Susana Malcorra on How to Fix Multilateralism

Amanda Sloat

Welcome to Power and Purpose. We are delighted to welcome Susana Malcorra, who has impressive experience in a wide range of fields. Currently she is President and Co-Founder of GWL Voices, an organization comprised of nearly 80 women leaders from around the world who are committed to building a gender-equal international system that advances peace, security and human rights. She’s worked in academia.

She’s had a distinguished career in the UN, including serving as Chief of Staff to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon under Secretary General for Field Support, Deputy Executive Director of the World Food Program and was recently announced as Senior Advisor to UN Staff for Gaza. She also, if that was not enough, was Foreign Minister of Argentina and before that worked as an engineer by training and spent 25 years in the private sector, rising to CEO of Telecom Argentina.

Susana. We could spend entire episodes on each chapter of your fascinating career. So thank you for joining us and welcome to the podcast.

 

Susana Malcorra

Thanks for having me. It’s a great opportunity.

 

Amanda Sloat

So you’ve had such a fascinating career with so many aspects that we could dive into. But given all of your experience with the UN, I wanted to start with that. The UN is soon going to begin the process of selecting a new Secretary-General, replacing Antonio Guterres, who leaves in January of 2027. You yourself were a candidate in 2016 and have remained a vocal advocate for having a woman in this role.

I’m curious how you are seeing this upcoming selection process, why you think we haven’t had a woman in this job so far. And what difference female leadership at the head of the UN would make?

 

Susana Malcorra

Well, again, thank you. And it’s a very, very important question from my perspective. Why is it that we haven’t seen a woman at the helm of the United Nations? Well because the United Nations, as is the case in many spheres of work in the world, is a male-dominated reality, that has been the case.

Diplomacy has been essentially a male-dominated realm and immediately in a male-dominated world, males are the ones chosen. In 2016, when seven women ran for secretary general, everybody was saying, “Is it time for this to happen?” And it did not happen. So it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will happen this time around.

Although many people again say that it should be a woman. Why a woman? And first of all, the charter of the United Nations says “we the peoples” and women represent more than half of the peoples of the world. So it’s only fair to say that half of the world should have a voice. The charter also say that men and women have equal rights.

So again, from the very beginning of the United Nations, there was a very forward-leaning approach to the role of women. And I have to add to that Latin America had a very important role in having those words included in the charter because there were very strong women from Latin America participating in the process. But then you also have the realities of the world today.

This is a world that has become hyper-militarized. It’s a world where the notion of dialogue, of reaching out, of bridging is being lost. Peace building and peacemaking seems to be the wrong thing to do or is a thing of the past. You see, members of the Security Council, permanent members of the Security Council, forgetting about the most basic rules set in the principles of the United Nations in the charter and nothing happens.

So my sense is that you need leadership there that approaches things from a different angle, from a different perspective. And women at large will bring a different perspective. This doesn’t say that having a woman there by miracle will solve all the issues. That’s not the case. But I think it’s a moment to provide an opportunity to having something new and different in the 21st century that will at least give the opportunity to the UN to connect itself again with the peoples of the world. And a woman will be that opportunity, in my opinion.

 

Nathalie Tocci

Yeah, I totally agree with you there. In fact, the system seems to be so, I wouldn’t say broken but very near breaking point, that we may as well try something different because very clearly, what has been done so far is not working.

Susana, I could ask you actually a rather different question. So you, Amanda and I come from three countries, Argentina, the United States and Italy, that are all led by far-right leaders. And in a sense, Milei, Trump, Giorgia Meloni, they have similarities. They seem to get on but they also have quite a lot of differences.

And in many respects, they – with all of this heterogeneity – seem to represent the sort of zeitgeist of the moment, the political moment internationally. But I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about how you see actually the evolution of the far right, whether it’s in your own country or globally and in fact, perhaps, as your country relates to the broader global situation because, of course, we could also mention many other countries, from Israel to India. So again, what are the similarities? Mainly, what are the differences? And how do you see right-wing populism evolving moving forward?

