Ryan Smith (Qualtrics) in “The Corner Office”

Smith, RyanAdam 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  Ryan Smith, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Qualtrics, a Provo, Utah-based provider of online survey research platforms

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?

Smith: I definitely had an interesting upbringing. There are five children, and everyone’s been pretty successful. My parents are both Ph.D.’s — they were in academia until the late stages of their careers, when they decided to go into entrepreneurial ventures.

They raised us with the mentality of “if you want it, you’ve got to go out and get it.” I remember when I was 13, my mother dropped us off in downtown Provo one summer, about two miles from where we lived, and said, “You guys are all paying for your clothes this year. Don’t come home till you have jobs.” They instilled in us the idea that “you can be anything you want to be, but you’re going to have to go do it.”

Bryant: How did you start Qualtrics?

Smith: I was a sophomore in college and working in L.A. for Hewlett-Packard on a summer program. My father was diagnosed with throat cancer, so I took a semester off school to be with him. He was always tinkering with technology to make the research world better. And when he would come home from his radiation treatments, he couldn’t speak. I bonded with him by helping him with his work. The cancer was very severe, and he needed something to look forward to. So we would work together, and by the time he recovered from the cancer, I had signed up 20 clients and we had formed a business. We’re 290 employees now, and we’ll probably double in size in the next 18 months.

Bryant: Tell me about the culture you’re trying to foster.

Smith: We’ve been extremely transparent, but not so that we can be cool. And it’s not about an open environment, because that’s not what makes a company transparent. It’s more around the fact that everyone needs to know where we are going and how we are going to get there.

So we want everyone to understand our objectives and make that available to everyone as we’re evolving, so people aren’t guessing and they’re not internally focused. That’s one obstacle a lot of companies fall into. I believe most companies fail because they’re not focused — they either get focused on other things in the market that aren’t important, so they’re thrashing around without a clear objective, or they’re focused internally on things like politics and bureaucracy. It’s not that these companies aren’t smart companies or lack good businesses. It’s just that there’s a lot of noise.

We want to be transparent because we want to encourage our people to have all the information to keep them focused on what really matters — our objectives and how they’re going to contribute.

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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.

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