Paul Gorup
Cerner Corp., Kansas City
“Health care,” declares Paul Gorup, “is probably 20 years behind the rest of the world in how it looks at things and does things.” That’s a fairly stern indictment, coming from a man who has helped health care close that gap—at least with its electronic medical record-keeping—since co-founding Cerner more than 30 years ago. “Look at the example of the 1990s, where basically we had a period of really unparalleled growth,” said Gorup, Cerner’s chief innovation officer. “That growth was based upon our ability to use technology to improve productivity significantly more than costs, the only decade where we’ve grown the economy without going into recession. Health care didn’t do that.”
Thanks in part to the health IT work of Cerner, that’s changing. Not rapidly, but “there’s a lot of opportunity for innovation there,” Gorup says. He and two other Arthur Anderson consultants—Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig—launched Cerner in 1979. Gorup left the company in 1987, then returned in 1999. Among his various pursuits in the interim was the launch of what today is Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, which revolutionized the way radio stations track their playlists. He sharpened that kind of vision at Arthur Andersen, he said. “The thing Arthur did for all three of us was give us a lot of exposure to different industries, and different facets of a business within an industry,” says Gorup, now a Northland resident after spending most of his life in Kansas City, Kan. Those lessons came right as the mainframe was yielding to the personal computer, which Gorup said would drive change at the user level—a fundamental transformation that made Cerner possible.
Karen Graves
Trails West Festival, St. Joseph
The line on a map—or, more specifically, the 1,000-foot span of the Missouri River—was never a barrier to Karen Graves or her ability to change a community. A transplant from Salina, Kan., where she was the first woman to sit as mayor, Graves found a wealth of new civic causes after she and husband Jim moved to St. Joseph in 1992. There, she founded the annual Trails West! arts festival, co-chaired an endowment campaign for the symphony, served as president of the local arts council and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Arts, and earned mayoral recognition for lifetime achievement in the arts. “I think the founding of Trails West! will have the greatest impact in St. Joseph,” she said, “because it demonstrated that when people pull together, they can accomplish great things.” Since its debut in 1993, the festival has consistently ranked among the state’s top draws by the Missouri Arts Council. Still, she says, “volunteering and leadership roles have benefitted me far more than the projects I have undertaken.”
She also co-founded the Community Foundation of Northwest Missouri. What accounted for such a seamless transition? “I have found if you are willing to roll up your sleeves, take on a big project and write a few small checks along the way, you are welcomed with open arms,” she says. Graves has leveraged her success with securing Salina’s All-American City designation into a similar outcome in St. Joseph. “I have “All America City” posters from two communities on my wall,” she laughs.
Arnold Donald
AWD Group, St. Louis
Three times a day, the public-address system at St. Augustine High in New Orleans blared the mantra: “Gentlemen, prepare yourselves; you’re going to run the world.” Arnold Donald took the message to heart. He’s not quite ruling the planet, but he’s definitely exerting a gravitational pull on his adopted home of St. Louis. Currently heading his investor and management consultancy, AWD Group, Donald has previously been with Monsanto, where he started after earning his MBA at the University of Chicago. Over the next 25 years, he rose to various division leadership roles and at one point had 20,000 people working under him. In 2002, he joined Merisant, the Chicago company perhaps best known for developing the artificial sweetener Equal. More than just a consumer choice, Donald saw that product as a means to greater social good: addressing a national epidemic of Type II diabetes. He has served on virtually every influential civic or non-profit group in St. Louis. “I only do things I can make a difference in,” he says, which explains why his skills are in demand by so many organizations. He’s served on the Regional Chamber and Growth Association and the boards of the zoo, art museum, United Way, science center and botanical garden—for some stretches, on five of them at once. “They all make extremely meaningful contributions” to life in St. Louis he says.
All of his personal drive can be traced to what inspired him back at St. Augustine, when he would interview corporate CEOs to map their organizational plans and set his own course. Through high school, a liberal-arts bachelor’s, a master’s in mechanical engineering and his MBA, “my goal was always to increase the probability that I could compete at the next level.”
