meditech, but for decades, it has been the biggest player in this industry. The campus sits on 1,700 acres. There's an underground auditorium that seats 11,000.
There are playful sculptures all around, and the inside of the office buildings are dressed like movie sets. Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz. So who's the wizard behind the curtain at Epic?
Judy Faulkner, also known as Judith Ruth Faulkner. And if you take away my middle name, I'm Ruthless.
Faulkner founded Epic in 1979 and is still the CEO. Epic is an unusual company. And as you will hear today, Faulkner is an unusual leader. But I'm not sure that ruthless is the right word.
I've got one house, one husband.
One dog.
One dog. I would want more than one dog, but the husband does not. One car.
What's your car?
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Chapter 2: Who is Judy Faulkner and what makes her leadership unique?
Like... This absolutely crazy thing happened. And if another car was coming, I'd be dead. But Judy Faulkner is at her core a coder, a programmer, a computer scientist. So when she told the story, she focused on the parameters.
It was hilly. I would be at 35 miles an hour. It would quickly go to 60.
She tried to identify the underlying error.
It thought that maybe the road was going to end, so it was going to save me. She replicated the error. Same thing happened, so it was the software and not the car. And she supervised the fix. The Tesla people realized that was not a good thing to do, and they did react quite appropriately.
This kind of temperament is probably a big benefit when you're running a software system like EPIX. They oversee a vast, dynamic dataset that underlies one of the most complicated, critical, and expensive industries in the world. Judy Faulkner is one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in history. So why haven't we ever heard much from her?
As I understand, you don't do much of this, interviews.
I try not to.
Yeah, why?
It's time consuming. You can mess up and just be embarrassed by what you do. So therefore, it's a little bit nerve-wracking because you don't know if you're going to mess up or not. And also, consider I'm a techie, math and computer science. Techies, by their nature, are usually introverted. So I'd rather crawl under the table than be interviewed in most situations. But sometimes it's fun.
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Chapter 3: How did Judy Faulkner transition from a programmer to a CEO?
Grow its market share, remain a competitive vendor, be sold to another IT firm, go public.
How would you answer that?
Can't do the last two. So it's only grow its market share and remain a competitive vendor, which I hope it will do both of those.
You say it can't do the last two, but it's not like it's impossible, but you're doing everything you can to set it up so that that won't happen, correct?
Well, only possible if the laws change somehow. But in today's law, it's pretty well structured so that that can't happen. My stock is divided into two parts, the value and the vote. The value gets given for charitable purposes. The voting side goes to the Purpose Trust, and the Purpose Trust has two groups who vote my stock, my family members and Epic staff.
I thought there were some healthcare CEOs in there as well.
Yes, but they're not the voting of my stock. I've got four family members and succession plans and five Epic company members and succession plans. They get to vote following my rules of here's what you have to do. You can never vote to go public. You can never vote to be acquires. And there's a whole bunch of other things. You can't create new stock, which gets over those rules.
A lot of different things to make sure that it's all followed. Then we have three CEOs from our CEO council, which meets once a year. Can you say who they are? We just changed who they are, so I can't yet because I don't have their names in front of me. But they're people who volunteered to do this, and we're very interested in doing it.
Their job is to take anyone to court who doesn't vote according to the rules.
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