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 César Melgoza , founder and chief executive of the business intelligence firm Geoscape. 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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Tell me about your early influences.

I was born in a city called Uruapan in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. I only lived there for less than a year, though, because my family decided to move to California, and we settled in a Central California agricultural community.

My father, from the age of 17, had been part of the bracero program — the guest worker program during and after World War II — where young Mexican men helped harvest the crops and build the railroads. But my mother basically insisted that we all move north. Legally.

So we actually grew up on a farm labor camp in the middle of California. It was a pretty big agribusiness ranch, growing all kinds of fruits and vegetables. There was an area for families and an area for single men, and there were eight of us in our family, living in this small place. We didn’t even have our own bathroom. We lived there until I was almost 9 years old, and then we moved to a small town nearby.

Obviously we were trying to get somewhere in the world. There were certain barriers that still existed, and a certain amount of discrimination. Some of that provided a little motivation to study more and do something to progress in life. So education was always a very strongly held value in my family.

My parents didn’t have the benefit of a college education, but they always had a sense of self-respect and carried themselves well, and they wanted their children to be well spoken and prepared. They instilled in us a strong work ethic.

Tell me about your college years.

I got married young. I had my first child at 19, and 13 months later my second son was born. I was still in college. It was not easy. I had to work full time. I would go to school in the morning and then usually worked from about 3:30 in the afternoon until about 12:30 at night.

I worked at a company that made the heads that read the information on hard disk drives. I was part of the quality control team, and then I became a supervisor when I was about 21.

What are some key leadership lessons you’ve learned over the years?

One thing I’ve learned along the way is that I know myself well enough to understand that I probably don’t communicate enough on a day-to-day basis. We all have our checklists of things we have to get done, and it’s easy to focus on that instead of talking to your employees about what the company’s up to, how things are going and giving them feedback.

Because I know that can happen, I’ve learned to overcommunicate during our regular staff meetings about strategy and why things are happening, so that everybody knows what’s going on.

The other thing I’ve learned is to listen more, both personally and professionally. I’m basically a guy who totally buys into the idea that old dogs can learn new tricks. I learn a lot from all of my children, who are 7, 10, 34 and 35. I really believe you can learn very valuable things from just about anybody. We all have blind spots. The question is, how many can you eliminate?

I’ve also learned that a lot of times, innovation happens just by talking among ourselves at work. I’ve discovered, especially when it comes to technology development, that there’s a magic that happens when you start to think about a problem with a group of people and collaborate toward finding a solution.

It’s amazing what you can come up with if you give yourself the time to think about it for a few minutes, just sit in the room, let the pregnant pauses happen, write on the wall, come up with stuff. It’s about giving people the opportunity to rise to the occasion.

Pregnant pauses are really good. There’s something that happens there. When you give a problem some thinking time, it’s amazing what you can come up with. You just need to make people feel comfortable about having a conversation and thinking through a difficult problem.

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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.