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 Deborah Bial, president of the Posse Foundation. It recruits and trains students from public high schools to form teams to help them succeed in college. “You are in this privileged position where you get the accolades for successes of the organization, and you get to make decisions and people have to listen to you. It’s important not to assume that you have that just because of who you are.”
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
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Were you in leadership roles as a kid?
I was a shy kid. There was nothing remarkable about me growing up. I grew up in Teaneck, N.J., in a white house with red shutters and a white picket fence. I walked to school. My dad played in the New York Philharmonic for 38 years — bassoon and contrabassoon — and my mom did P.R. at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
In your leadership style today, do you see strands of your parents’ influence?
The most important thing is that my parents were very inclusive. Our voice was always important, and they always asked my sister and me what we thought. They respected us. If we were unhappy about something, they would listen and respond, and even change their approach or views.
Did you have ideas about your career path going into college?
When I was growing up, I thought I would be an illustrator of children’s books and a writer. When I graduated, I became a paralegal for six months. Then I quit my job to work for the CityKids Foundation, a nonprofit.
I was in charge of this idea of Posse, which came from one of the kids — a really smart, great kid from the Bronx who had gotten a scholarship to an Ivy League school and had dropped out, and was back at CityKids. He said, “I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me.”
I loved this idea that you send teams of kids together to college so they can back each other up. Social justice motivates me now, but at the time the idea of starting something and making it great really appealed to me. I always wanted whatever I did to be the best.
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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.