Mark Wrighton
Washington University, St. Louis
Mark Wrighton became chancellor of Washington University in 1995—the year many of this fall’s incoming freshmen were born. In their short lifetimes, he has led a transformation, elevating the university’s already impressive stature within national academic circles. More than $1 billion has gone into new campus construction, yield-ing 30 buildings with more in the planning. Among them: new facilities for the law school, the school of design and visual arts and the school of engineering. The arts and sciences curriculum has been redesigned, endowed faculty professorships are up. Enrollment applications have doubled. A $1 billion endowment fund drive beat its goal by 55 percent.
And yet, the credit for virtually all of those achievements lies elsewhere, says Wrighton, a man who can talk at considerable length without ever getting to the word “I.” “Success in an academic institution depends on attracting the very best faculty and students and providing for them the very best environment for learning and discovery,” he says. Simple as that.
Wrighton says his parents instilled in him a drive to learn, which paid off with degrees in chemistry from Florida State University and a Ph.D. from Cal Tech—the latter when he was just 22. He started his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and rose to provost there before Washington University came calling.
While St. Louis itself has challenges with public education and unemployment, and the state must address funding issues for public higher education and health indicators, Wrighton is optimistic about its near-term prospects, saying the state enjoys, in relative terms, a strong financial position.
“Maintaining this strength is important,” he says, “but it is also important to make the investments needed in education that will prepare the citizens of the state to be successful in this challenging employment environment.”
Jim Limbaugh
Southeast Health, Cape Girardeau
It’s not terribly surprising that the legendary Limbaugh family of Cape Girardeau counts among its members a football coach, a banker and a health-care executive. More surprising is that they’re all one guy: Jim Limbaugh, currently vice president for business development at Southeast Health. After an early turn as a bank credit analyst in Kansas City, he came home to coach defensive backs at his alma mater, Southeast Missouri State. A Division II grad assistant, though, will never retire rich—“I was earning more selling ads for the football program than my stipend paid,” he marvels—so Limbaugh went back into banking. The traits he learned as a player and coach, though, stayed with him: Hard work. Long hours. Sacrifice. Teamwork. “In my career, there’s never been a better training ground than that experience,” he says. Over nearly three decades, he rose to chief operating officer at Montgomery Bank, then made the leap into health care in 2009—at a time when regulatory issues were beginning to roil both sectors. The common denominator for success in either arena, he said, is the ability to form lasting, meaningful relationships. He’s custodian of an influential name in the Cape—his grandfather, Rush Hudson Limbaugh Sr., the family patriarch, represented Procter & Gamble when it acquired land for a plant there, and it’s still among the biggest employers in the county. And, yes, there is a notable radio broadcaster in the family. He’s Jim’s cousin.
Angela Speck
University of Missouri, Columbia
Her head is in the stars—Angela Speck is, after all, an astronomer—but her feet are firmly grounded in Missouri. “Coming to the U.S. was initially meant to be a temporary thing, but it turned out to be a great fit,” says the British-born Speck. But, she notes, “like many women faculty members these days, I am married to another professor (a geologist).” And MU, she says, has a strong record of hiring spouses, and hanging on to them through tenured professorships.
Most professional astronomers, she says, travel the globe to use different observatories, which have different capabilities—and because only at the equator can you see all directions in the sky over the course of a year. So those in her line of work can expect to travel. But looming cuts in federal research funding, and the end of manned space flight in the U.S. with retirement of the shuttle fleet, will likely limit globetrotting, to the detriment of more than just her chosen field. “While the study of astronomy is important philosophically and does lead to breakthroughs in basic science that apply well beyond astronomer, the direct research is not of tangible benefit to anyone,” Speck says. “Consequently, the chances are slim that we can get industry to fund our research.” Higher-profile research in sustainable energy, medicine and the life sciences has obvious commercial applications, she concedes, but limiting research will also slow the pipeline of individuals going into more obviously commercial science and technology sectors. “Defunding astronomy,” she says, “will have a big impact on science in general.”
