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 Lily Kanter, co-founder and chief executive of Serena & Lily, a home décor company. She says she maintains an entrepreneurial atmosphere in part by assigning no more than four employees to a project to drive innovation.

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: What are some leadership lessons you’ve learned?

Kanter: One of the biggest ones I’ve learned, from working at Microsoft, was that failure is O.K. because of the lessons you learn. I think it’s O.K. for people to swing hard for the fences as long as there’s brutal honesty and no cover-up. I encourage it among my employees — to test things, to try things, but to not make the same mistakes twice. I don’t like cover-up.

Bryant: What about influences of your parents?

Kanter: It was their work ethic. My parents were tireless volunteers. My father was a doctor and my mom was a schoolteacher. I don’t recall my dad ever not going to work, or even being sick. My mom was tireless as well. She’s a strong woman. She sticks up for what she believes in. It was just having a role model of someone who takes initiative. We have a joke in our family: you need to put your hand in your lap at some point, and stop raising it to volunteer for things.

Bryant: When you’re hiring people, what qualities are you looking for?

Kanter: I’m looking for a can-do attitude. We’re growing fast, things change, and they don’t exactly happen the way they’re supposed to every single day. It’s about adaptability. It’s about being happy. It’s about finding people who are happy and bringing them into your culture. I think that’s very important.

Bryant: What questions do you ask people?

Kanter: I like to know what they’re passionate about, what interests them, what kind of books they like to read — just, over all, what does their life look like? I’m looking for balanced people who have a sense of pleasure in their lives, and that it’s not just all work. I hate hearing, “My weakness is that I’m a workaholic.”

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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. To contact him, please click here.