In June 2018 I was awoken at my home in Norway long after midnight by a call from a top official at United Nations headquarters, in New York. The Mexican ambassador to the UN had submitted a formal complaint about the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), the organization I lead, alleging that UNOPS had officially sided with the opposition candidate in Mexico’s upcoming presidential election. The complaint was ridiculous: All we’d done was say yes to the candidate when he asked if we would assist him with an anti-corruption campaign if he was elected. Nonetheless, the formal complaint created a press frenzy in Mexico. We had two options: apologize profusely, or declare we’d done nothing wrong. It was a sensitive decision, because our reputation was at risk, especially if the opposition candidate lost. We decided to stand firm. The UN secretary-general issued a statement reaffirming the UN’s impartiality. A month later the opposition candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was elected president—and soon after his inauguration he asked UNOPS to help sell Mexico’s presidential airplane, to set an example of government frugality.
The Executive Director of a UN Agency on Running It Like a Business
When the author became executive director of the United Nations Office for Project Services, in 2014, she faced a big challenge: moving the operational arm of the UN further along on the path toward behaving like a for-profit business—a journey begun by her predecessor eight years earlier. Faremo has accomplished this by creating a culture of discipline and a measured approach to risk-taking.
Her experience includes a decade of development work, five years as Microsoft’s director of legal and corporate affairs in Western Europe, and 10 years in the Norwegian government, during which she led four ministries. These roles helped prepare her for the daunting task of revamping how UNOPS prices jobs, increasing the percentage of business that comes from non-UN sources, and, recently, partnering with the private sector in a wind farm in Mexico—a move beyond simply performing services to investing assets in socially beneficial ways.
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