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 Francesca Zambello, general and artistic director of the Glimmerglass Festival and artistic director of theWashington National Opera. In theater as in business, she says “the success of a new idea depends on getting the initial details right.”

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

Photo Credit: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

* * *

Bryant: Do you remember the first time you were in a leadership role?

Zambello: I started a theater company at Colgate because I didn’t like the university theater company. I found it was too regimented and too formal. I raised the money. I got the people. This is what I’ve been doing my whole career. It’s just that the productions get bigger and bigger.

Bryant: When did your interest in the theater take hold?

Zambello: I’m in the family business. My mother is an actress. My father started as an actor. So many of their friends were people in the theater. If my parents were working, I was backstage watching. Of course, I started to mimic them, but I was most interested in the stage manager. From about age 5, I loved to sit with that person as they would say, “Move this here, move that there.” When I was still a child I started a theater company in my basement with kids from around the neighborhood. So the directing gene, which is a leadership gene, started early on.

Bryant: What were some early leadership lessons for you?

Zambello: When you’re in your 20s and have that leadership gene, the bad thing is that you don’t know when to shut up. You think you know all the answers, but you don’t. What you learn later is when to just listen to everybody else. I’m finding that all those adages about being humble and listening are truer and truer as I get older. Creativity cannot explode if you do not have the ability to step back, take in what everybody else says and then fuse it with your own ideas.

Theater is one of the most collaborative art forms, and you have to be able to absorb everything that people tell you. That’s not any different from really good businesses. When I go into meetings with successful business people, I’m always amazed at how much they’re able to just sit there and absorb things and then make a really good decision.

* * *

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