For too long, leadership has been researched and written about without taking account of context and societal culture. This article takes as its context under researched multi-ethnic urban schools, and looks at leadership--specifically five successful head teacher case studies--of these schools. The research project that it reports was carried out for the National College for School Leadership in the United Kingdom, but the implications from the study cross national boundaries. The findings confirm the centrality of passionate promulgation of values-driven leadership as the hallmark of successful leaders of these schools. Realising that global events and hostilities now for the first time penetrate inside schools to effect their micro-management, the study suggests that notions of head teacher as leader of local learning communities are now obsolete and need replacing with leaders as connected to communities at local, national and global levels. However, the project raised more questions than it answered: we still need to know how leaders conceptualise values such as social justice, inclusion, and equity, and how they put them into practice.