Soyinka: In this particular case, yes, the North, the feudal, I’ll use the expression, feudal, the feudal part, the less progressive in political ideological terms, less advanced, even economically, because the productive mechanisms, modern productive mechanisms, which were adopted by many newly independent African countries lagged, shall we say, lagged a little bit behind in those areas. And that’s what’s happened. And of course, the first comers into these stakes of power, once they were there, they were determined to make sure nobody else feasted at that board. And this, I’m afraid, is a story which has been repeated throughout many countries on the African continent.
SOURCE: The Root.com, October 25, 2008.
A CONVERSATION WITH CONDOLEEZZA RICE
On Leadership
CONDOLEEZZA RICE IS the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, professor of political economy in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and professor of political science at Stanford University. She served as the 66th Secretary of State of the United States from 2005 to 2009 in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, thank you very much for granting me this interview.
Condoleezza Rice: It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Gates: How do you define a leader?
Rice: A leader is someone who inspires others toward a common goal. The most important thing about leadership is to remember that you are trying to bring people together to achieve something. And none of us wants to be pushed and shoved in any particular direction, so if you treat the people that you’re leading with the same respect with which you would like to be treated, then I think you are a good leader.
Gates: Are leaders chosen or are leaders made?
Rice: I think leaders are made. I have never believed that anyone is born to anything. And leadership is also something that I think you get better at over time. In many experiences, as a younger person trying to lead a university or leading people, you make mistakes because you’re young and maybe a little too aggressive. I think leaders are not only made, but they get better at leading over time.
Gates: Let’s talk about that idea with regard to your own upbringing. When I looked at your family pictures, I particularly noticed the way your parents looked at you. They seemed to be looking at someone who was going to be a major player, going to be a leader. Is that a self-fulfilling prophecy, do you think, the kind of reinforcement through self-esteem that is part of the air that you breathe?
Rice: There is no doubt that without John and Angelina Rice, I would not have ended up where I did. I grew up in the segregated South where the messages could have been absolutely crushing, but somehow my parents made the messages about empowerment, which is no small trick in and of itself. They also, from a very young age, wanted me to understand that I should want to make decisions. So I was president of the family from age four. I remembered this as I was writing my book and I thought, ‘What in the world were they thinking?’ I think they were just trying to give me a sense that even in the family context, it was all right for this four-year-old to have real responsibilities and to carry them out.
Gates: Your parents are just extraordinary. Did you find that your friends had a similar relationship of intimacy and equality, given the limits, with their parents? Was it a class thing or was it unique to your parents?
Rice: I suppose it was, in part, a class thing. I think in middle class Birmingham, in the little enclave in which we lived, Titusville, most of the families, fortunately, were two-parent families in which both men and women worked. So girls received early signals that they could have a profession, could have a career. Most of my friends, just like my parents, gave me every opportunity and, in fact, some opportunities you didn’t even want—to play in recitals and to stand up and give little speeches. That was all part of the ether in Birmingham. But of course, I was an only child. I’ve always said it is easier to be an only child than to be a parent of an only child; [laughter] when the friends go away and the little one needs somebody to play with, the parent has to stand in. So probably the real difference is that I lived in a more adult world than my friends did. They had siblings. They could go home and play with those siblings. My parents had to be my playmates after dark.
Gates: So this little girl, who was reared on the idea that strength and discipline and leadership were expected of you, grew up to be Provost of Stanford University and U.S. Secretary of State! More than anyone else I know, you have had an opportunity to observe leaders in action. What makes a good leader? Can you give an example of someone who has been a model for you of leadership?
Rice: A good leader has to have a vision of where they are leading people. If you don’t know where you’re going, then you’re not going to be able to bring others around a common goal and a common vision. But that vision has to be, on the one hand, realistic. It can’t be pie-in-the-sky or people won’t warm to it. They will ridicule it. On the other hand, if the vision is too confined to the world as it is and doesn’t have a strong sense of the world as it should be, then it’s not inspiring. So I have always found that the best leaders are people who have that vision that pushes people to think about what is possible, but shows them a realistic way to get there. And I have been fortunate to see a lot of great leaders.
One of the strongest leaders I ever encountered was the woman who is currently the president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. When you talk to her about Liberia, and you are standing in Liberia, you say to yourself ‘what is she seeing?’ I remember when we first went to Liberia after she had been inaugurated as president. I was there for her inauguration. It was an extraordinary event. But we were going up to her office, which I think was on the fifth floor, and the elevator simply quit. It just stopped because electricity was so rare in Liberia. And she, very proudly, said, ‘Oh, don’t worry. The next time you come, that’ll be fixed.’ So this is somebody who, in these very dire circumstances, has painted a vision for the future that I think Liberians are warming to and are inspired by. We sometimes decry vision and we talk about people as being too idealistic, but if you are not an idealist, if you’re not an optimist, then you can’t lead.
Gates: So one needs to be an idealist sufficient to paint the dream and a pragmatist sufficient to create the pathway to the dream.
Rice: That’s right. And very often you will find people who are good at one or the other, but not at both. The best leaders are people who are good at both.
