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 Liz Pearce, chief executive of Liquid Planner, a project management software firm. 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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What were you like as a child?

My mom says I was pretty strong-willed and strong-minded as a toddler. She would try to get me dressed in the morning, and I would say, “I’m only wearing dresses.” So she would go out and buy me all kinds of dresses, and then I would say, “I’m only wearing pants.”

The nursery school teacher also said I had strong leadership skills, which I think was her way of saying I was really bossy. I’m the oldest of three girls, and I was not the kindest sister in my younger years, although I’ve turned things around now as an adult, and my sisters have forgiven me for all my sins of the past.

I was also geeky and a bit nerdy as a kid. My mother is a devout Catholic, and I grew up going to church every Sunday, and went to Catholic elementary school. There was a time where I thought that I had to become a nun. I was relieved when I learned that was not the case.

How do you think your parents have influenced your leadership style?

One thing that was a steady current through my childhood was that my mother was politically conservative and, for a while, socially conservative. And my dad was very liberal. They were the two ends of the political spectrum.

I remember sitting at the dinner table, and it was like watching a tennis match. They would debate back and forth. And it made me naturally inclined to look at everything from both sides, to understand the different angles.

It’s made me a bit more apolitical as an adult because I really want to understand the issues before I form an opinion, and it’s so hard to get enough information to really understand the issues. But it has also really impacted the way I look at problems in business. I have all of these sources of data about the company, and I look at them a lot. It’s almost like channel surfing for me. And I just remember the numbers. It freaks our employees out a bit.

And tell me about your college years.

I was way more interested in my jobs than I was in my coursework. I was a graphic designer in the student services organization, and I thought, “These are my people.” I could combine my love of art with technology, and I was learning computer programs. I got a lot of exposure to leaders in the university through that work.

Then after graduation in 2003, I learned about a job at Google as a marketing coordinator. I was there for only nine months, but they were like dog years. The company was exploding. I was working 17-hour days. I was running 200 projects at a time. I would break my day down into 15-minute increments and ask, “What is the most important thing to do in these 15 minutes?”

After a brief stint at Amazon, I started consulting, and that’s what led to working for LiquidPlanner, and I eventually joined them as director of marketing in 2008. Four years later, I became C.E.O. When the board approved my new role, it just hit me like a ton of bricks that this is really happening.

What do you like about being C.E.O.?

I like to put all the pieces together. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. When you’re running a start-up, you have this finite set of resources, and you have this huge goal. So you look at all the angles, and twist things this way and that as you’re thinking, “What if we did it this way?”

And every new employee who comes in is like Christmas morning. What are they going to bring to the table? What do they know that can help us? How can we help them?

The job has a lot of pressure, too. The perfectionist student in me wants to hit every single number every single month. And that’s been a big part of my evolution as a leader — to be O.K. if we don’t execute perfectly every month, and to keep people focused on tomorrow and moving the business forward.

Any surprises in the role?

I’ve had light-bulb moments when I realized I have to be really thoughtful about what I ask for and how I ask for it, because people are watching and listening closely, and caring in a way that they didn’t when I didn’t have this title. That’s always been a little bit uncomfortable for me. I don’t have this grand image of myself. I’m just like everybody else.

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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.