 

Susana Malcorra

Before I go to your question, let me add something to the first question. The one you spoke about the system being broken or near broken. And that’s correct. The risk we have now is to choose a woman to solve a problem that is almost unsurmountable. And, that’s often the case in the private sector. It’s often the case that you choose a female CEO when things are so broken. So we need to really say it clear. This is not something that is going to be solved by any single person. It requires the work of many. And that’s why I believe a woman is important because women tend to be good at building teams and reaching out to others. So just to close that loop on the first question.

 

Amanda Sloat

Can I just… Do you think the UN system is fixable? as Nathalie pointed out, we have a rising far right in a range of countries, the US current leadership is very skeptical of multilateralism. Russia’s been using its veto power and is involved in an unlawful war. China has growing influence. The Global South is demanding a greater role. It’s obviously a huge job for anybody coming in. So is that fixable? Especially in this context of the rising far right. As Nathalie said in a growing number of countries with illiberal perspectives.

 

Susana Malcorra

Well, first of all, the Secretary-General is not the president of the world. And we need to remember that what the Secretary-General has is a great convening power. And with that she can eventually bring these different perspectives to the table and try and find a new United Nations. Clearly, what we had before needs to be rethought. No question about it. But it’s not a design that can be done only from the 38th floor of the UN building where the Secretary-General resides. It has to be done with a much broader perspective. Many believe that this is a time of a multipolar multilateralism, which means having different groups that associate themselves around different issues. it might be for some, the case that 193 member states to agree on everything is almost impossible.

And this goes beyond the current situation with the Trump administration and others. So there are needs to fix the system to upgrade the system to something new and different. My question is and not only to the next Secretary-General, to the 193 leaders of the world, are we ready and willing to do something that is newer, fresher, that addresses the issues of the 21st century without having a major crisis, as we did in the past with the World War Two that generated the current UN model? And what will be needed for them to step up and work together with the new Secretary-General to get into this direction.

To me, that’s the big question. I think it’s something that the peoples of the world need. And this takes me to the other question that Nathalie just raised Amanda. And when we talk far right and why is it that the far right is taking so much space, I think the question is what has failed so far? Because you don’t get to this situation without the citizens feeling that something has failed dramatically.

And I think we need to recognize that democracy has not produced for the common citizen much of what the common citizen needs. And there’s a question there regarding the fact that democracy is not only having elections. That’s a necessary step but it’s not all. And this cycle of elections that in most cases are every two year election has brought the political system to a very short-term perspective, driven by elections.

And in my view, that has led to a situation where the long-term investments badly needed to transform the realities of the people have been lacking because they are not seen in the next cycle. And that is one of the reasons, in my view, why democracy is failing. It’s failing out of one of the conditions of democracy, which is sort of a continuous election cycle.

Then you have another element, which is the current reality of social media, that creates these echo chambers that have people talking among themselves because they think alike. That’s another element that it also has created something that is very important and it is the disintermediation between the political parties and the citizens on politics. It used to be the political parties were the translators of politics and policies to the citizens, both ways.

That has disappeared. And now we have a very, very flat approach where everybody knows everything and can intervene and say and provide answers, short answers, fast answers to needs. And they do that in echo chambers again. And that to me has been very well absorbed by the right. And the right has been able to make the case that they are the ones who have simple answers to complex questions. And people who feel that they are not listened to, that their questions are not addressed, that their issues are not solved, embrace that and embrace different models.

You said Nathalie, Italy, Argentina and the US have very different models and you could argue that some of them are even antagonistic between themselves but they are under the same umbrella of simple answers to complex problems. And that has been something that fascinated people because they wanted to try something different because what we have done so far and is a failure for the ones who believe in democracy, who believe in a different way of doing things. It has been a failure and we need to find ways to fix these shortcomings of the system.

 

Amanda Sloat

No, I think that’s absolutely right. I think for Nathalie and me, our very humble hope with this podcast is to make a small contribution by at least reminding people of the very positive role models we had of people in leadership. And frankly, for both of us to inspire young people to continue going into public service to address all of these problems that you’ve outlined.

One of the things I wanted to ask you about is, how you take something that is unexpected or may seem like a negative event in your life and turn it into something positive. I find with my students, they all think they need to have a life plan. They need to know what they are going to do next.

