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 Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, a provider of note-taking and archiving technology says the company has an unusual culture.

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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The Phones Are Out, but the Robot Is In

Bryant: Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

Libin: I’m a programmer by training. I just worked as an engineer all through college and then after school. But then, at one of my earlier companies, there were three of us, all programmers. I was the weakest programmer of the three, so I kind of got pushed into doing all of the other stuff. It was kind of accidental almost. It was like, I’m the guy whose time was the least valuable.

Bryant: Did managing people come naturally to you?

Libin: To me, being a C.E.O., being a manager, was really a direct extension of being a programmer, which I think explains some of the things I’m good at and some of the things I’m bad at. When you’re programming, you have a very specific goal that you want to accomplish, and you do it by basically pulling together blocks of code. When I became a C.E.O., I was basically doing the same thing, except I was working with people who needed to accomplish some stuff, and it was still kind of very functional. That worked really well with the kind of people we had early on — high-energy, very technical, very goal-driven people. So I kind of thought, “Hey, I’m a natural. I’m a great C.E.O.” I didn’t have to do anything, and everything gets done, and products get released and revenues climb. I didn’t have my first experience of actually trying to manage people with conflicts or personality issues or any of the softer stuff until several years later. That was kind of a big shock.

Bryant: Tell me more about that.

Libin: My company was acquired by a much larger company, and that’s when I was really a manager for the first time. I had a department — the people who used to work for me in my previous role as C.E.O. — but now I had to represent their interests in the larger organization. I had other people reporting to me, and now there were politics, personalities, all this other stuff, and I hated it.

Bryant: Why?

Libin: I knew how to set a goal, and if I had like-minded people who wanted to accomplish the same goal, I was pretty good at directing them. But not everyone’s mission in life was to accomplish that particular goal. So how do I deal with these other issues? I didn’t have any of those skills, and I had no idea how hard that was. So that was a pretty rude awakening. I kind of went from being relatively successful as an engineer and relatively successful as a start-up C.E.O., and then to utter failure as a midlevel manager. I kind of vowed that I was going to try to not repeat that. Luckily, now we have about 160 people, so I’ve got people on my staff who are much better at managing people. The company doesn’t suffer quite so much just because I may be a little bit tone-deaf.

Bryant: Tell me about the culture of your company.

Libin: We have a flat and very open structure. Nobody has an office. In fact, there are no perks that are signs of seniority. Obviously, there are differences in compensation, but there are no status symbols. You certainly don’t get a better seat or any of that kind of stuff, because they’re just unnecessary. They create artificial barriers to communication. They create artificial things that people focus on rather than just getting their job accomplished. We try to have an organization that just helps you get your work done, and then it’s my job to eliminate all of the risks and all the distractions so you can just focus on achieving. That attracts people who are primarily motivated by how much they achieve.

Bryant: What else is unusual about your workplace?

Libin: We got rid of phones in the office. Just on a whim, I thought that at every company we start, and this is the third one, we’re going to eliminate one piece of unnecessary technology. So this time it was phones. We thought, why do you really need a phone? If you have a phone at your desk, it’s just sitting there and you’re kind of encouraging people to talk on it. Everyone’s got a cellphone, and the company pays for the plans. There are phones in the conference room. We’re not a sales organization, so we’re not making a lot of calls, either. If you’re at your desk, you should be working. And that’s actually worked really well. I don’t think anyone misses phones. Even though it’s one big room, it’s actually fairly quiet because no one is sitting there talking at their desk. The culture very much is that if you want to talk, you go 10 or 20 feet in some direction to a quiet area.

Bryant:  But don’t people then just resort to e-mail?

Libin: One of the things I’ve tried to do is uproot any sort of e-mail culture at Evernote. We strongly discourage lengthy e-mail threads with everyone weighing in. It’s just not good for that. Plus, it’s dangerous, because it’s way too easy to misread the tone of something. If you want to talk to somebody and you’re a couple floors apart, I kind of want you to get up and go talk to them.

Bryant: So tell me more about your culture.

Libin: We recently implemented something called Evernote Officer Training. I got this idea from a friend who served on a Trident nuclear submarine. He said that in order to be an officer on one of these subs, you have to know how to do everyone else’s job. Those skills are repeatedly trained and taught. And I remember thinking, “That’s really cool.”

So we implemented officer training at Evernote. The program is voluntary. If you sign up, we will randomly assign you to any other meeting. So pretty much anytime I have a meeting with anyone, or anyone else has a meeting with anyone, very often there is somebody else in there from a totally different department who’s in officer training. They’re there to absorb what we’re talking about. They’re not just spectators. They ask questions; they talk. My assistant runs it, and she won’t schedule any individual for more than two extra meetings a week. We don’t want this consuming too much of anybody’s time

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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 new 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. To contact him, please click here.