From Diplomacy to Business: Know Who Sits Across the Table
By Salvator Mundi Times
Salvator Mundi Café No. 7, Sunday 4 October 2026
Speaker: Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo, Chairman, SMG Global Council for Democracy and Governance
Forty years a diplomat. Chairman of Italy’s largest aerospace and defence group. Now the founder of two young companies building light helicopters and drones. At the seventh Salvator Mundi Café, Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo explained what travels from one world to the other, and what does not.
His message was simple and demanding at once: whatever the room, whatever the stakes, everything begins with understanding the person in front of you.
A Life Lived Abroad
Diplomacy was not a career choice for Ambassador Pontecorvo so much as a birthright. The son of a diplomat, he was born in Bangkok and grew up in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka before returning to Italy at thirteen.
He went on to serve at NATO, in the European Union and in Moscow, worked as a Russian interpreter, served as Italy’s Ambassador to Pakistan and later as NATO’s Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan.
After diplomacy came his “second life” as Chairman of Leonardo, a period in which, by his own account, the group’s revenues grew from around 14.5 billion to nearly 20 billion. He was quick to share the credit with his CEO and with a rising tide of defence spending.
Earlier this year he left Leonardo and took stakes in a drone company and a light helicopter company. “From businessman,” he said, “I turned entrepreneur.”
The Person Behind the Flag
The thread running through all three lives is one lesson. Lord Palmerston said that countries
have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Yet behind every country and every company, the Ambassador reminded us, there is always a person.
“Understanding the culture, the motivation, and researching the background of the person you are talking to is paramount,” he said. He recalled Giulio Andreotti, six times Prime Minister of Italy, who liked to say that your greatest ally is your interlocutor’s vanity.
The cost of ignoring this lesson can be tragic. Ambassador Pontecorvo took part in the Doha process with the Taliban, led on the American side by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. Too many Western negotiators, he said, read what the Taliban said through their own culture rather than through Afghan eyes. The end result was the withdrawal from Kabul and the spiral that followed.
“If a business folds, it is a problem. If a country falls, it is a tragedy.”
Three Schools of Diplomacy
Asked what prepared him for business, he described the three faces of a diplomatic career:
the consul who looks after citizens, the bilateral diplomat who manages relations between two countries, and the multilateral diplomat who sits at a table of many partners and must build consensus.
It is the multilateral table, he argued, that comes closest to business. His example was an EU working group on lawnmower noise emissions. It sounds trivial, but the wording of that regulation protected a market in which Italian manufacturers held a commanding share.
By building alliances with other member states, Italy kept the rule as it was. “That is classical negotiation,” he said. “If you support me here, I will support you on the next dossier.”
Responsibility You Can Measure
Here the two worlds part ways. A diplomat’s work is measured in years, even decades, and much of it can never truly be measured at all. Business has a balance sheet at the end of every year.
“The tempo of international relations is measured in decades. The tempo of business is week by week.”
The weight is different too. An ambassador is taken at face value, because he speaks for his country. An entrepreneur has to prove himself every single day. With around sixty people now working in his companies, he feels a responsibility he never felt in government: “If I make the wrong decisions, those people are without a job and without a livelihood.”
What helped him most, he added, was not leadership courses but knowledge of the world. Engineers can build superb helicopters and still have little sense of the environment they will be sold into. International exposure fills that gap.
Politics Is Noble, Politicians Less So
Responding to SMG Founder and President Mario Diel on trust and the place of entrepreneurs in society, the Ambassador drew a sharp line: “Politics is the most noble occupation you can have. Politics is noble. Politicians are not.”
He has turned down offers to stand for Parliament, and he is surprised that entrepreneurs, who generate the overwhelming share of every economy, still fail to make their voice heard. Too many large companies, he argued, look after their own interests instead of the health of their whole industry, like a football club that wins in Europe with foreign stars while the national team fails to qualify for the World Cup.
Michal Zeevi-Bender asked whether business can ever truly be separated from the state, as she prepares a regional business conference in Aqaba. His answer: most of the economy already is. “I started my operations in May. I am already selling in six countries,” he said. Government, in his view, should be the administrator of the building. It creates the framework. It does not tell you what to do.
The Best Negotiators, and the Limits of Exporting Democracy
On cultural awareness, raised by Ali Safa, he offered a candid ranking. The best negotiators he has met are Turks, then the Chinese, then Iranians and Syrians.
He also challenged a Western habit of mind: “We are going to export democracy. Have you ever heard that phrase from anybody who is not Western?” Afghanistan, he noted, had its loya jirgas centuries ago. The real question is always: which democracy, and whose?
Technology, Power and the Next Generation
SMG Chief Strategy Officer Ferda Kert asked whether power is shifting from states to
technology companies. The Ambassador’s answer was unambiguous: it already has, in part, and the shift will accelerate as artificial intelligence moves from an enabling technology to a foundational one. “Those who own the data will be the ones in power.” The one exception, he argued, is China, where the state keeps control of its technology champions.
Asked by SMG CEO Björn Söderberg how to pass experience on to the next generation, he said example comes first, followed by a serious study of today’s structures of power and the hard work of making democracy truly function.
To young Italian entrepreneur Davide Legnani, who asked how to really know a counterpart, he gave practical advice: read history, but read the literature even more. “I understood a lot more about Pakistan from good Pakistani authors than from its history books.” Above all, cultivate the will to understand the other side. “It is not rocket science. It is a question of will.”
Answering Helen Hannick on why so few women hold senior diplomatic posts, he said the reason is simply how society is still geared, and that a functioning state, one that supports families and working parents, is part of the answer.
A Lesson for Every Table
Sunday’s Café brought together members and friends from across the SMG family, including Mario Diel, Björn Söderberg, Ali Safa, Ferda Kert, Michal Zeevi-Bender, Prof. Mirsad Hadžikadić, Helen Hannick and two young guests from Italy, Davide Legnani and Luca Girardi, who joined because of the Ambassador’s talk.
The lesson travels well beyond diplomacy. Whether you are raising capital, closing a deal or negotiating peace, you are never talking to a flag or a logo. You are talking to a person. Know who they are, where they come from, and how far they can go. Everything else follows.
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About the Speaker
Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo
Chairman, Global Council for Democracy and Governance, Salvator Mundi Global
Former Italian Ambassador to Pakistan, former NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan and former Chairman of Leonardo. Today an entrepreneur in light helicopters and drones.
About the Author
Shlomi Selim “Sally” Benbasat
Editor in Chief, Salvator Mundi Times
Serial entrepreneur and investor in B2B e-commerce, carbon markets and emissions reduction, chemicals and raw materials trading, EPC, technology, telecommunications, digital media and real estate, with ventures built and exited across Europe, LATAM, the Middle East and Asia.
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