And when you and I first met a couple weeks ago, I was really struck by your personal story and was hoping you could share with us how you ended up leaving a very successful private sector career and actually getting involved in the government and public service yourself.

 

Susana Malcorra

Well, I always tell young people that having a plan for life is the wrong approach to life. Yeah. And this was true many years ago and is even more so the case now where, the fast pace of change means that we will have to reinvent ourselves many times in our life span. So just be there listening, understanding where reality is and where we stand before the reality and adapt and adjust. Learn. Be in a continuous learning path. To students, you never stop being a student, which is very positive because it’s energizing and be ready for change because change will go over you if you are not ready for it. And on my personal case, it’s not that I left the private sector and took a decision.

In fact, the private sector left me and it was what one could consider a failure in my life, in 2001 and many people might not know this but there was one of the many big crises in my country. And that crisis led to the company that I led as the CEO to go into chapter 11. Telecom Argentina is a listed company in New York, in Wall Street and I had the responsibility to go to New York, to London, to Tokyo and announce that we were going into chapter 11 because due to the 300% devaluation of the peso, our numbers didn’t work any longer as a company. So I did that. It was one of the most excruciating experiences in my life.

And six months later, interestingly enough, the board decided that they needed a different profile of a CEO, not somebody coming from operations like I was an engineer. They needed somebody from coming from finance to deal with the financial crash of the institution. It was dramatic for me. I had worked 10 years in the company. I had seen it grow, excel, do things that were magic.

And for reasons not associated to my doing, I was sacked. Today I look at what the board did and I understand it. At that point, it was personal. It was just it was a failure and just to add, Telecom Argentina was the third company in my country. So it was a big thing. You were not an unknown person.

You were a very central piece of the economy of Argentina. So when I left, the first thing I did is I took off. I went with my husband and my son and did some long vacations, which I hadn’t had for a long time. Then I took cooking lessons because I love to cook. So I took cooking lessons with an Italian chef that lives in Argentina.

He is great. I did things that I hadn’t done for many years and I just wanted to do it for myself. And shortly after that, some of the headhunters asked me what I wanted to do and I said, I want to go to an NGO. They thought, they really thought that I was sick, that something had to do with this change. And I wasn’t serious.

 

Amanda Sloat

Cooking and vacationing made you soft.

 

Susana Malcorra

Yeah. So I said, listen, I got to the highest point I can get in the private sector. I proved myself that I could do it. And now I feel that I need to do something for purpose, not only for business. And that’s why I think an NGO where I can bring the business experience, NGOs most of the time lack that discipline that businesses have. I could be of help. And then not long after that, one of them reached out and said, “Listen, there is one UN organization, World Food Program, based in Rome and they are looking for a Latin American woman for the position of deputy. Would you be interested?” I did not know what the World Food Program was.

I never thought that the UN could be an opportunity for me. So I went back home and looked into their website and I discovered an incredible institution, incredible institution. And I really went into their programs. I really did research and I said, “Why not?” And then I discovered first that the UN had these regional approaches. That’s why they were looking for somebody from Latin America. There was nobody in the leadership from Latin America. And they were starting to have this notion of more gender balance. That’s why they were taking the opportunity to bring a woman on board. But interestingly enough, the head hunters said, “You stand no chance.” I said, well, now that you have convinced me, you tell me I have no chance.

And they said yes because I presented myself Susana Malcorra, the government did not support me. I mean, it was a private presentation. And he said both Brazil and Mexico will be interested. So they will push for this position. And that was the case. Mexico was behind an excellent candidate who is now a close friend of mine. But I decided to go for it, to take the risk. And, in the end, what will happen if they asked me to go to Rome and have interviews? It would be perfect. visiting Rome was great. So it’s just there in being ready to change, being ready to accept the risk of being rejected. Those things are important and you find yourself discovering a new self, a new yourself when you take those steps.

