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 Jane Park, chief executive of Julep. She says, “In business today, it’s not enough to be high-level and strategic; you have to be able to execute. I think of it like a bumblebee that can move multidirectionally, and can get granular in the details, but also can go up high enough to see how everything fits together.”

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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Tell me about your parents.

My parents were immigrants. They had a 7-Eleven store when I was growing up in Toronto, and they worked seven days a week, 11 hours a day. I helped out with different parts of the business. Later, my dad opened a frame shop just so that he could have one day off a week. I did a lot of the marketing for him. There’s nothing that I will ever do that is as hard as what my parents have done — moving to a new country and starting a business.

My dad also lost his parents when he was 9. He was walking home from school one day when the border between North and South Korea went up, and he lived right at the border, with his school on the south side and his home on the north. He couldn’t go home, and he never saw his parents again.

Where did your entrepreneurial drive come from?

My view of the world is really informed by the fact that I grew up with two sets of rules. There were the rules my parents had at home, and they were considered absolute truths. And then you go to other people’s homes and you realize that the world doesn’t fall apart when those rules aren’t obeyed, and you begin to understand that nothing is absolute. So from a very early age, I saw that it’s all about navigating your own way and figuring out what the rules are for you.

Early leadership lessons?

I worked at the Boston Consulting Group for four years, and ran teams of consultants on pretty big transformation projects. One thing I learned — and one of the biggest pieces of advice I give to new college grads — is that it’s not about you; it’s about the result you’re driving for. It’s not college anymore. You’re not trying to get an “A.” What matters is what you’re achieving.

When you started Julep, did you have specific ideas about the culture you wanted to create?

One thing we talk about is assuming positive intent. The whole idea of trying to understand the person in front of you in a unique way has been a big theme for me. Julep is a beauty company and a technology company, so I have people who are figuring out how to make a better mascara and I have software engineers who are trying to create a better online checkout experience.

It can be easy not to understand where the other person is coming from and to assume that they’re giving you some answer you don’t want to hear because they’re being a pain or because they’re not a team player. So my big request of my employees is just to stop when you’re having that feeling and assume the most positive reason you can imagine for why this person is giving you this answer you don’t want to hear. I think that goes a long way, because when you’re busy and you’re doing a lot of different things, it’s hard to stop and put yourself in somebody else’s shoes.

What else?

We are really collaborative. And I know everybody says they are collaborative, but to do collaboration really well is a very complex action that requires self-awareness — who you are and what your contributions can be. It takes strength to allow people into the conversation in a way that they can truly change the trajectory.

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It’s not collaborative if you listen, but then go off and do your own thing. You have to be willing to sit there and hear input and be willing to let the person impact the final decision. That takes strength, but it also takes vulnerability to be open to the fact that maybe what you had in mind is not perfect, or that there was one element you didn’t think about, or that there’s a way to make it better. You have to be open to that possibility, but you also have to know what you want.

It’s not about giving up control and saying, hey, whatever everybody wants. It’s not consensus. Collaboration isn’t consensus. It’s deliberate, and it’s a way of letting people in that is genuine but still very results-focused. It’s something I learned as a consultant — if there’s a faster path, I want to take it, and often you find the faster path by asking somebody else. It’s not about sitting in a room and trying to figure it out yourself.

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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.