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 Penny Herscher, the chief executive of FirstRain, a business analytics firm. She observes, “The things you learn raising a child are great skills for nurturing a team and bringing a project to life. You take obstacles out of the way, encourage them and set goals that are tough but can be achieved.”
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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Tell me about your parents.
My parents were both engineers and mathematicians. My mother was actually the second woman to ever major in engineering at Oxford. So I was raised in an environment where anybody who was anybody did math, and the expectation was that I would go into technology, because that’s where all the excitement was.
So you had a clear idea what you wanted to do in college.
I studied math at Cambridge, and I thought I was going to be in technical roles my whole life. I worked for a year in England as a computer programmer, and then my husband and I got on a plane and came to California. We had no health insurance, and no money. But we were confident we could get jobs.
I did get a programming job, but after a couple of years I wasn’t terribly happy being a software engineer because so much time is spent in front of a screen, and I’m an extrovert. I got discovered by the sales and marketing people in the company because I was good at doing product demonstrations, and they recruited me to the business side of the house. I’ve never looked back.
What were some early lessons you learned as a manager?
I have a strong personality, and early on I definitely didn’t know how to let other people blossom and thrive. I was sure I was right all the time, and I was probably bossy and autocratic. I learned that the hard way. I had people who didn’t want to work for me — some of them told me, and some of them just left.
Even so, the company’s leadership above me appreciated what I was doing, so I had to learn this balance between being a strong personality that could solve a hard problem while creating enough air and light for the people who worked for me. That took some time to learn.
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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.