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 Lew Cirne, chief executive of New Relic, a software analytics company based in San Francisco. “I get de-energized and often lose focus and excitement when I’m in a large meeting.”

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

Photo credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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Were you in leadership roles or doing entrepreneurial things when you were young?

I was involved in sports, loved music and I enjoyed school, but the thing that really captured my passion was the first computer my parents bought me. It was 1982, and there was a computer called the Commodore VIC-20. I just fell in love with the idea of creating software on the computer. I liked making video games more than playing them.

Tell me a bit about your parents.

My mother is incredibly warm. Remember Mrs. Cunningham from “Happy Days”? She’s like that but with an English accent. I was a day student at a boarding school in Toronto, and she was like a mom to my friends who were boarders. She had a lot of influence on me in terms of empathy and leading with the heart.

And my dad is the most optimistic person I’ve ever known. He loves to golf, and he’ll have the identical smile on his face whether he shoots a 78 or 125. He’ll say, “It was a beautiful day, I got some good shots in, missed a few, and I’m so lucky that I get to do it again.”

And what about early leadership lessons?

The mistake I made as a first-time C.E.O. was that I wanted everyone to like me. But you can’t get very far as a leader without making tough decisions that some people disagree with. I still care about people’s opinion of me, but I care more about the success of the organization as a whole.

What else about your management style?

I prefer small meetings. It’s really about my self-awareness and recognizing that I get de-energized and often lose focus and excitement when I’m in a large meeting. The only way to get re-energized is to talk a lot during those meetings, which often does more harm than good. When the C.E.O.’s really active in a big meeting, people feel less willing to volunteer contributions, and that’s not good.

So my antidote for that was to realize that even though we sometimes need big meetings, I just don’t need to be in them. I have a table in my office. It has six chairs around it. And if the meeting is too big for that table, I won’t go to it unless it’s a board meeting.

Why six?

If you set the right tone, everyone can contribute, and you’re more focused on problem-solving. Anything more than six and it becomes more about just receiving information. You’re not part of the dialogue.

Whenever I meet a C.E.O., especially of a large company, the question I invariably ask is, “How do you manage your time?” That’s the most important question a C.E.O. can ever ask of themselves. It’s our most precious asset, and I don’t think you can be successful in this role without being very thoughtful and deliberate about it.

One of the things I do on a quarterly basis is to review the standing meetings on my calendar, and every one of them ought to be able defend itself. The point is not to keep going to that meeting just because you always have to go. I think it’s a great practice to say, “O.K., we meet every Thursday on this. Does it have to be these people every Thursday? Why?” I ask myself that question, and I encourage my managers to question their calendars, too.

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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.