There are lots of smart people here—and some not so smart—we are not using our brain power enough as it is. … The Secretariat is a neutral party; it represents the WTO, not governments. Why can’t I have ideas? What a loss of capacity! —WTO Secretariat staff member (interview with author, 2006) From the outside of an organization, ofice secretaries are nearly invisi- ble. Simply doing the bidding of their bosses, they take instructions, write up memos, and make appointments for a controlling principal. They have no obvious source of power and are on the receiving end of authority. They appear to play, in other words, a derivative or secondary role. To understand how decision making unfolds within a professional ofice, many would simply bypass the secretary and go straight to the source of command. Viewed from the inside, however, this is nonsense. Anyone who has ever worked in a professional ofice knows that a good secre- tary does much more than is captured within the four corners of his job description. More than anyone else in the ofice, a good secretary often has the ear and trust of his boss. He likely ilters information, controls who talks with whom, and acts as a repository for institutional memory. These things impact ofice outcomes and have a substantive effect on the success of the organization. A good secretary is a far cry from the coffee- making, nail-iling stereotype of the 1950s. Secretariats—the administrative arms of international treaties—suffer from similar analytical neglect. On paper, secretariats, like office secre- taries, simply do the bidding of states. Their leaders are appointed by the member states to international treaties; they take instruction from these member states and depend on them for financing. This derivative status of secretariats is the reason international relations (IR) scholarship gives them such short shrift. 1 Indeed, most treatment of secretariats in the IR literature has been from the outside and merely reflects what secretariats 1 Introduction: Secretariats as Overlap Managers