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 Christopher J. Nassetta, president and C.E.O. of Hilton Worldwide. He says he has spent much of his time seeking to align the company’s vision, boundaries and priorities.

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

Photo credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

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Bryant: Tell me about some of the leadership challenges you tackled at Hilton.

Nassetta: Over the last several years, we have focused on transforming the culture and the priorities of the company. We have over 300,000 people, and what I discovered when I joined the company five years ago is that we had a lot of segments of the company that operated very independently, and we had massive amounts of duplication and fragmentation. We needed alignment. We needed people to understand who we were, what we stood for and the key priorities of the company. And we needed them, once they understood that, to get their oars in the water and head in a common direction. I have spent most of my time in the last five years around building that culture, and getting that alignment.

Bryant: Give me more of a sense of the problems you discovered.

Nassetta: I would ask people, what are the three or four key strategic priorities? But as many people as I asked, I got a different answer. We always had good values, but I just don’t think people understood what they really were. In those first months when I traveled around the world, I stopped counting when I got to 30 different value statements at our offices. So we tried to simplify everything.

I think of culture as guardrails. The culture of a company is what you stand for, essentially the ground rules so that people know how to operate. You give them a direction and boundaries. The trick is having an intense alignment around vision, mission, values and the key strategic priorities. My job as C.E.O., simply stated, is to create the right culture, set the tone, the high-level strategy.

Bryant: What sort of exercise did you go through to figure out the values?

Nassetta: We did a lot of work with teams around the world, and asked people to look at all their values statements and boil them down. Then we took all those ideas with us on a two-day offsite with about 12 of us. There was a lot of overlap, and we tried to consolidate it. What I ended up saying to them was, let’s use some of our own skills and brand it, not because I want to be cute about it, but because people will remember it. I started looking around the room and at the letters and they came together as HILTON — H for hospitality, I for integrity, L for leadership, T for teamwork, O for ownership and N for now. To reinforce them, we are constantly referring to the letters — in newsletters, in town halls — almost to the point where we are driving people crazy. But it works.

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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. To contact him, please click here.