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 Peter Miller, the chief executive of Optinose, a pharmaceutical company. “I believe in culture so strongly and that one bad apple can spoil the bunch.” 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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Were you in leadership roles or entrepreneurial when you were younger?
I did have a real passion and an interest in business for some reason. Part of it was just finding ways to have ideas and solve problems. When I was in second grade, I had the idea to collect old newspapers and try to sell them to people at half price. It was not a very good idea.
I also played a lot of sports, and I was captain of both the lacrosse and soccer teams in college. In some cases I was the best player, but a lot of times I wasn’t. It was about understanding how you have success as a team. I wasn’t trying to be captain of the teams — this was back when the teams elected the captains. I think they chose me because I truly wanted the team to win, and I didn’t really care if I was the one scoring the goals. I think people can sense that.
It’s one of my core philosophies now. I call it “one mission,” and it’s a lot easier to do in small companies than large companies, because in large companies a second agenda often creeps in — the team has to do well, but you have to do well in a big corporation. You start thinking: “How am I doing, and am I getting points?” That’s what I love about small companies. I say to the team all the time, “If we succeed, everybody succeeds. If we fail, we all fail.”
Tell me about your parents.
They always gave me lots of latitude in terms of trying to figure stuff out. They gave me freedom to fail, and when I succeeded, I knew it was me succeeding and not necessarily the circumstances.
My mom was a nurse who gave up her career to raise us. And my dad was enormously influential. He grew up in Appalachia, truly in poverty, and became this remarkable guy — a real Horatio Alger who worked harder than anybody, and he never put himself above anybody. He went on to become a world-renowned radiologist.
How have they influenced your leadership style?
This really comes from my dad. Probably the most important thing that I try to embed in our culture is what I call possibility thinking. My dad never thought he was poor, never talked about the things that were going wrong. He always focused on the things that could go right. It was really powerful to me to see that anybody can achieve anything.
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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.