Kent Thiry DaVita CEO brings Fortune 500 cachet to Denver's Union Station.

• Author: Bronikowski, Lynn
• Position: EXECUTIVE EDGE

WHEN DAVITA INC. OPENS ITS $100 MILLION headquarters near Denver's Union Station next year, the 14th Door penthouse will house a cafeteria with a huge terrace.

"In most corporate buildings the top floor has the CEO, the board room and things like that," said Kent Thiry, CEO of the Fortune 500 company that last year moved its corporate headquarters from El Segundo, Calif. "In ours, it's going in be the cafeteria so that every teammate--both the ones that live here and the ones who visit to attend DaVita University--gets the best view."

That's just one of the fingerprints Thiry has put on DaVita, where he calls employees teammates, likens the company to a village and labels himself Mayor KT. He developed the village metaphor shortly after taking over near bankrupt Total Renal Care in 1999 and overseeing its emergence as DaVita, which last year had revenues of $6.1 billion.

"We were trying to create a special place for people to work," Thiry said. "In a village you look out for each other; you pay your taxes; you don't litter. We wanted to be a healthy community, and everyone knows how to behave in a healthy village."

At first the idea of calling the company a village was met with dead silence by his senior team.

"We have a lot of people who never lived like that," he said. "But what we attempt to do here is we liberate people's desire to celebrate universal values. We're about humanness, and most people want to be about humanness."

Thiry himself grew up in small villages in Wisconsin--Thiensville and neighboring Maquon--where his father was a partner at Arthur Andersen and his mother was a stay-at-home-mom of six children. He envisioned growing up to become mayor or running a company, although not near the scope of DaVita where at 55 he is Colorado's highest-paid CEO, earning $13.8 million 2010.

"Being raised in a small community, you got exposed to people who made a difference and believed in the community," Thiry said. "All these people didn't give flowery conceptual speeches, but...