Kerry Patterson

Kerry Patterson was born in Bellingham, Washington. He studied at Brigham Young University, served as a Coast Guard officer in the early 1970s, and took a master's degree in organizational behavior at BYU. He then did doctoral work in the same field at Stanford, where he began to study what makes organizations healthy.

He taught at BYU's Marriott School of Management and co-founded Interact Performance Systems, a training company. He was an early adopter of video in corporate training. In 1990 he co-founded VitalSmarts (now Crucial Learning) with Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler.

The four wrote Crucial Conversations (2002). The book argues that the conversations that matter most are the ones people handle worst: high stakes, opposing views and strong emotions. Its tools help each side add facts and feelings to a shared pool of meaning instead of going silent or attacking. The team followed it with Crucial Confrontations, Influencer and Change Anything. Patterson also wrote children's books and a business column.

He died at his home in Provo, Utah, in November 2022.