It’s difficult to imagine that Kofi Annan, SFMBA ’72, former Secretary-General of the United Nations and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, once suffered from “imposter syndrome,” but in 1971, as a new MIT Sloan Fellow, he was plagued with doubt. It was a luminous fall day, and as he walked along the Charles River, he wondered whether he really fit into the audacious group of global leaders who were his classmates.
Annan says that suddenly, looking out across the sailboats to Boston, the answer came to him: “Follow your inner compass…know who you are, what you stand for, where you want to go, and why you want to get there.” His anxieties, he remembers, immediately began to fade. In fact, as a result of that walk by the river, Annan says he took away “the intellectual confidence to help me locate my bearings in new situations, to view any challenge as an opportunity for renewal and growth, and to be comfortable in seeking the help of colleagues, but not fearing to do things my way.”
Annan, who passed away last month at the age of 80, took those tools and built a global infrastructure dedicated to peace during his years at the United Nations and later, with the Kofi Annan Foundation. Born in Ghana, he joined the UN system in 1962 as an administrative and budget officer with the World Health Organization in Geneva. He served at posts in Ethiopia, Egypt, and in the former Yugoslavia, and headed the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. There he ushered in unprecedented growth in the UN’s global presence and oversaw the response to the Rwandan genocide. Annan rose to Secretary-General of the UN in 1997.
An international organization is an experiment
As Secretary-General, Annan undertook reform of the United Nations, advocated for human rights, the rule of law, economic development, and mobilized global action to fight AIDS. He also fought vehemently with the U.S. government to forestall the war in Iraq in 2003, later confiding to Time magazine that his inability to prevent that invasion was “his darkest moment.”
In an extensive eulogy in Forbes, Georg Kell, founder and former Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact, said Annan was the “conscience of humanity, endowed with the ability to inspire millions of people across cultures, religions, and nations to support the good causes of the United Nations—peace, human rights, and sustainable development…. As last great reformer of the United Nations, he managed to modernize its bureaucracy in critical areas such as women empowerment and global health.”
MIT and the United Nations, Annan once said, have more in common than might be at first obvious. “An international organization,” he said, “is an experiment…an experiment in human cooperation on a planetary scale. International organizations must be closely tuned to their environments, quickly correct their mistakes, build cumulatively on their achievements, and continually generate new modalities as previous ways of doing things become outdated. As a Sloan Fellow, I learned management skills that I could draw on in refashioning the United Nations for the new century.”
Read more about Kofi Annan in MIT News.
Watch Kofi Annan’s keynote address at MIT Sloan in October 2002.