Articulate, wise and able not only to see the bigger human picture, but to apply it to his business. They should make all CEOs like Steve Patterson, who I profiled in this ColoradoBIZ column.

Vocal Point
By Stewart Schley

Sit down, says Steve Patterson, who played tight end 20 years ago for his high school in Cortez, Colo. Sit down and let’s talk.

Mid-morning sunshine streams through a tinted window at Patterson’s Highlands Ranch office as he settles into a comfortable chair. A copy of Sun Tzu’s 6th Century manifesto, The Art of War, sits on a bookcase nearby. For an hour, Patterson talks about his work and his philosophy of work: How he’d prefer that an employee rip up the ski slopes on a Sunday afternoon and drive home Monday, rather than grind through the traffic Sunday evening on I-70. How there’s no dress code at his company and no ordained vacation: better to hire great people and trust them to figure out their own work schedules – and what to wear. How he insists his software developers work on something other than their day jobs on Fridays, so long as they tell their colleagues about what they discovered. (more…)