When chairmen came courting Condoleezza Rice.

• Position: DIRECTOR MEMOIR - Reprint

Ed. Note: Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice published her memoir. Extraordinary, Ordinary People, in October 2010. After completing her Bush administration responsibilities she returned to Stanford University where she is now a professor of political economy in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow of public policy at the Hoover Institution. She is also returning to corporate boardrooms. In July 2011 she joined the board of KiOR Inc., a renewable fuels company that just went public in June. The following passage from her memoir recounts how doors initially opened for her to join corporate boards 20 years ago when she first came back to Stanford after serving on the National Security Council as an advisor on Soviet and East European Affairs for President George H.W, Bush.

I returned to Stanford tired but content, I didn't miss Washington or the work in the White House, Even when the coup against Gorbachev took place in August 1991, leading to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in December, I didn't regret my decision to leave. Throughout the spring and summer, I worked again for ABC News as an expert analyst but largely kept my distance from the policy world, I'd done my part and had no desire to try to influence events from afar.

In fact new horizons were opening up for me, A few weeks after returning home, I received a call from George Shultz, I had gotten to know George shortly before he went to Washington to become secretary of state in 13S2, He had taken an interest in my career and stayed in touch during my time in Washington, George was a director of the Chevron Corporation and wondered if I might be interested in joining the board. Chevron had just acquired a stake in the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan, at the time a part of the Soviet Union, and George felt that my expertise would be useful to them.

After a day with the CEO, Ken Derr, and his team, I signed on enthusiastically.

In retrospect, it was a stretch for the company to appoint a 36-year-old associate professor to a board largely populated by corporate titans. At the time, Chevron named oil tankers for its directors, so in 1993 my entire family and I traveled to Brazil to christen the Condoleezza Rice. Several years later, when i was national security advisor, the company and I agreed that it was not wise to have my name floating into...