I’m a different person today from what I was then because I went into the World Food Program and the rest came after. But I discovered a world that is not in the travel guides. I was a big traveler but I went to places that I did not know existed and I discovered there something that for me is significant: I discovered people just like me that had the same objectives of having their children educated, having their children fed, having their children safe. But they were in impossible situations and I was there to help them. So it’s really an opportunity that you must give yourself to reinvent who you are sometimes because you have no choice. And that was the case for me when I started this new venture. Sometimes by choice and giving yourself that choice is the highest level of freedom that you can have.

 

Nathalie Tocci

Susana what you’re saying resonates so so much. And I think it’s one of the themes that we’re trying to really bring out in this podcast. I mean, essentially what you’re saying is transform what happens to you as the best possible thing that could have happened to you. And you’re only able to do this if you remain open, if you embrace change and you embrace risk, in your case and that is the only way in which, in a sense, you sort of reacquire agency in all this process rather than having events fall upon you.

Just a sort of quick follow up on this. I mean, given that you were coming from the private sector into the public sector, what were the approaches, skills, attitudes that you brought with you from that previous experience into public service?

 

Susana Malcorra

Well, first of all, that was my only experience. So anything that I could offer in seeking solutions was from my private sector experience, what I did and what I advise people to do is never to say, “this is the way I did it, this is the way we did it”. You just need to listen to where the organization is, where the organization stands, where the noise comes from and then interpret that and add to that your own experience and do it in a way that is a win-win. You are never above anybody because it’s not true that the private sector is better than the public or the international sector. It’s not true. They are different. And there are aspects that can complement each other that make it better, make it more impactful, which in the end is what matters. I always remember there was somebody from the Financial Times that I don’t know why, covered that I was in the World Food Program and interviewed me.

And the question was, “How do you feel in this incredible bureaucracy of the United Nations?” By the way, the World Food Program is much less bureaucratic. And against what was the case in the private sector, where you could do things and you had the sense of achievement. And I said, well, I have much more sense of achievement today because the pressure I feel is the pressure of those people out there that if we don’t do what we have to do today, they will die.

They will not survive. So there is nothing compared to that. There is nothing like the quarterly results for the shareholders. Yeah, that’s very important. And that was the pressure I felt. But this pressure is much deeper and the commitment it requires is much higher. So it’s just being open to a new and different way of doing things and realizing that nobody has any magic wand to solve things. You just need to bring together those different ways of doing it and solving issues.

 

Amanda Sloat

I think your personal story on this is so important and one of the things I say to students is that people’s biographies are like their Instagram reels, right? Like, if you listen to me at the beginning of the podcast, I list everything you did. It looks like it’s success after success after success. But what is missing is these stories of failures that ended up causing this transition.

And before we move on, I want to push you on just one other thing, which is the personal and emotional effect of this. In Washington, DC, there’s thousands of federal employees who devoted their entire careers, decades to the State Department, to USAID and for no fault of their own, they have been very dramatically fired and are now facing a very difficult employment sector.

So beyond your vacation and your Italian cooking class, I want to push you just a little bit further on what was the emotional, the psychological process you had to go through to really grapple with the fact that after 25 years in a certain direction and a huge amount of success in this direction, you had to rethink everything. What advice do you have for people on the emotional processing of this kind of an experience?

 

Susana Malcorra

First of all, it was devastating. I mean, don’t let me underestimate the incredible, incredible sense of failure. And, people don’t like to speak about failures. I think you learn probably more from failures than from successes. But I lost everything I was, I lost the place I had been for 10 years. I lost my social group at work. I lost the objectives that I had established for myself and for the company. I lost, one could argue, I lost almost everything but I did not lose two things: my family, my closest support group and my friends. And it was very important to have that because when you have the sense that nothing is left there, you find that the most important things are there to help you transition to whatever comes next.

For me, that was fundamental. my partner, I wouldn’t be what I am without my partner. I can say that for sure. We have been together for 47 years so I cannot imagine the life I have and the life he has without each other. So that is significant. And the friends, the ones who see you beyond the perks of power. And this is the most fundamental thing, that understanding that one thing is what you are, who you are, another one is what you are because of the power you have in a certain place or in a certain position. And understanding that difference and betting on your own self is what is fundamental. Because if you strip yourself from those perks of power, you find a much more natural way to surf to the next phase, whatever that is.

