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 Maynard Webb, a veteran technology executive whose current roles include serving as chairman of Yahoo. “You have to get voted onto the team every day as an employee, and you have to be the employer of choice every day. I would often ask team leaders: ‘You have seven people working for you. How many of those would you rehire if all the positions were open again?’”
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
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Early influences for you?
The biggest thing that impacted me early on was my dad passing away when I was 7. We were a very successful middle-class family. He was a real estate appraiser and had his own company, but he died suddenly right before my seventh birthday. He had no life insurance, and we went from having most of what we needed to penniless.
My mother was left to look after five kids and his mother. Mom was a rock star and took care of us all — she went back and got her graduate degree and was named science teacher of the year for the state of Florida.
I am what I am today in large part because I was driven to never leave my kids in the same kind of position. I also had to start working early on. I was a paperboy. In high school, I worked at a bedding factory at night.
Tell me more about your mother.
My mother was fabulous but she was very, very tough on me. She ruled with an iron fist, so I was never confused about the values and ethics of our family. I feel her sitting on my shoulder every day, telling me whether she would be O.K. with what I’m doing.
And what were the values?
We treat people well. We stay humble. We don’t get ahead of ourselves. We work hard, and we take ownership of what we do. And if you act out or you do anything out of line, you will hear about it.
I remember when I made the all-star team in the Babe Ruth League. We had just come together recently as a team. I was playing third base, and when it was my time to hit, I struck out. I went back to third base, and we were doing a bit of practice before the other team’s turn to bat. I was really mad and I was firing the ball as hard as I could over to first base, and my mother yelled out, “Hey, Webb, too bad you can’t hit as hard as you throw.” And the shortstop walked over to me and said, “Why don’t you tell that lady in the stands to shut up?” I said: “I can’t. That’s my mom.”
She also taught us to give back and take care of the family first. I didn’t go hungry or anything like that, but we did live for three years without any TV or air-conditioning in a Florida house.
I used to love Christmas as a paperboy because you got all these tips, and so I would always do something special for the family. One year I bought a Ping-Pong table and put it in the family room. It taught me how cool it is to get something for somebody else and to have them enjoy it.
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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.