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. At 35, she advised President George H.W. Bush on Soviet strategy. She became Stanford’s youngest provost, during a budget crisis in 1993. President George W. Bush named her national security advisor in 2001; again, she was the youngest person ever to hold the position. 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.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review.