And I think that’s what it was and I’m not saying it was easy. But looking backwards, I think I can even say that I felt that to go through that exercise, which was not initially by choice because that took me to where I am.

 

Nathalie Tocci

Let me jump onto something that we talked about earlier when talking about the UN but perhaps looking at it in a slightly broader way now. So you have founded an organization focused on women leadership. And in many respects, you yourself are a role model. We discussed what women leadership might entail in the context of the UN. But perhaps could you talk a little bit more generally about what is it about women leadership that can make a difference? Is this something that is exclusive to women or is it something that perhaps men can learn how to do as well? And I think it’s important, particularly on this podcast, to get into this question because we deliberately made a choice for this podcast to be not a woman-only podcast, a women-mainly podcast.

But, we will occasionally invite the odd man and it will actually be interesting to hear, for instance, also what a man may think about a question concerning women leadership. But given your role in the organization that you have founded, perhaps could you talk a little bit about that as well?

 

Susana Malcorra

First let me briefly describe the organization. Amanda did it at the beginning but Helen Clark, Irina Bokova and I founded GWL voices six years ago. And some people might not know this but the three of us competed to be Secretary General of the United Nations in 2016 and the three of us fell together with four other women.

So a couple of years after we ran into each other in New York and we said, listen, we should do something together. We should show that we as women are ready to compete. But after competing, we can work together, which to me is one of the attributes that women have. And, after conversations and thinking, we decided that there were two areas of interest that we had in common.

The multilateral world – it’s improvement, transformation, regeneration – but seen from the lens of women and women’s leadership and that’s what GWL voices is all about it. So that is to say where were we stemmed from the place where I am today, as president of GWL Voices. What is it that is unique to women? Well, first of all, not all women are feminist in their approach to life as not all men are anti-feminist in their approach to life.

So to answer your question, this is not an either or situation. There are important areas of overlap that one needs to consider. But it’s also true that we as women at large have a different life experience. Men and women are different and to me that’s fundamental. We are different for many reasons. We are different. And one of them and particularly for women, coming from my age, we were trained to be different. We were prepared to be very different. We were prepared to be at home and take care of certain things, which develops certain aspects of your thinking, of your brain, of your personality. I don’t know what it is. I’m not an expert on it. How much of this is biological and how much of this is educational, how much of this is psychological?

But it’s true that we excel naturally in different things, men and women and we complement each other. So my view is that women, largely are used to building teams. That’s the natural thing that our mothers did at home. just bringing the whole family together and influencing in manners that were significant. Many people will say, the one who ran things in the family was not my father it was my mother but the father was always the figure. So I think that element of influence, that element of listening, that element of listening but then deciding and deciding in the best interest of the whole. I think that’s something that women have to essentially have and I think it’s an element of significance in leadership; not being antagonistic just for the sake of it, being ready to antagonize if needed.

But first give it a try, talking, dialog. That’s another element that I think women have at large. So there are differences. There are different ways to approach things. There are complementarities. That’s why I also speak very much about leading teams because not only do you have to have men and women in your teams, you also have to have different skills that are brought by different people in your teams, that capacity to stick together, to bring that stickiness is something that I believe is essential in women.

And I think it’s very important and it’s very important in this moment where cacophony, where antagonism, where confrontation, where the denial of the other as a human being is so so clear. I think that’s why it is important to have more women.

 

Amanda Sloat

Can I be a little bit provocative? All of us have had experiences where sometimes, frankly, women aren’t so great to work with. And it could almost be easier to have a male boss than a female boss sometimes. Or you have women that have really had to struggle to get to where they are and tend to box other women out.

You had the happy experience of competing with other women and then ending up cooperating with them afterwards. And I think it was Madeleine Albright who said there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. So what are your thoughts on that aspect? How women should be working with other women, how we can mutually support other women. And frankly, what you do with women, especially in more senior roles that aren’t particularly cooperative in that way.