Gates: How long were you trapped in that elevator?
Rice: Well, fortunately, we were able to kind of pry it open. [laughter] Then we had to walk five flights of stairs in the Liberian heat. That wasn’t much fun either. Because the air conditioning was also long gone.
Gates: If leaders can be made, which you said they can, what are some of the important lessons, from your experience, that you would offer to an aspiring leader, particularly in the Black community?
Rice: Well, I very often encounter young people and they say, ‘I want to be a leader.’ In my opinion, that is the wrong place to start. The first questions to ask are ‘What am I passionate about? What do I care about? What am I going to learn enough about to actually have something to say about it?’ And then an aspiring leader should ask him or herself, ‘How am I going to acquire that knowledge and that expertise so that I’m not just talking through my hat?’ as we might have said where I grew up in Alabama. And once you have started on that path, you can have early leadership experiences by taking on hard jobs. If there is something somebody doesn’t want to do, you do it. And do it with a lot of vigor and a lot of enthusiasm. And that is a great leadership experience.
Gates: It’s like Booker T. Washington, sweeping the room . . .
Rice: Absolutely. Because I am a professor, I often reflect on how to talk about these issues with young people. I have had students say, ‘I don’t want an internship where I’m just going to be stuffing envelopes.’ And I say
‘Well, perhaps when you start that internship, all you are capable of doing is stuffing envelopes. But as you demonstrate that you’re more and more capable, you will get greater and greater responsibility.’ Those who emerge as leaders are people who have demonstrated that they can take responsibility in the hardest circumstances, mobilize others, and move them forward.
Gates: Let’s talk about young people a bit more. I know how deeply troubled you are, as am I, about the fact that seventy percent of Black children are born to a single mother. When you were talking earlier about the nuclear family in your neighborhood, not only did your friends have two parents who lived together, but they both worked. So did I, in West Virginia. How do we translate these lessons for future generations? Particularly, those lessons about entrepreneurial leadership for the large part of the Black community that was not privileged to be raised in the environments in which you and I were raised?
Rice: Well, unfortunately, the nuclear family is still in decline. The data get worse, not better. And we cannot simply sacrifice the kids who find themselves in that condition by saying we really should be trying to build nuclear families. We should be. But for children who are not fortunate enough to have that, some adult—a minister or a teacher—needs to step in and advocate for that child. No ten-, fourteen- or eighteen-year-old is going to be able to navigate the complexities of life in America alone, particularly life in America for a minority kid. In many communities, even when I was growing up, it was a teacher who would step into the role of advocate or mentor. While my community was middle class and we had two-parent families, not every community in Birmingham was middle class. My parents and their friends, as teachers, very often took on responsibilities for helping isolated kids to navigate the world. I tell a story in Extraordinary, Ordinary People about my father, a Presbyterian minister, and the youth fellowship at his Black middle-class church. Behind that church was a government project called Loveman Village, where two-parent families were less common and parents were often not educated people. Kids from all over the community came to youth fellowship. I later teased my father that the reason his youth fellowship was so popular was because he was a Presbyterian minister and so he could host dances. The Baptists couldn’t. [laughter] But in that youth fellowship, my father and the church sent messages: ‘Your kid is smart. Your child ought to go to college. I’ve got a scholarship for your child from Spelman College or Knoxville College. And I want your kid to go to college. Your daughter or your son.’ So, it is not ideal if there has to be a substitute for the nuclear family, but in our world, we may have to rely on others to advocate for those children.
Gates: It takes a village.
Rice: It does take a village.
Gates: You have learned a great deal from these different communities you’ve inhabited: segregated Alabama, the academy, the White House. You must have observed many different leadership styles. Did you deliberately set out to emulate or adopt a particular style of leadership?
Rice: I believe that you learn a lot about leadership as you take on leadership positions. I remember my first year as provost at Stanford. I was pretty tough. I was a thirty-eight-year-old provost. Though I had had tenure for a number of years, I had never been a department chair. Nevertheless, I was promoted to full professor in May, and to provost in June. And so—
Gates: That’s amazing.
Rice: Well, the president of Stanford, Gerhard Casper, took this chance. But in those first few months, I really felt I had to assert my authority. And I did it sometimes by not delegating and not letting people do their jobs. And if something wasn’t accomplished in three or four days, then there I was trying to do it for them. I had a long talk with my father in the summer after my first year as provost, and he said ‘Let me tell you something. If somebody is trying to do their job, but they’re not doing very well, your job as a leader is not to go do their job, but to help them figure out why they’re not getting it done. Because if you don’t do that, pretty soon nobody who is any good is going to work for you because they’re going to be tired of you constantly taking over.’ I learned a very important lesson from that. When I then became national security advisor and, particularly, secretary of state, where I had a 55,000-person department to run . . .
Gates: It’s hard to micromanage that.
Rice: But I had learned that when something isn’t getting done, perhaps you can intervene to help that person. That’s a very different concept. It’s more collaborative and more about working with people to help them remove barriers. So those are the kinds of lessons that I think you learn by having leadership experiences and maybe not doing it as well as you might the first time around.
