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 Yorgen Edholm, chief executive of Accellion, a developer of software for mobile file sharing.

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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Any lessons from early in your life?

I remember being quite frustrated early on when people were doing the wrong thing. We had a big extended family and if people were working on house projects — like putting in wall-to-wall carpet — I might notice that they weren’t making holes for the radiators or were doing things the wrong way. Because I was only about 8 years old, nobody would listen to me. I remember being really frustrated.

I learned that if you asked questions the right way, you could frequently get people’s attention, because everybody wanted to preach and tell you what to do. So I’d ask them how they cut holes in the carpet for the radiators and then they would figure out that they were doing it wrong.

That was helpful for me later when I started work. Sweden is less hierarchical, and because of the tax system, there’s not much advantage to being promoted. So a lot of people are happier to be individual contributors. When I was in my 20s, I was managing engineers who were over 40. They didn’t think I was in charge, so I fell back on my training as a kid — I just asked questions.

They decided they were going to explain to me how things work, and by asking the right questions, I could frequently get them to the place I wanted them to be, and we were very successful. The funny thing was that it took them years to discover that I actually knew what I was doing.

Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to do for your career?

I played the violin for many years. It was a pretty full-time commitment. I came here in 1980 to study with Ivan Galamian, the head teacher at Juilliard. For a quarter-century or more, he was the teacher to go to.

In those days, I was totally immersed in the violin and in figuring out computers. I worked as a management consultant. I practiced six hours a day, seven days a week, and I worked long hours, too. I just worked and played violin. I would go in to the office on Saturday and Sunday to work and practice because I could make noise there without anybody complaining. I was trying to be a soloist, but that’s a bit of a crapshoot, and I eventually gave up the violin. It would have meant traveling 200 days a year and not being able to have a family.

What are some lessons you’ve learned over the years about building a corporate culture?

Everything has been trial and error. But my sense is that companies that operate from an engineering perspective are different than other kinds of companies because there is less of a hierarchy. With engineers, there’s much more of an understanding that the best idea could come from anybody. It doesn’t have to be that the top guy is the smartest guy.

I’ve always wanted to make the company flatter and more flexible, with less of a chain of command, so that the person who has the most passion or valuable perspective about something could assert himself or herself a little bit more.

Sometimes when companies have a problem, there is a temptation to throw more people at it. But that kind of linear mind-set can kill a high-tech company very quickly. In that kind of situation, my impulse is to take some people off the project and unleash the best ones.

You can’t have people who are afraid of making mistakes. In high-tech, there are no templates. And when you have no templates, you can’t think that with the right time and resources, you’ll have a 95 percent chance of success. We can’t have people who approach problems by thinking, “If I can’t guarantee success, it’s going to hurt me.”

The idea is not to celebrate mistakes, but to be somewhat tolerant of them. Whenever something unexpected happens in a big company, that’s not a good thing. But when something unexpected happens in a small company, that’s important information that possibly should lead to a course correction.

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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.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.