Judy Faulkner doesn’t like interviews.
“I’d rather crawl under the table than be interviewed in most situations,” the Epic founder and CEO told “Freakonomics Radio” in April.
Still, between that rare sit-down, her “Hey Judy” blog and the corporate philosophy classes Epic runs for new hires, Ms. Faulkner, 83, has laid out in some detail how she runs the EHR giant and its roughly 15,000 employees.
Becker’s has covered the business rules she has written into Epic’s succession plan, such as never going public or being acquired. These are the rules beneath those: how she handles problems, prices, customers and the people who work for her.
Here are 10, in her own words:
1. “My job is not necessarily to know the answer, it’s to know who knows the answer.”
When “Freakonomics Radio” host Stephen Dubner asked Ms. Faulkner how she spends a typical day, she sent a colleague to her office for two printed slides, one titled “My role: Company success,” and read from them.
“People call me and I have to know, ‘Oh, Joe knows the answer to this, Mary knows the answer to that,’ and get them on the line and help with the answer,” she said.
Mr. Dubner noted she can’t know everything happening across the campus.
“It’s going on much faster than I can keep track of,” Ms. Faulkner said. “And I don’t know even all the products we’re working on, because we hire bright, capable, hardworking people. And they come up with new things all the time.”
2. “If you tolerate mediocrity, you become a mediocre company.”
“Focus on competency. Do not tolerate mediocrity” is No. 6 of Epic’s 10 commandments, which hang in the bathrooms, break rooms and copy rooms on its campus. Ms. Faulkner explained the rule on “Freakonomics Radio.”
“What we say is if you tolerate mediocrity, you become a mediocre company. And is that what you want to do?” she said.
Commandment No. 8 makes a similar point: “Have courage. What you put up with is what you stand for.” In a 2019 talk in Madison, Wis., Ms. Faulkner listed “an acceptance of mediocrity” among the “symptoms of corporate decline” Epic tries to avoid, alongside increased bureaucracy and too much focus on legal matters and finance, Becker’s reported, citing The Cap Times.
3. “If something is wrong, you have to write a red flag up about it.”
Ms. Faulkner told Mr. Dubner about the time her Tesla’s self-driving mode crossed a double yellow line toward oncoming traffic. She reported it, and Tesla reproduced the problem on a second car. Asked whether Epic’s software had ever done something comparable, she said not to her knowledge and pointed to the company’s internal reporting system.
“We test it very well before it goes out. But we have reports that everybody is supposed to write, they’re called red flags. If something is wrong, you have to write a red flag up about it,” she said. “Most of the red flags are about things that can be fixed and don’t make a big difference. Every once in a while, a red flag will either be a clinical error or a financial error. And on those things, we jump on them right away.”
4. “Externally, people can make up their title, and they do.”
Epic largely does without job titles inside the company, Ms. Faulkner confirmed in April.
“We don’t use them internally. Externally, people can make up their title, and they do,” she said. “Although, once someone told me that he had met our chief medical officer and I had to ask him who it was because we have about a dozen physicians who work here, and any of them could have used that title.”
5. “What’s our disability?”
Ms. Faulkner puts that question to new employees during Epic’s five-hour corporate philosophy classes, after asking how many of them grew up in the Midwest, she wrote in a 2025 blog post. The answer: “Midwest nice.”
The lesson traces to a call from a Northeastern health system CEO who was upset that he had hired a consultant after Epic warned him not to.
“I was confused. I asked him why he was angry at us,” she wrote. “He said: ‘Because you didn’t argue enough!'”
“And we talk about the need to be very clear and firm, to explain the pain that will happen if the organization goes the wrong way, and to escalate to leadership at Epic if needed,” Ms. Faulkner wrote of the classes. “I think the lesson has been working. I often hear that we are very strong and clear, which is a good thing.”
6. “The surprise comes when one leaves and the other takes over.”
Strong leadership pairs tend to work because the two people are so different, Ms. Faulkner wrote on her blog in 2024, borrowing the concept of yin and yang.
“People think it will just be a continuation, but usually it’s quite different because the yin is gone and only the yang remains, who is good but needs a yin for balance. It happens a lot,” she wrote.
Epic is now living through its own version of that handoff. Sumit Rana, the company’s president and long viewed as Ms. Faulkner’s likely successor, left Aug. 14. Epic has expanded the roles of four leaders — Seth Howard, Mark Lipsky, Erv Walter and Garrett Adams — but has not named a new president. The blog post predates those changes by nearly two years.
7. “The hardest negotiators, who were often not the nicest people, got the best deal, and that didn’t feel right.”
Epic let customers haggle over price in its early years but stopped in the early 1980s, Ms. Faulkner recalled in a 2025 blog post. Many of those early customers didn’t negotiate at all.
“They were such nice people, and they didn’t know to negotiate,” she wrote.
She recalled one large organization that tried to negotiate anyway. Ms. Faulkner held firm.
“They came back six months later and said, ‘Judy, you never called us back up, you never looked back. You said goodbye and you walked away!'” she wrote. “It amazed them.”
Epic tells customers it will adjust a price if it is unreasonable and the company can confirm it, she wrote. It has heard the opposite complaint, too.
“People [have] also told us when our price was not high enough — usually after they signed the contract,” Ms. Faulkner wrote.
8. “We don’t want a client not to be successful.”
Epic doesn’t go out and sell. Prospective customers call the company, as Mr. Dubner put it in April, and Ms. Faulkner said that is how its international business works, too. Asked whether Epic rejects potential clients, she said it does.
“Both in the U.S. and overseas, we do, yes. We don’t want a client not to be successful. And if we think they’re not going to make it — like, let’s say they’re too small, and the expense and the work effort would be too great, we’ll say no to them,” she said.
The answer can change.
“I remember one case a number of years ago where I said, no, you’re too small. And they said, how many doctors do you need? And I told him. And he said, give me some time. Three months later, he called back. He said, we got them. And they’re still a client,” Ms. Faulkner said.
She is more cautious with physician practices rolled up by private equity.
“We don’t have many like that. Just a few, and we’re very leery about working with them because we can feel a difference,” she said. “We can feel the focus not on as much helping patients, but much more on making a profit.”
9. “Yes, they will — especially anyone who’s had a teenage daughter.”
Each Epic customer is paired with one staff member, called a “BFF,” who stays with the organization after go-live, Ms. Faulkner wrote in October. The role formalized something that was already happening during installs: Customers grew close to one member of their Epic team, so the company now identifies that person and asks them to stay on.
Some employees told Ms. Faulkner the name was embarrassing and that people wouldn’t know what it stood for. That was her reply.
With few exceptions, each BFF works with one customer and each customer has one BFF, she wrote. Many of the pairings last for years.
10. “The quotations represent much of the culture of Epic.”
Two walls of the conference room next to Ms. Faulkner’s office, nicknamed “The Cottage,” are covered with hundreds of quotations that are regularly updated, she wrote in a 2023 post.
“When people sitting at the table are waiting for the meeting to start, or their minds are wandering from the conversation, they can look at the quotations and find some that speak to them and help guide their lives,” she wrote.
The table follows a rule of its own. Epic’s facilities staff built two polished cherry-wood tables for the room, but they were too nice for a working space and went to other rooms.
“The table there now is made of oak boards and fits the purpose,” Ms. Faulkner wrote. “It works! People remember the quotations and refer to them. They try to live by them. I just wish I had a few more empty walls to fill.”
