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 Tae Hea Nahm, managing director of the venture capital firm Storm Ventures. “Being a C.E.O. requires a lot of faith and passion, but for making decisions, sometimes truth and faith are different.” 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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What were some early influences for you?

I was born in South Korea, and we immigrated to St. Louis when I was 5 years old. In the beginning, it was all about learning how to get acclimated to life in the United States. I remember starting kindergarten not being able to speak English. I felt like I was going to flunk kindergarten, but somehow survived.

Tell me about your parents.

My father was a medical school professor in Korea and became a doctor here in the United States. My mother was very hard-driving. If I got 99 on a test, the first question was, “Why didn’t you get 100?” If I got 100, the next question was, “Can you do it again?”

That pressure can be hard on some people.

I wasn’t happy about it, but once I went to college and met other Korean students like myself, I realized we were all sort of trained the same way — almost like thoroughbreds to run races. After a while I just learned to accept it for what it is. It’s not a question of good or bad; it’s how we got trained.

But I almost felt like I had a second set of parents because my brother and sister are 12 and 14 years older than I am. My sister is an architect, and very artistic. My brother is as logical as you can be, and he became a medical school professor. I remember listening to a lot of family debates where it was almost like two ships passing in the night because there wasn’t a fundamental basis of communication. Their perspectives were so different.

That taught me the importance of really trying to understand others and their motivations, because so much depends on their backgrounds and their perspectives in terms of how they’re going to make decisions.

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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.