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 Hugh Martin, chief executive of Sensity Systems, an LED lighting company, who says his team knows to avoid starting sentences with “My goal is….” It’s far better, he says, to demonstrate total commitment to getting something done.

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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Bryant: Were you in leadership roles when you were younger?

Martin: I started working at Hamilton College in upstate New York while I was in high school, and I was running a lot of the weekend kitchen operations by the time I left to go to Union College, which is in Schenectady, N.Y.

Bryant: And what about your college experience?

Martin: I decided I wanted to be a doctor, and studied pre-med. But I was also running a restaurant on campus, and I was also a member of the rowdiest fraternity on campus. I was getting solid C’s, and a D in organic chemistry. I just wasn’t hacking it, so my dad called me and said: “We’re spending $3,000 a year to send you to this school and I’m looking at your report card. If you want to come home, just come home.” I drove home the next day.

My first job after that was working at Whitehall Labs. I worked on the Preparation H line, and my job was to use a putty knife to scrape off the suppositories that had fallen off the machine line. I did a few more jobs, but eventually went back to school, at Rutgers. I decided that I was going to be an engineer. What a difference it makes when you settle down. Going to school was my job, and I got straight A’s.

Bryant: You’ve had a broad range of experience — working at big-name companies like Apple and 3DO, as well as in venture capital and in start-ups. What are some things you’ve learned about fostering a corporate culture?

Martin: At every company where I’ve been C.E.O., communication is critical. For instance, I’ve always had a Friday meeting with the entire staff. I get up there for an hour and it’s no-holds-barred. We talk about anything that’s important and it’s a great opportunity to model behavior to every single person in the company.

Another is accountability. One of the things that seeps into almost every Silicon Valley company is that people say they’re going to do something and they don’t do it, and there’s no consequence. If you roll all of those missed expectations up to me, how can I commit to anything?

At 3DO, Trip Hawkins used a system called A’s and O’s, which stands for accomplishments and objectives. Everybody sits down at the beginning of the quarter and says, “Here are the 10 things I want to get done in the quarter.” Then, at the end of the quarter, you review those and say, “Here’s how I did and here’s 10 things I want to do next.”

I read every one of them. It’s super-important, because sometimes people’s eyes are bigger than their stomachs. How do you get them calibrated? How do you create a culture so that if you say you’re going to do something, you’d better do it? I’ll have conversations where people say, “Well, the goal is. …” I’ll say: “I don’t care about what the goal is. I want a commitment.” People know to never use the words, “My goal is …” with me.

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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 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.