The call for ethical leadership in international organizations is intuitively persuasive. We need – or at least, we want – leaders to ‘model’ ethical values: to profess them and, ideally, to be guided by them. This is not simply an issue of public perception about international organizations. In numerous conversations over many years with individuals who worked professionally in the vast system of organizations that comprise ‘international Geneva’ – including senior civil servants in the United Nations (UN) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) systems, civil society activists, members of diplomatic delegations and young interns to all of these positions – I found that many were emphatic that good leaders made an enormous difference. This may be particularly important for the staff of international organizations: many of them come to these organizations with a deep sense of idealism and a desire to ‘make the world a better place’ and they believe that such leaders need to set an example.