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 Brent Frei, executive chairman and co-founder of Smartsheet.com, a provider of online project management software. In his opinion, “there’s a valid excuse for every failure, but the question is, How do you overcome those valid excuses?”

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

Photo credit: Stuart Isett for The New York Times

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Were you in leadership roles when you were younger?

I grew up on a wheat, barley and beef cattle farm in Idaho. Probably more than most kids, I had an opportunity to do big things early on. When I was 6 years old, my dad needed to get a tractor and a pickup home from five miles away. He put me in the pickup, put it in first gear, and I drove it home with my 5-year-old sister in the passenger seat. He drove the tractor behind us.

I did real work from a young age on the farm. It was fascinating, and it was fun. We were fixing machines, cutting down trees and everything else. It was like a boy’s playground.

How big was the farm?

It was 800 acres. That was a little bit below the threshold for break-even, but Dad kept it going just through sheer willpower. When I started my first company, he and Mom put money in because I couldn’t get anybody to finance it. Fast-forward five years, and the $13,000 they put in was worth $3 million. Now Dad farms about 3,000 acres.

How have your parents influenced your leadership style?

Everyone likes working for my dad, and it’s pretty obvious why. He always takes the hardest job. He’s always down there working with you, so you never have to figure it out for yourself. You see how it’s done the right way. And he just gave you the sense that you can get it done no matter how hard it is. I felt incredibly important.

Other early leadership lessons?

I played football in high school and at Dartmouth. I’ll never forget a game we were playing at Columbia. I was on defense and trying to put pressure on the quarterback, but the linemen were practically tackling me, and the refs weren’t doing anything about it.

But the coach was riding me, and I told him my valid excuse: “They’re holding and they’re not calling it.” And he said to me, “Well, then we’re going to lose.” It was the way he said it. We ultimately won the game, but the lesson was that there’s a valid excuse for every failure, but the question is, How do you overcome those valid excuses? Ever since, I’ve said to people I’m working with, “There may be a reason why we’re not going to be successful, but how are we going to overcome that?”

What did you do coming out of college?

I studied mechanical engineering. I didn’t have a clear path on where I was going, but I ended up working for Motorola for about 18 months in Florida. I was working on their first flip phone. It was really interesting, but it was my first experience in a big company, and it was pretty frustrating, because people were often promoted based on seniority rather than merit. I believe so firmly in meritocracy, and that you get what you earn. You shouldn’t be penalized because you have less time or experience than others. That drove me crazy.

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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 with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here.

His more recent book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, was also also published by Times Books (January 2014). To contact him, please click here.