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 Lisa Falzone, the C.E.O. of Revel Systems, a maker of point-of-sale payment systems for restaurants. She says: “You always want to have composure in front of your employees. They can tell if you’re stressed, and then they feed off that.”
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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When you were a child, were you in leadership roles or doing entrepreneurial things?
I was captain of the swim team in high school and I swam at Stanford. That was really my entrepreneurial endeavor. I was very competitive. And swimming really helped me learn how to perform under pressure, how to just work hard and get the job done.
Other lessons from that experience?
Richard Quick was my coach at Stanford. He was a six-time Olympic swim coach. He was very good at inspiring and motivating and rallying the troops. He had this saying of, “Believe in belief.” It’s basically a belief in the power of the mind — whether you’re swimming or starting a company from scratch — to just overcome all obstacles.
Tell me about your parents.
My dad is a dentist, but he only does really complicated cases, and does a lot of out-of-the-box solutions for patients who have had jaw surgery, for example. He’s very creative and looks at things in different ways than the mainstream. My mom is more of a get-stuff-done driver.
And what about after college?
Because swimming was my passion before, it was difficult to find that passion after I graduated. It took me a good three years of trying things — marketing, sales, big companies, small companies, finance. I looked into starting a dozen different businesses before I started Revel.
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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.