Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings

Jared Diamond, a scientist and author known for works such as Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, examines a question that has long divided historians: do individual leaders shape events, or are they carried along by circumstances beyond their control? Rather than accepting either extreme, Diamond stakes out a middle position, reframing the question from "Do leaders make a difference?" to "Under what circumstances is a leader most likely to make a difference?" He pursues this inquiry across four spheres: political history, business, sports, and religion. He introduces two methodological approaches: the traditional biographical method, which argues for a leader's uniqueness by surveying their qualities and dismissing alternatives, and the method of natural experiments, which draws statistical conclusions from naturally occurring events such as leaders' deaths, firings, or hospitalizations.

Diamond opens with Adolf Hitler's near-fatal 1930 car accident to illustrate the stakes of the debate: Would World War Two and the Holocaust have occurred without Hitler? He introduces the "Hamlet test": just as one can assess Shakespeare's uniqueness by examining his Elizabethan rivals' plays and finding none that approach Hamlet, one can sometimes confirm a leader's uniqueness by identifying and dismissing a small pool of realistic alternatives. He also introduces the theme of timing: the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan's empire depended not only on his military genius but on his birth coinciding with the wettest period on the Mongolian steppe in recent history, which supported more horses, food, and population growth.

The book's first extended case study is Botswana's founding president, Seretse Khama. When Botswana gained independence in 1966, it was the world's third poorest country: arid, landlocked, with only seven miles of paved road and 22 university graduates. Khama was one of those graduates, the hereditary chief of the Bangwato (Botswana's largest tribe), and had studied at Oxford and married a white British woman, giving him credibility across racial and cultural divides. When enormous diamond reserves were discovered on Bangwato land in 1967, Khama assigned his tribe's mineral rights to the national government, a step only he could take without provoking civil war. He devoted diamond revenues to long-term investment, stripped traditional chiefs of real political power, retained experienced colonial civil servants while building educational institutions, and cautiously supported neighboring Black independence movements without provoking invasion by apartheid South Africa. Diamond argues that Khama passes the Hamlet test: no one else in Botswana combined his tribal authority, international experience, and political skill.

Diamond's second case study is Rachel Carson, who never held political office but whose 1962 book Silent Spring founded the modern American environmental movement. Carson initially studied English in college before switching to zoology and developing a distinctive poetic writing style through years of writing about marine biology for the public at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Her earlier book The Sea Around Us had held the number-one position on the New York Times best-seller list for 39 weeks. Silent Spring documented the toxic effects of DDT and other pesticides, provoking fierce industry attacks but also prompting President Kennedy to order a review of pesticide use, Senate hearings, and the eventual founding of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Diamond argues Carson was uniquely qualified by her combination of scientific expertise, literary skill, and freedom from the academic taboo against writing for the public. Without Carson, the environmental movement would still have grown, but more slowly and weakly.

Diamond then surveys 22 well-known modern political leaders and illustrates the biographical method's weakness through Harry Truman, whose undistinguished early life gave no hint of his later presidential effectiveness, and Hitler, who showed no sign of his subsequent abilities before age 30. If biographers cannot predict such leaders from their early lives, Diamond argues, claims about a leader's irreplaceability are fundamentally weakened, motivating his turn to natural experiments.

Diamond explains natural experiments through economists David Card and Alan Krueger's landmark study of New Jersey's 1992 minimum wage increase, which found that higher wages increased rather than decreased fast-food employment, and economists Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel's study of United Nations (UN) diplomats' parking violations, which measured corruption through diplomats' behavior when facing no enforcement. He then applies natural experiments to political leadership. Studies of European monarchs show that rulers with higher degrees of inbreeding, used as a proxy for lower cognitive ability, presided over less territorial expansion, especially in states with absolute power. Studies of leaders who died in office show that leaders' deaths produced much higher variation in economic outcomes than periods of continuity, confirming that leaders do affect economies. Deaths of autocratic leaders produced larger effects than deaths of democratic leaders. A ranking of 646 national leaders from 1951 to 2014 placed Seretse Khama first worldwide for positive economic growth.

Turning to business, Diamond argues that Lynda and Stewart Resnick, who founded the American pomegranate juice industry, pass the Hamlet test because the industry required prerequisites only they possessed: ownership of over half of US pomegranate production, personal wealth unconstrained by shareholders, exceptional marketing skills, and the determination to sustain 14 years of losses through legal battles, including Supreme Court victories. By contrast, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk do not pass the Hamlet test, since their industries would have emerged without them. Yet each leader's distinctive choices shaped their industry's particular form. Natural experiments using Denmark's national databases show that a CEO's death decreased company profits by 13% on average, while statistical analyses find that CEOs account for roughly 6 to 29% of variation in earnings, with the greatest impact in high-discretion industries like computers and entertainment.

Diamond examines sports coaching, arguing it offers superior conditions for studying leadership because outcomes are precisely and frequently measured. He profiles UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, whose teams won 10 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships, including seven consecutive. Diamond attributes Wooden's success to meticulous practices, strategic innovation, and a philosophy of basketball as a model for life expressed in his Pyramid of Success, a personal framework of values including cooperation, honesty, and self-discipline. Statistical analyses show that coaches account for only about 21 to 31% of variation in team success, and firing a losing coach usually does not produce lasting improvement because apparent gains reflect regression to the mean, the statistical tendency for an extreme result to be followed by a less extreme one, rather than the new coach's superiority.

Diamond's final analytical section examines religious leadership through three American religions: Mormonism, founded by Joseph Smith and organized by Brigham Young; the Shakers, founded by Ann Lee, whose celibate communities were reduced to two members at the time of the book's writing; and Jim Jones's Peoples Temple, which began as a progressive, racially integrated church but descended into the 1978 mass killing of 918 people at Jonestown, Guyana. Diamond also examines religions that failed to spread, including that of the Mahdi, a Sudanese messianic leader whose successor was crushed by British forces. He then traces how Christianity grew from a tiny Jewish sect into the Roman Empire's official religion, identifying key advantages: the Apostle Paul's decision to open Christianity to non-Jews, Christians' care for the sick during plagues, and early Christianity's prohibition of abortion and infanticide. Emperor Constantine advanced Christianity in the fourth century AD, and it became the Empire's state religion by century's end.

In the Epilogue, Diamond synthesizes his conclusions. The central factor determining whether a leader makes a difference is discretion: the freedom to choose between different courses of action. Timing is equally critical. Charisma is only one of many paths to successful leadership; others include persuasion, attention to detail, courage, and tenacity. Diamond proposes four spheres for future study through natural experiments: military history, protest movements, arts and music, and the history of science. He illustrates the last with Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Alfred Wegener, each of whom shaped their field distinctively even though the broad ideas they championed would eventually have emerged without them.