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 Robert LoCascio, founder and C.E.O. of LivePerson, a firm that provides online customer-assistance and other services to businesses. He says, “To tear down walls, you have to move out of your office.”
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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Bryant: What were some early leadership lessons for you?
LoCascio: I got out of college in 1990. We were in the middle of a recession, and I got a job at a trading company. I was there for six months, and they fired me because they needed to lay people off. I remember they took me to lunch, and they asked me what I took away from the experience. And I said, “I’ll never work for anybody again.”
And then I started my first company. I put $50,000 on credit cards, and I had the idea of bringing interactive kiosks with touch screens to college campuses and selling advertising on them. It was working, but it was a struggle. And the Internet spread quickly, and I had to shut the company down. I lost everything. It was a humbling experience, and I ended up coming to New York. I rented about 400 or 500 square feet from a guy who was making T-shirts down in TriBeCa.
This was the point where everything changed. I was 27, I failed and I was pretty down, and I went to see a therapist named Frank Maurio. He didn’t charge me because he knew I didn’t have money. For two years he worked with me and changed how I perceive the world. And when I took LivePerson public on April 7, 2000, I gave him some shares in the company and thanked him.
Bryant: What lessons did he teach you?
LoCascio: There were a couple of things. One is that, usually, nothing is as bad as it seems. As entrepreneurs, we tend to react to a situation. So if you panic and you bring that emotion, it’ll wear you down. So it was really important to just be centered during the day. The second thing is surrounding yourself with the right people, but I think he changed my understanding of who the right people are. Entrepreneurs in particular want high control. It can be wonderful, and it can be disastrous. He taught me that you don’t want to have people you can control, but you can still control your future and have people who can help you build the company.
The other one is that you have to evolve and change at all times. We have a tendency to be lazy, especially when things are good. So the concept was, you should be in a constant state of evolution as a person, because if you stop, you will end up having to leave, or what entrepreneurs tend to do is they basically self-destruct and hurt the company. They start making bad deals. They hire bad people.
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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. To contact him, please click here.