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 Susan Salka, chief executive of AMN Healthcare, a staffing company based in San Diego. “I don’t want somebody who just sees this as a job,” she said. “I want it to be really important in their life somehow.”

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

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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What were some early influences for you?

I grew up primarily in Nebraska, in a little town of 100 people. I say primarily, because my dad was in the Navy before that, and we moved all around. That definitely influenced me, in terms of just having to embrace change and be adaptable.

It really causes you to be open to new ideas and new people. You were always walking into new places where you didn’t know anybody, so you had to learn to make friends quickly.

You also knew you weren’t going to be there for very long, and so you had to be O.K. with that. In fact, you need to embrace it, because there’s nothing you can do about it.

Any leadership roles for you early on?

There were 12 kids in my high school graduating class, so I’m not sure what kind of leadership opportunities there were back then. But I started working when I was 12 years old, washing dishes at the Hungry Horse Saloon. I would do anything just to keep busy. I became the assistant cook, then the cook, then the hostess and the server, and some nights it was so dead I would be all of those things combined.

I ended up working in the neighboring town at Jigg’s Bar, which had a restaurant. I got a little tired of offering up the same dishes, so I decided to offer “specialty nights,” with Mexican or Italian food. I was about 15. They ended up being a big hit. I’ve always liked to figure out what people want and find a way to deliver it.

Any favorite expressions that your parents would repeat often around the dinner table?

My dad has 10,000 expressions. When he would say these things as I was growing up, I would roll my eyes every time, but I find myself using many of those same expressions today.

One of them has to do with keeping things simple and making people feel comfortable around you. If somebody was talking over his head, using big words, being too complex, or trying to act too sophisticated, he would say, “Would you break that down to cows, chickens, and taters?”

I used to think it was silly — what do cows, chickens, and taters have to do with each other? But years later, I realized that the message is, keep it simple. Don’t overcomplicate things. As a leader, that’s something that I’ve really learned over time. The strategy and the business can be complex, but you have to explain them in a way that’s really easy to understand.

Did you have an idea of what you wanted to do when you were in college?

I wanted to be a C.P.A. I studied accounting, but I fell in love with economics, too, so I ended up graduating with a dual major. Not long after I graduated, I moved to California and joined a diagnostic and therapeutic company called Hybritech.

I was just a little financial grunt at first, but I got to know the C.F.O. and a lot of the leadership team, because when a new project or anything came up, I would raise my hand and say, “Can I do that?” I was 21, I had all the time in the world on my hands, and so I would get involved in all these special projects and be there until midnight.

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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.