![]() One is that you have to paint a picture of other times that that institution has responded to change and difficulty successfully. ![]() The fact that I’d studied how institutions develop was very helpful when I found myself leading a Department of State that was having to adapt to a post 9/11 world. The question is how do you get a relatively successful institution to respond to really new challenges. They take the cues too late from the environment. It’s very hard to make them change when they’re succeeding. A lot of the work I’d done as an academic affirmed that usually institutions change when they’re failing. They’re institutions because they’ve developed a certain set of traditions and norms and expertise, and change is hard. I found it useful to remember that most institutions don’t want to change. What piece of knowledge from your academic career did you find most useful in the State Department? You have to leave behind the context of what you were doing and adapt to the new context, but the nice thing about making these transitions back and forth is you can bring new skills and new ways of looking at problems. I think if you take that attitude then you fall more easily into a new environment. And now I don’t plan to be the former Secretary of State either. And I wasn’t the former provost, I was the new National Security Advisor. I wasn’t the former special assistant for Soviet affairs, I was the new provost. I believe you never should spend your time being the former anything. How have you made those transitions work? You’ve specialized in big career moves between sectors. And I was really ready to leave government. So it’s been a pretty easy transition back. I’m teaching in the business school this time, which I hadn’t done before, but teaching is very familiar to me, Stanford is very familiar to me, being involved in Stanford sports is very familiar to me. I’ve been here since 1981, so it’s coming back home. In some ways I don’t feel as though I’ve been away. HBR: How does it feel to be back at Stanford after eight years away? After eight years in Washington, four as the 66th Secretary of State, Rice returned to Stanford as a professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Bush named her national security advisor in 2001 again, she was the youngest person ever to hold the position. She became Stanford’s youngest provost, during a budget crisis in 1993. Uncowed by the prospect of failure, Rice has made a career of arriving in positions of power during difficult times and, critics say, without the requisite experience.
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