Q. And which of those personalities describes you?

A. I’m very much aware of who I am not, as much as who I am. At least I try to be. I’m not the enforcer. I’m not the champion of the customer. Those two things don’t come naturally to me, so I need to make sure that I have partners who can supply that.

Q. What about leadership lessons from earlier in your life?

A. I grew up on a ranch in Central Africa, where, out of necessity, I spent a lot of time on my own. And then I went to a British-style boarding school. That gave me a certain self-reliance and thick outer skin. I also gained a certain ambition in life because I was very aware, growing up, of being on the periphery of the civilized, technical world. Everything that was new in technology was exciting, and happening in very distant places from me. So I had to drive myself to get to the center of that.

My self-reliance is something I have had to learn to deal with, because it’s my nature to be an introvert. And being a leader, you can’t just be an introvert. People want to know that they can emotionally connect with you — that you’re, in some deep way, going on a journey with them and that you recognize them. And that requires you to open up to people and reach out to them and connect with them. Left to myself, I will retreat into my office, so I have to be aware of that.

Q. What about different styles of leadership you’ve seen through the years. How did those influence you?

A. It’s very hard to talk about these things without becoming trite or corny, but the best leaders are those who get the best out of other people.

I’ve learned that you only really get the best out of other people when you do things in a positive way. There are negative styles of leadership, where you do things by critiquing and criticizing and terrifying other people. But in the final analysis, it doesn’t get the best out of people and it doesn’t breed loyalty. Because no matter how much we think we’ve got things figured out, we haven’t got things figured out. Inevitably, we’re going to go down blind alleys. We’re going to run into problems. We’re going to make mistakes. And when that happens, you have to ask people to help you and to overlook the fact that you’ve messed something up.

Great leaders, in my view, are those who have built up that reservoir of loyalty, so that when the time comes to say to folks, “We have to change direction,” people are willing to make an extraordinary effort. If you’re the kind of leader who cuts people down and humiliates them, you leave scars on people that can eventually come back to haunt you.