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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

On the company's web site there's a page about him (he's the CEO): http://cerner.com/public/Cerner_2.asp?id=27586

In that it says: "Cerner associates extol Neal for his passion and foresight, his ability to drive change within organizations, his entrepreneurial spirit, and his candid, uninhibited conversational style."

So that's just a candid, uninhibited conversational style :-)

Note that that message was sent in 2001. If you chart CERN against the NASDAQ over the last 10 years you'll see that the memo hasn't hurt company stock price one bit.

http://www.google.co.uk/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=...

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I watched a Midwife trying to enter my partners test results into what I believe was a CERNER system at my local hospital. It was painful. The UI is text based, looks pre windows 3.1 and breaks all the basic rules of UI design. Evidently, they also had more serious technical issues under the hood: http://bit.ly/4vLPtE http://bit.ly/9NQKi8 It took them months to sort this out and wasted a huge amount of the medical staff's time. I personally experienced the problems with appointments disappearing. Also, the nurses were having to print out test requests and give them to patients to take to appointments with instructions about what they information they needed to bring back because they couldn't make the requests through the system or access the results of the tests they had requested.

In short, I don't think the success of this company is based on the quality of its software or the timeliness of its delivery. Maybe this is always a problem where the end users are not the customer. The company that builds the system is chosen based on tenders from a few suppliers. As a consumer of a system like this it's hard to identify what you are actually buying. The purchasing of such a system will be managed by a senior executive who will have little experience of the pitfalls of the system in use before they are contractually committed to paying out significant sums of money. There is no market connection between the quality of the software and the end users. I suspect that companies make money in these markets by gaming the bidding process and milking every loophole in the contract to add extra time and cost, not by actually producing a better quality product than their competitors. It's not just a public sector purchasing problem either. Just look at any large construction project, these are also typically be late and over budget. Is there some kind of 'complexity threshold' at which point the market is not driving the quality or cost of the product because you are not sure what you are buying and for how much?

So, basically customers buy their product using other people's money.

It did cause the stock to drop a bit for a while, and caused some negative publicity - including a NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-m...

The e-mail message was leaked and posted on Yahoo. Its belligerent tone surprised thousands of readers, including analysts and investors. In the stock market, the valuation of the company, which was $1.5 billion on March 20, plummeted 22 percent in three days.

....

At the end of the week, as the stock fell, Mr. Patterson sent out another e-mail message to his troops. Unlike the first memo, it was not called a Management Directive, but rather a Neal Note. It was both an apology to those he offended and a confirmation of the work-ethic problem within the company.

That's speculation. They've done better than the NASDAQ, but how do you know they couldn't have done better without the memo being sent out?

Of course you're right, but that's a pretty high standard to hold him to. You'd have to say the same thing about CEOs who behave in a way you support, too. ("Yeah, their stock improved after he started treating employees with respect, but how do you know they couldn't have done better without that change in behavior?")

I think the moral of the story is that stock prices are a pretty bad way to gauge employee morale.

I'll refine that one step further: stock prices are a bad way to gauge anything reliably ... except stock prices.

And the CEO in question probably has optimizing stock prices at a higher priority than optimizing employee morale.

Well, here's one clue from Google Finance's weekly price data: in the three weeks before he sent the memo the price had dropped from $29.407 to $21.063 - a 28% drop. Oddly enough, the 3/23 Friday close of $17 (just after the memo went public) marked the bottom of that stock decline. A month later the stock closed up at $21.55.

Generally speaking, warm fuzzy bosses don't mean spit to a stock's price, while layoffs can sometimes improve it. The perception that a division's managers are ineffectual, however, could hurt a lot. The story that a CEO was starting to kick managerial ass could improve investor's assessment of the company's chances. Certainly the price data supports the argument that the CEO's actions stopped the price erosion.

Looks like their stock price was pretty volatile in 2001. Is it really likely then that employee action was the reason for a 20% drop?

So much for theories about Karma, etc.

EDIT: To be more clear, there is no such thing as Karma outside of ones self. If you can be a total douche bag like this guy and not feel bad about it, then nothing bad is going to happen to you because of it.

Are you defending this guy?

No. I'm pointing out that he may be a total ass, but it doesn't seem to have hurt his company.

I appreciate you pointing out that it doesn't seem to have hurt company, although its very like that it did in other unmeasurable ways.

Your post seemed to excuse his actions as if its just his style.

Yes, but you didn't present evidence that he didn't hurt his company. You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.

> You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.

Since no one has presented evidence showing that he hurt his company....

In my book, you don't get to complain about the quality of someone else's evidence unless your evidence is better. And no, "self-evident" doesn't count. YMMV.

At the risk of getting meta, I was complaining about the quality of the evidence for the assertion. I never made any assertions about the company suffering in any way because of this guy.

in past 10 years the stock has grown at an annualized rate of 19%, weathered 2008 crash extremely well and has doubled since crash. The guy is also still at the helm at the age of 60. He might be the worse a*hole possible, but whatever he's doing seems to be working pretty well.

Without intimate knowledge of the company's workings, plans and actions in those past 10 years, that logic is post hoc ergo propter hoc. The only thing we can say for sure is his jackassery didn't hurt the company as much as a rational person would think it might.

He's commenting on the truth of certain statements.

Are you saying we should gloss over some facts just to make the guy look even worse than he already does?

Nope. I'm saying, "Are you defending this guy?"

By conflating making true statements about the stock market (good) with defending assholes (bad), you create an environment hostile to truth.

I was genuinely curious.

When did you stop beating your wife?

Sure. Why not?

The morale of the company was supposedly "killed" after that email and the evidence used was a drop in stock price, but a little investigation shows that the stock price is actually fine. Therefore, any accusation that the CEO is ineffective appears to be false and deserves to be defended against.

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