MIKE VALENTINE | CERNER CORP.

What does it take to stand out in business? Mike Valentine will tell you it helps to be part of a company that itself stands out: “Cerner is an innovation company, so we continue to extend the fringes of what defines us as a company. And because we’re an entrepreneurial company, our clients grow to expect new things.”

Providing those new things is part of his job as executive vice president, overseeing worldwide client organization. That’s an area vital to long-term growth for Cerner, which operates in 25 countries and saw global revenues for 2008 increase, in percentage terms, at 10 times the rate of the much larger domestic division.

A key to Valentine’s success is that he understood the nature of Cerner’s business when he joined up 11 years ago. “I grew up doing what Cerner does at its core: Technology,” said Valentine, who ran his own tech company for two years.

Beyond innovation, a key part of the company’s success is … failure. “If you’re not failing, you’re not trying enough new things—that’s part of the corporate culture at Cerner,” Valentine said. His early influences there were important ones, and include founders Neal Patterson, Cliff Illig and Paul Gorup. “Incredible entrepreneurs,” Valentine calls them. Others were a pair of now-retired executives, Jack Newman, “a world-class client-relationship builder,” says Valentine, and Paul Black, “the best I’ve seen at growing the top line of a business.” “My goal,” he said, “is to be as much a hybrid of those two as I can be.”

He hones his focus at work with quality time spent away from it, especially with his wife and twin 11-year-old daughters. And he defies his work persona with his “detox routine” of hunting and fishing: “Away from the office,” he says, “I do the exact opposite of what I do every day—it’s not low-tech, it’s no-tech.”