Bryant on writing the “Corner Office”

Adam Bryant, who writes the “Corner Office” for the New York Times, was interviewed by David J. Parnell of Forbes.com about how he writes his regular column.

Here is an excerpt:

Parnell: Why did you start Corner Office?

Bryant: I was a business reporter here at the [New York] Times for many years throughout the 1990s. During that time I covered a lot of different industries and companies and interviewed a lot of CEOs. And what dawned on me over time—it sounds obvious to say it now—is that CEOs are almost always interviewed in the business press as strategists. When you whittle down a typical CEO Q&A in the business press, essentially it is two questions: What is your growth plan? And what is the competitive landscape?

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed writing those articles, and really learned a lot, and there is a big audience for them. But I just found that the more time I spent with CEOs, the more I became interested in them as people, and found myself wanting to ask them simple questions like, “How do you do what you do?” and, “How did you learn to do what you do?” People often see CEOs as this subspecies of the human race—that they are born leaders. And I thought, well, that can’t be right; there has to be a learning curve.

So I rolled all of that up into a simple “what if?” that launched Corner Office, which is, what if I sat down with CEOs and literally never asked them a single question about their company, their industry space, and strategy, and all that? Instead, I would ask them really simple questions about leadership lessons they’ve learned over the course of their lives; how they lead their employees as opposed to how they lead in their industry space….

Read more here.