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 Tom Erickson, chief executive of Acquia, an open-source software company.

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

* * *

Any leadership lessons early in your life?

I grew up in a very small town in Wisconsin, a classic Scandinavian town where it wasn’t encouraged to brag. My father was a leader just by virtue of his personality. He ran a store that’s still in the family. He was president of the City Council, president of the school board, and was a leader of the business association. He was one of those quiet leaders who just did his thing.

He had a very different leadership style than me, because he was blessed with a patience that I don’t have. He was able to help people, over an extended period, think about things differently. We were one of the very first schools in our part of the state to receive a computer. My dad had been really active about saying, “We need to be on the forefront of what’s next.” I glued myself to that computer.

What about early management experience?

I got a job out of university with a small company called PSDI. I had eight other job offers, but I chose them because they said, “You’ll be promoted if you work hard.” Within a year, they sent me to Australia to open an office there. I was 23.

I was a technical guy with an engineering background, but I learned how to sell there. That was probably a pivotal point in my career — learning that it wasn’t magic. Coming from a small town, I just assumed that there were certain tracks in life, and that moving across them was hard. But I learned that I could sell.

Any early speed bumps in learning how to manage people?

One notable mistake happened with a very nice guy who really didn’t fit in the company. I told him one day that we didn’t have a position for him anymore. He had been there a while, and he had a lot of friends, and I didn’t let him go in a way that was graceful. That caused a domino effect, and some people left who I didn’t want to leave. That was a really hard lesson. There is a right way to let people go, and there’s a wrong way to let people go.

Another happened when I went into France to build our business there. I thought I had hired the right guy, and he started to explain to me that France was a different market, and that the French are different. I let him persuade me that the kind of people we had to hire were different. The whole thing collapsed a year later, and I had to make tremendous changes.

Tell me about the culture of your current company.

I think of myself as a team builder more than anything else. At Acquia, I interviewed the first 220 or so people who came on board. We built a core DNA for the company. There’s a saying I learned: “If you let one bozo into the company, they multiply like rabbits,” which is especially true if they’re in a position where they can influence hiring of other people.

* * *

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.comthat 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.