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 Kim Reed Perell, chief executive of Adconion Direct, a provider of digital advertising, says that thinking “as big as you possibly can” is especially important at Internet companies: “You can dream it and you can create it.”
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 when you were younger?
I’m a twin, and I led my sister out into the world. That was my first foray into leadership. She reluctantly followed nine minutes later.
Nice. What about a bit later?
Both my parents are entrepreneurs, so I was given the tools of leadership by watching them. My father was a real estate entrepreneur, and my mother worked in organizational behavior and communications. She worked with companies and nonprofits in the Pacific Northwest on their vision and values.
So our dinner-table conversations were not about sports or school. It was more, “Here’s the business problem we’re trying to solve,” and then we’d have a family discussion about it. There’s a lot of hard-work DNA in our family. I was able to watch how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and how great it can feel when you build something successful. Everything had to be earned in my family. If I wanted to ride a horse, I’d have to work at the stable for seven hours before my one-hour horse ride.
Any expressions they would repeat often?
I’ve worked since I was a very young child, and if I was telling my dad about a long day at school, he’d say: “Eight hours? That’s a half-day. Go back to work.” It wasn’t a negative; it was motivating. A 40-hour workweek isn’t going to get you very far. So it was very much a hard-work mentality — what you put in is what you’re going to get out, and nothing’s going to come easy.
Tell me about your college years.
I studied business at Pepperdine. I had two jobs for most of my time in college, and I front-loaded my classes in the week so I could work the other days. I worked as an intern at an investment bank, and at a direct-marketing company. It was a small company, and they basically let me run all the marketing, and I managed a small team.
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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.comthat 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.