 

Susana Malcorra

Well, first of all, one needs to recognize that is often the case that women get to leadership positions by competing with men. And in doing so, often they adopt male approaches to their competition because they often feel that only by copying the male way of doing things, they stand a chance. I think that’s wrong. I think that’s totally wrong.

I think that precisely making a difference and bringing in new ways of doing things is what will make an impact and will really give more opportunities to women than men. But is true that’s why I started by saying not all women are feminist. It is the case that many women are not helpful to other women and adopt the same power structures that men have.

Well, we need to fight against that. We need to say to those women, that’s not what we should be doing. That’s why we also need to emphasize that we need all types of perspectives. We need all types of men and women involved in seeking solutions to the huge problems that we all face at different levels in the world. But it’s also true that at least we need to give a chance for women to be in enough level of representation at leadership positions. Some say that less than 30%, you just don’t make a difference because you don’t have a support structure among yourself that helps you. So that’s what is needed.

 

Nathalie Tocci

And then Susana, may I ask you, you’ve kind of talked about this throughout but you have worked in a university, Amanda and I have just started off as professor of practice at IE and SAIS. As hopefully many young people, many students possibly will be listening to our conversation, what is the one piece of advice?

You’ve kind of scattered pieces of advice throughout but what’s the one piece of advice that you’d like to leave our listeners, that are indeed thinking about but perhaps have not quite made up their mind as to what they want to do next.

 

Susana Malcorra

Well, for me, the piece of advice is be yourself. I find too often people trying to imitate, to copy others. That’s why you just need to build on who you are because that is the only way to make a difference. The second piece of advice together with that: play to your strengths, not to your weakness.

I find we all have strengths and weaknesses. We all are better on certain things and worse in others. I find very often that people, particularly young people, try to focus too much on their weak side. I’m not saying that you should not be aware of it. Of course you should be aware of it. But the investment, the work that is required for you to really change something that doesn’t play to your strength, does not compensate with being very good at what you are good at.

But just be mindful and manage that. Manage that balance and through the management of that balance, find people that compliment you, that bring that what you are not good at, your weak side and work together with that person. Build with that person. So it is very self-centered advice but it’s the advice that I can give that is within the realm of things that you can do really.

 

Amanda Sloat

I love that, I love that and good advice for all of us, even the no -onger students, to follow. So Susana, we like to end our podcast on a positive note and give people some hope in these dark times, although you have been incredibly positive in everything that you have set out. So my last question for you is: what brought you joy this week?

 

Susana Malcorra

Well, before I answer the question, let me say something. Being optimistic is not being naive. I am very conscious of the challenges that the world faces today, that people face today, that the students that are listening to us face today. It’s just how we approach the solution of those challenges. Through the glass half empty or through the glass half full.

I tend to do it through the glass half full but recognizing the emptiness that is there. So that’s another thing to mention.

 

Amanda Sloat

Another good piece of advice you squeezed in at the last moment.

 

Susana Malcorra

What brought me joy? I just joined a group of UN staff that has decided to come together for Gaza and they asked me to advise them. I have become an advisor to them. That would be joy because it’s showing that at the heart of the UN, there are these people who really believe in the principles and the values of the charter, who are ready to stand up and say things that can be uncomfortable and that can eventually bring some risk to them if they go too far but just stick their neck out for those in need.

And of course, the situation in Gaza clearly is an example of that. When they reached out, I thought, is this something I should be doing now? I have many things in my portfolio and I said, no doubt I should be doing this because of the people in Gaza because of the 360 UN staff who have died in Gaza and are not recognized and because of the ones who want to fight for it. So that’s brought me joy.

 

Nathalie Tocci

Wonderful Susana, I think that last bit, which is really a message about courage and courage to stick your neck out for the right thing is a wonderful way to end this conversation. This has been, I think, absolutely delightful, certainly for Amanda and I and hopefully for everyone that will be listening to us.

Susana, thank you so much for being on the show with us. And I very much hope that in different shapes and forms we will continue this conversation.

 

Susana Malcorra

Thank you. I’m sure we will. And I wish you all the best with this journey that you have started.

 

Amanda Sloat

Thank you so much.

 

Susana Malcorra

Thank you.