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 Dane Atkinson, chief executive of SumAll, a data analytics company. He says says SumAll discloses the pay and ownership stakes of all its employees. “It’s pure transparency,” he says, “which manifests itself with a much greater level of trust.”
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
* * *
Bryant: Were you an entrepreneur early on?
Atkinson: My parents made me work for money at a very young age. I had a dog-walking business when I was about 6 or 7 years old. I wrote my first piece of software when I was about 11. At around 13, I started working in advertising, because a lot of people didn’t know how to use computers. They paid me $25 an hour. By the time I was 18, I was C.O.O. of a subsidiary of one of the Grey advertising companies. We had about 20 or 30 employees.
Bryant: That’s a big management role at a young age.
Atkinson: I tried to ignore the fact that I was younger, and I would lead from the front. So I worked longer hours, just to make sure people knew that I wasn’t taking advantage of them. I looked after them, and that really helped protect me from other mistakes.
Bryant: How many companies have you started?
Atkinson: Well over a dozen, if you count the act of starting. Fewer if you just count the ones that were successful.
One reason entrepreneurship is so amazing — and one of the reasons I recommend it to everybody — is that unlike most other career paths, it is the purest lens for looking at yourself. If you’re in a big operation, you can blame the surrounding environment. When you’re starting your own company, it’s just you. There really is nothing else. So you have to take that medicine at its purest form, which I think matures you as a person faster.
* * *
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 next book, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation, will also be published by Times Books (January 2014).
To contact him, please click here.