Joanne Burns, Cerner Corp.

After working as a critical-care oncology nurse for more than six years in New York and California, Joanne Burns moved into management roles—and quickly saw the future of health-care delivery. “After I started on some IT projects, I knew that with health-care IT, computers and information technology were the ways to change how health care was being delivered,” she says. “I felt I could help ensure that IT was being deployed correctly, that my background could help ensure it met the needs of patients and caregivers.”

That vision meshed perfectly with the mission of Cerner Corp., where she came to work in 2004, following those stints at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Stanford University Medical Center and nearby Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital. She applies that combination of IT savvy and hands-on nursing experience to her role as chief strategy officer for Cerner, one of the nation’s biggest companies in that sector.

A native of New York, she earned her nursing degree at SUNY-Plattsburgh, then went west and picked up her master’s in health-services administration from the University of San Francisco, juggling that academic and work load with the demands of raising two girls then under the age of 3 with her husband, Steve.

Health care, she says, has always been stocked with strong female executives and leaders, who provided role models for her own career. “But I think that as you start to do the crossover to more traditionally male-dominated industries like IT, I’m seeing that success is not related to your gender, it’s really what your experiences are, your ability to articulate and carry yourself, to lead, and the different attributes you look for in a leader or executive are what matter.”

Beryl Raff, Helzberg Diamonds

Sometimes, you find your career. Sometimes it finds you, as with Philadelphia-born Beryl Raff. After college in Boston and a move to California, she found a job over the holiday season in the jewelry department of a San Francisco department store. It was the first step on a path that would take her to jewelry counters, manager’s offices and executive roles for some of the nation’s biggest retailers and specialty jewelers. The most recent stop on that tour came in 2009, when she became CEO of Helzberg Diamonds.

She carries on the legacy of a renowned Kansas City family and works for Warren Buffet, who acquired the chain in 1995. From R.H. Macy, where she spent 19 years moving through the costume-bridge-fine jewelry sequence, to J.C. Penney and Zale’s, Raff established a reputation as a skilled merchant in a multi-store retail setting. “I really consider myself an incredibly fortunate person,” Raff says, “I found something I liked, and it liked me. In a sense it may have been preordained, because I grew up in retail (her parents owned a furniture store), but in another sense, I was just lucky and fell into it.” And how. She’s in the Lifetime Hall of fame for the Women’s Jewelry Association, as well as the Nation-al Jeweler’s Retailer Hall of Fame. Though her MBA was from hometown Drexel University, her “Harvard PhD,” as she calls it, came at Zale’s. A six-year tenure there “did not have a nice ending,” she says. “It was a difficult time,” she said, but the man who fired her “was also the one who hired me, mentored me, and taught me how to run a business. I learned a huge amount and I’m grateful for that. If that had not happened, I wouldn’t be sitting where I am today.”

Lenora Payne, Technology Group Solutions

Hands down, Lenora Payne wins the WeKC Gift of Understatement for 2013: “Starting a company is hard,” says the founder of Technology Group Solutions. “A lot of people are thinking, ‘Oh, this will be easy,’—it’s not.” TGS launched in 2005, and the first few years “were very, very difficult,” she said. “You have to get that first purchase order and you don’t have the finances to buy the product or deliver the services—you either succeed, or you fail.” But the company uncovered some opportunities, proved itself, and began building a base of repeat client business in IT services. “You just can’t give up,” says Payne. “You’re never satisfied, and the technology, the way it changes today, you’ve got to be on top of it or you won’t succeed.”

Within two years of startup, the company hit $2 million in revenues and soared to $11.7 million in 2008, then $39 million last year. She now has 24 employees, and will be looking to hire, based on projections of an additional 20 percent growth over the next year or two. “As long as we continue to do what we say we’re going to do, work with our OEMs and customers, we’ll continue to grow,” she said. It’s a far cry from where she started in IT, working for other resellers, large and small. “I was drawn into the business by default,” she says, but she learned the technical pieces and supplemented that with courses through Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and other venues, and finally decided that the market had created a demand for a local, full-service and minority-owned IT company. She’d been “divorced for decades,” she says, and her children were grown, so the timing was right for her. “I don’t know how people can do it now,” she says of the career-family balancing act.

Danette Wilson, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City

Be honest: Boy or girl, does any child every really say, “When I grow up, I want to be in insurance!” So Danette Wilson didn’t exactly have insurance on her mind when she set out to earn a degree in business administration at the University of Nebraska. What she did have was a childhood framed by a great family structure, and a Dad who “talked to me about leadership when I was growing up, and told me I could do anything I wanted to do. And my parents encouraged me and gave me this strong work ethic.”

That, combined with a business degree that she felt would produce the widest array of career options, led her into straight-commission sales for Massachusetts Mutual at the age of 21. Two years of that led to an opportunity with a subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska, and when her husband, Richard, took a job in Kansas City, she made the jump to the BlueKC offices 26 years ago. “I was fortunate enough to get a job here, and appreciated it because I liked working for an industry leader, in a company full of a lot of great people,” she says. “I loved the sales side of it.”

Starting off in large group market sales, she advanced through the ranks and today is group executive for external operations, serving as chief marketing officer. But the job entails far more than marketing and advertising; Wilson also oversees the Health and Wellness Solutions, Medical Management, Underwriting and Sales operations. She attributes her own success in part to the influence of Karen Harris Hicks, whom she calls “the first real woman executive at Blue Cross. There has been lots of progress, lots of opportunities for people like me because of people like Karen.”

Elizabeth Frank, AMC Entertainment

Could there possibly be a better job anywhere than chief content and programming officer for AMC Entertainment? That’s Elizabeth Franks’ lot in life, and great movies are the stuff of her day, every day: She oversees sourcing, scheduling and promotion of movies and content, and she heads up film-related business development initiatives for the Wanda Group, which bought AMC last year. Placing content in 300 venues nationwide means she indirectly touches the lives of 200 million AMC patrons every year. And therein lie the challenges. “The most important piece is understanding the consumer,” says Frank. “That’s true in any business, but in this business, it’s also about understanding the consumer’s broad interest in blockbuster films as well as the neighborhoods we serve and the communities we entertain. We’re an incredibly broad-based entertainment business.” That means a full menu of date-night films, horror flicks for the teen set, friends out looking for a good comedy—hers is a job where the product really must be all things to all people, all the time.

A native of Connecticut, Frank joined AMC in 2010 after two decades in various entertainment settings. She was a business major all the way—undergrad at Lehigh University, MBA from Harvard—and learned the entertainment ropes at Time Warner and Viacom. But she also held executive roles with a medical relief organization that operates worldwide, and with McKinsey & Co., the New York-based management consultancy with a global reach. That career diversity, she says, allowed her to “build a broad base of skills and a deeper understanding of how business really works.”