Gates: You benefited, obviously, from great mentors, starting with your parents. I’m asked to speak in corporations all the time, particularly by minority people, about the secret to success. And I say, from my point of view, it’s about finding a great mentor, being adopted by a mentor. But then they say ‘Well, how do you do that?’ What is your advice for finding a mentor?
Rice: Well, first to recognize that you need one. And that is the first step because the idea that anybody gets there on their own is one of the great fictions in society. Everybody needs somebody to help them navigate their course and advocate for them, to push them ahead. Secondly, you have to be pretty aggressive about finding mentors. And I know that it is ideal if you can find mentors who look like you. But it really may not be possible. Some of my most important mentors—as a matter of fact, all of my early mentors other than my parents and a few teachers—were White men. In fact, they were old White men, because they were the people who dominated the fields in which I was working: International politics, Soviet Studies. I would have been waiting a long time to find a Black female mentor in Soviet Studies. So being comfortable with the fact that they may not look like you is important. And third, trying to seek out people in whom you are interested. I very often say to my students, you know, we’re a little bit vain as faculty. If you think this is somebody you’re really interested in getting to know, go read something they’ve written. Then go talk to them about it. And try to establish a relationship. You can’t be shy about seeking out mentors. Many people love to be sought out in that way and want to help, but you need to have something in mind that you would like to have them help you do; for instance, get a fellowship or an internship. Ask them ‘Can I help you with that project?’ I think we have made mentoring too formal a term. What we really mean is finding people who will help you out, who will think about you when a possibility comes along, and who can give you a little advice along the way.
Gates: One crucial mentor for you was Josef Korbel, Madeleine Albright’s father. Could you tell us the story of how this relationship came into being?
Rice: It came about because I was a failed piano major. [laughter] I started playing piano when I was three years old. I went off to college to be a piano performance major, and at the end of my sophomore year in college, I went to the Aspen Music Festival School. And I met twelve-year-olds at the Aspen Music Festival School who could play from sight what it took me all year to learn. I was seventeen. I thought ‘I’m about to end up teaching thirteen-year-olds to murder Beethoven for a living and that’s not what I want to do.’ So I went back and said to my parents ‘I’m changing my major.’ They said, ‘What are you changing it to?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’ They said, ‘You don’t know what you want to do with your life?’ I said, ‘Right, it’s my life.’ They said, ‘It’s our money, find a major.’ [laughter] And so, after a couple of false starts, one in English literature, which I didn’t like, and one in local government, which I liked even less, I literally wandered into a course in international politics just thinking ‘Oh, it fits into the right time slot on my schedule.’ And it was taught by Josef Korbel. All of a sudden, I knew what I wanted to do. He opened up this world of international affairs and diplomacy and the Soviet Union and Russia, and it was like finding love. All of a sudden, inexplicably, for a Black girl fro
m Birmingham, Alabama, I wanted to be a Soviet specialist. And he continued to nurture that interest. I remember giving a presentation in his class and he said, ‘You should be a professor.’ I remember thinking, ‘Oh, come on, me a professor?’ So he was a very good mentor because he kept helping me to define what I wanted to be. He didn’t try to impose a view on me. He was a terrific mentor.
Gates: Were your parents supportive or did they say have you bumped your head out there in Denver? A Black Russian . . .
Rice: Exactly. [laughter] No, fortunately my parents didn’t say ‘Why in the world is a Black girl from Birmingham talking about being a Soviet specialist?’ They said, ‘That’s great, honey, go for it.’ And they were thrilled. I’m not sure they knew what a Soviet specialist did. But they were happy to support it.
Gates: You were lucky.
Rice: I was lucky. I used to say, when I would address parents at Stanford as provost, ‘When your kid comes home and says “mom and dad, I’ve found it. It’s Etruscan art.” Don’t panic. It might in fact turn out all right.’ [laughter]
Gates: In those early days of your education and career, was there a moment when you realized that you were going to be a leader?
Rice: Oh, I still don’t think of it in those terms. I think that I have had special experiences and unique circumstances. I don’t think I am a particularly unique person in that regard.
Gates: You are the first Black female secretary of state.
Rice: I know, but I . . .
Gates: In history.
Rice: But it’s a combination of preparation and circumstances. I was fortunate to find something I loved doing. International politics. Soviet specialist. I happened to be fortunate that a Soviet specialty was hot property in 1981, 1982, when I came out of college. I am fortunate that I met Brent Scowcroft, who would become George H. W. Bush’s national security advisor. I had done my work and I had worked hard. I had learned Russian. I had done the basic research. And I had written articles that identified me as a rising young Soviet specialist. Scowcroft took me to the White House as the special assistant to President Bush for Soviet affairs, and I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. I got to be the Soviet specialist at the end of the Cold War, because in 1989, everything broke loose in Europe. Now, some people say serendipity. But I say, some combination of serendipity, good luck, and maybe divine intervention, [laughter] but that’s how I see what emerged for me.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 78