Terry Brewer
Brewer Science, Rolla
After quitting his job at Honeywell, Terry Brewer was ready to start his own company. Missouri wasn’t a primary site. “I looked all over the country, in all the great spots like North Carolina and Colorado, but I couldn’t get any interest” from investors. Then an acquaintance on the staff at the University of Missouri–Rolla offered Brewer some space to get started. Brewer, in turn, would provide some technical assistance for his landlord’s projects. “In today’s world,” Brewer says, “he would be called angel investor.” That was 32 years ago. Since then, Brewer Science has grown into one of the largest employers in Rolla, with 300 skilled workers turning out reflective coatings for the semiconductor industry. “I think there is something special about Missouri; it still has a wide-open-spaces attitude, a frontier attitude,” Brewer says, and that entrepreneurial spirit was a foundation for his company’s success. The company makes goods for manufacturers worldwide, and he has three operations in Europe and four in Asia. It all works, though, because of what he’s found in Rolla. “In a town of 15,000 in the middle of the Ozarks, I can ship products around the world in a day or two,” Brewer says. But if Missouri really wants to capitalize on the new world of commerce, it must invest more in wireless technology, highways and airports, Brewer says: “We don’t plan very well, so we don’t do a very good job of taking advantage of the resources we already have.”
Wayne Goode
Former State Senator, St. Louis
Only one other person has served longer in the Missouri General Assembly, and when Wayne Goode looks back over 42 years of legislative achievements, the complicated deals he was involved with aren’t the ones that stand out. It was a far simpler bill, one that allowed the University of Missouri to take over an operation it was running in conjunction with the Normandy School District. That planted the seeds for what would become the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “The long-term ramifications of that have been tremendous,” Goode says. For 22 years in the Missouri House, then 20 in the Senate, Goode was a fiscally conservative Democrat who was able to broker deals on everything from K-12 school finance to hazardous and solid-waste regulation and creation of St. Louis Community College, which until last year led even the University of Missouri-Columbia in numbers of undergraduate students. His career straddled a seismic shift in Missouri’s political alignment, going from a solidly Democratic assembly to one that today has veto-proof Republican majorities. Term limits have abetted that process, and Goode laments the lack of institutional memory they have imposed in Jefferson City. “People are there only two or three years and then they’re sometimes chairing appropriations committees,” he says. “You have to be relying almost totally on staff.” Since his retirement, he’s stayed active in various roles, serving on the boards of the Missouri Foundation for Health and the MU curators, among others.
Shubhra Gangopadhyay
University of Missouri, Columbia
MU wanted a nanotechnology department in its school of engineering. Shubhra Gangopadhyay, quite at home at Texas Tech University, had a question: “Why should I move to Missouri?” She got the answer she was looking for: Because she would be able to make a major impact for the school of engineering, the university and the state. “I liked the idea of building a new program to make a major impact at every level,” she says.
She’s co-director of MU’s International Center for Nano/Micro Systems and Nanotechnology, where she has been recognized among the nation’s 50 most innovative people in nanotechnology. If Missouri truly wants to broaden its economy, she says, it must “include-energy related business, including photovoltaic, electrochemical batteries and biofuel.”
A native of India, she has found in Columbia a surprisingly collaborative environment. “There are no barriers between departments and different disciplines,” she says, and “the faculty are excited to talk about new science and ready to collaborate”—Midwestern friendliness that she says extends to her neighborhood, as well.
Art Fillmore
Levy & Craig, Kansas City
Art Fillmore answered a nation’s call, spent a year as a forward observer calling in air strikes against enemy positions in Vietnam, and came home to Missouri to get on with his life. That he did, earning a law degree and developing a successful practice with an emphasis on renewable energy and business development. But for 15 years, there was unfinished business. “Vietnam shaped my life more than being a lawyer did, in many ways,” says Fillmore. In 1992, he was appointed by the first President Bush to an advisory committee studying problems with war veterans.
That eventually led to a leadership role with the Heart of America Stand Down Foundation, which serves 1,800 homeless veterans in the Kansas City area. “It was the first time since I got back from Vietnam that I was on a regular basis talking with other vets,” he says. “I had been suppressing memories, had nightmares all the time—it was really a reflection of post-traumatic stress disorder.” And that’s when he started doing “everything I could for veterans, especially those on streets because of problems that came out of their service. They fought for country, but the country didn’t do its part for them.”
Fillmore’s path to law was charted early; he cites the influence that a Clarence Darrow biography left on him as a 13-year-old in his native St. Louis, and he would go on to become the first lawyer in his family. “I was struck by the fact that not only could he affect the outcomes of the lives of people in trial,” he says, “but also that was he was doing was making history.”
