This weekend’s Corner Office in the New York Times, featured Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America.  Here are a few insightful excerpts from the interview with this inspirational chief executive on the failures and struggles that ultimately led her to success and finding purpose in life.

On managing & hiring:

Q. Tell me about the first time you started hiring and managing people.

A. I was dismal at it. Some people seem to sort of have a gut for hiring. I literally had a gut that was exactly the opposite. So whenever I thought someone would be great, it was sort of the opposite.

You meet people and they seem nice and charismatic and they seem to have presence. And at that time, I was looking for people who could, in fact, build a movement on campuses. So maybe I was going on that, versus diving into people’s past experiences and figuring out how they actually operated. But I have since become obsessed with building the right team.

Q. So how do you hire people now for staff positions?

A. I start with someone’s experience, just to try to understand how they’ve operated in past environments and challenges, to see if they have demonstrated what we would think of as the core values for Teach for America.

Are these people who operate with a relentless pursuit of results, and with a sense of possibility and disciplined thought and respect and humility and integrity? I’ll just dive into people’s pasts and try to look for evidence of that. And then if it seems like someone would be a fit here, based on that, then we’ll actually try to simulate the job.

On starting out

We had a very rocky start in the first decade, and it was not clear at many points that we were going to actually make it financially. For three years, every single payroll was a huge question. But ultimately that near-death experience led us to see the power of really clear, measurable goals. We realized the only way out of this mess was to raise money in the communities where we’re placing teachers.

Fund-raising is so measurable, and it’s easy to manage that system. And then once we worked ourselves out of our financial crunch, we stepped back and said, “How do we bring the same kind of rigor to the rest of the organization?”

On Failure

I think that the near-death experiences of our first decade were completely formative. Every single day, I feel like I think differently and probably we operate differently as an organization because of that.

Q. How?

A. I’d say a few things. There are certain lessons — you could read them in any textbook. But because we learned them the hard way, they’re just so deeply ingrained. One of them is the importance of focus, the importance of saying no.

There was so much good momentum and we were asking all sorts of good questions and launching new, good ideas. But ultimately, they took away resources and energy from the fundamental core of what we do, which we came back to believing was the most powerful thing. The obsession with truly staying focused on our core mission, I think, came from that.

And also, I’m obsessed with the idea that what goes up comes down, and the need to be very, very careful. And not to get too caught up in all of the good stuff and just to constantly be thinking about whether we are getting out in front of ourselves.

Interview by Adam Bryant and photo from David Goldman. Read the full interview here.