Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Bracken P. Darrell, C.E.O. of Logitech. To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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Were you in leadership roles at a young age?

I grew up in Owensboro, Ky., a city of about 50,000 people. I ended up in leadership roles because I grew up very fast. I was about the height I am now when I was 12. I was a good athlete, and people literally looked up to me. You probably get addicted to that.

I played center on the basketball team when I was in sixth grade. By the ninth grade, I was playing forward. By my sophomore year, I was playing occasional point guard. But I really liked leadership, so I moved into other leadership roles, including student body president of my high school, which was about 1,600 kids. That’s really where it started.

Tell me about your parents.

My mom was a first-grade teacher and my dad was a college professor. They were really into education, so it was all about school, school, school.

How have they influenced your leadership style?

It’s hard for me to say. I’m not much like either one of them. But I’ve got two older siblings who are in leadership roles, and my sister’s a lawyer.

Any thoughts on why all of you turned out that way?

Part of it is probably that we grew up with so little money. I’m not a Horatio Alger story or anything, but my parents divorced when I was really young. I wore the same pair of jeans every day. I remember waiting to pull them out of the dryer so I could wear them to school.

We were definitely on the lower part of the economic curve, but we were in the top 10 or 15 percent on the education curve. I’m really not a money-oriented person at all, but I’m sure it drove me to feel that you have to have money to have an impact, and I was always very impact-driven.

And what about your college years?

I really wanted to go to an Ivy League school, but I thought I’d never be able to pay for it. So I ended up going to a smaller liberal arts college, Hendrix College, in Conway, Ark. I majored in English, but I took enough accounting and economics courses to move in the path I wanted, which was leadership through business. I knew I either wanted to go into politics or business when I was 16.

Hendrix was great for me. It was very small. It was even smaller than my high school, but it was a place where I could be a big fish in a small pond. One of my lines within the company is that we want to play where we can be a big fish in a small pond. That strategy is a lot better than being a small fish in a big ocean.

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To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.

TAGs: Adam Bryant, SundayBusiness section, The New York Times, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, Times Books, Bracken P. Darrell (C.E.O. of Logitech) in “The Corner Office”, Earl Wilson