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 Jimmy Dunne III, . To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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Tell me about your early years.

I grew up on the South Shore of Long Island. My father would always say to me that you’ve got to be a leader, not a follower. You can’t let the room sway you. Just because other guys are going to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, you should not be a follower.

So I was always willing to take a stand. There was a belief in our household that there’s a special place in hell for somebody who sits on a fence during a crisis.

What about your mother?

She was tough, and she was strong. She had very definite views, and was seldom right but never in doubt. There would sometimes be tense situations. My father was working and traveling, and there were arguments. One I remember was about evolution, which got very heated. She thought I was being anti-Catholic or some crazy thing.

I remember my father came upstairs and said to me, “Look, this is how it’s going to go. If she says something is white, it’s white. I’m no longer interested in your point of view. This is not high school, where you come and tell everybody what you think. Everything you say has a consequence. You’ve got to think about this.”

And he would talk to me about it like it was being in a boardroom, and how you have to pick your shots. His whole thing was about anticipating the consequences of what you say.

Sounds like he was grooming you for your current job.

Yes and no. He was grooming me for how to anticipate things, how to control the situation at home and make sure there was as little volatility as possible. But he would have much preferred that I go into medicine.

What were some early management lessons for you?

There was one overriding thing that happened at Bear Stearns. Sometimes you have a point of view and you get turned around 180 degrees.

There was a small group of us divvying up the bonuses, and somebody wanted to give one guy an additional $5,000 on top of the $20,000 he was getting. Then someone said, no, he didn’t earn it, we’re not doing it, and we should give it to the guy who made a $3 million bonus, because he earned it. And either the first guy has got to do a lot better, or he has to quit, or we have to fire him.

That was not my view, but he was right, and it changed my mind. It’s about meritocracy. You’ve got to be brutally honest with people about where they stand. And you do them a disservice by sugarcoating it or by not giving them the absolute facts. That evolved into what I call my infinite-finite strategy.

Which means?

Finite is about whether this guy or that guy gets the $5,000. Infinite discussions are whether you were a good father, a good husband, a good brother. Finite is stuff that should be handled with the back of the hand, and there’s a finite beginning and end to it. They’re important; they’re just not critical.

So let’s keep things focused on the nonpersonal, financial nature that they are, so that if I tell you you’re not good at something, I’m not saying you’re not a good person. But a lot of people can’t handle the truth. What we do is deliver the news without Novocain.

It is absolutely critical for me to be brutally honest with people because they’re entitled to it. If they can’t handle it, it isn’t written that these people must work here. We live in the greatest country in the world, there are other opportunities, and water will find its own level. That early conversation changed me to being 100 percent about merit with no fluff.

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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 of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.