The quality of executive leadership may prove to be the most critical single determinant of the growth in scope and authority of international organization. Now sufficiently long and varied to allow a comparative approach, the history of international organization may provide elements for a theory of leadership. This essay is but a preliminary effort in that direction. It is concerned not only with how the executive head protects and develops his position as top man but also with how, by doing so, he may be the creator of a new (if yet slender) world power base.

The origin of the comparative study of executive heads of international organizations was the observation that Albert Thomas was a very different kind of man from Sir Eric Drummond and had very different ideas about how to carry out his job. From this observation stemmed a number of speculations. The failure of the League of Nations in the late thirties was contrasted with the apparent success of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Would the story have been different had a Thomas been secretary-general of the League? Or would – as seems to have been Sir Eric Drummond's view – the nature of the job have led a Thomas to fail in the League? Whatever disagreement surrounds this speculation there is a greater measure of agreement that with the Drummond approach the ILO would have become nothing more than a technical information bureau.