Why Jared Diamond’s leadership book on prophets, coaches and kings is flawed but fun

Jared Diamond is back. Since Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse were published a generation ago, Diamond has been synonymous with sweeping explanations for complex historical problems. His latest book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter? tackles another ambitious question: when do leaders make a difference? Diamond assembles examples from politics, business, sport and religion. The result is an accessible, highly readable book. Review: Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter? – Jared Diamond (Penguin Books) The book is strongest when it explores leadership as a relationship between individuals and circumstances. Diamond avoids the extremes of either “great man” theory (about history being shaped by exceptional individuals) or structural determinism (all about systems, with individual talent or effort playing a lesser role). Instead, he argues a middle position: leaders do matter, but only under particular conditions. Another key attraction in this book is its range. Beyond obvious figures, such as British wartime leader Winston Churchill, Diamond introduces readers to an eclectic cast of world leaders. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s ability to weave different examples into a compelling narrative remains one of his greatest strengths. Historians like me may have some quibbles with Diamond’s approach. But this book is not written for them. Instead, it’s designed to encourage further exploration about history and society – and on that front, it succeeds. The problem with Diamond’s ‘Hamlet test’ Diamond’s central device is what he calls the “Hamlet test”. Would the same outcome have occurred if a particular leader had never existed? Or, could anyone else in Elizabethan England have written Hamlet? This is a form of counterfactual history: asking what might have happened under different circumstances. Counterfactual history isn’t new. Historians have debated its usefulness for decades, with most very cautious of this approach. While a conventional history can be checked against the evidence, counterfactual histories are impossible to verify. They can be entertaining thought experiments, but historical circumstances contain far too many dependencies to predict the outcome with any real meaning. The book’s second major weakness is its choice of case studies. Although Diamond successfully highlights several neglected figures, those selected are almost always interesting or unusual. This makes for engaging reading – but it also introduces sample bias. If we only study exceptional leaders, we should hardly be surprised when they appear to have influenced history. Everyday, mediocre and unremarkable leaders can often tell us most about whether (and when) leadership actually matters. Who counts as a leader? Diamond’s comparison across politics, religion, business and sport initially seem refreshingly interdisciplinary. However, the book largely treats leadership as a single phenomenon, rather than an industry-specific occupation. The skills required to manage a multinational corporation differ from those needed to lead a religious movement, govern a nation state, or coach a winning basketball team. Leaders emerge through industry pipelines, succeed according to different criteria and face different constraints. A religious leader is typically a member of their faith. A chief executive usually spends decades developing industry expertise. A coach usually played their sport. Success for each is measured in a different way. This becomes important when Diamond draws on “natural experiments” – studies where two groups are exposed to experimental and control conditions by external factors – to supplement his counterfactual biographies. Natural experiments are extremely useful when a clearly defined intervention affects one group, but not another. While the studies drawn on by Diamond meet these criteria, their findings are less convincing when applied to the general question of: “do leaders matter?”. Diamond’s central concept of “making a difference” is vague. His book is an assemblage of circumstances in which leaders are seen to matter if they had an outcome – any outcome – on the course of history. Moving from the impact of a distracted CEO on earnings, to an inbred monarch on territory expansion, to the chances of winning the big game after firing your basketball coach, requires comparability that the book never really establishes. The missing gender story This book pays remarkably little attention to gender. By studying leadership domains historically dominated by men – “prophets, coaches and kings” – Diamond inevitably presents men as default leaders. Some women do appear, including former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and American conservationist Rachel Carson, who wrote the influential book Silent Spring. But they do so as exceptional participants, not natural occupants of leadership. Botswana’s founding president, Sir Seretse Khama. Evening Standard/Getty Images Botswana’s founding president Seretse Khama’s story, while captivating, illustrates this problem. As a man, Khama inherited the throne of his clan. During his presidency, from 1966 to 1980, the discovery of diamonds on his clan’s land helped fund Botswana’s national development, rather than let the country descend into civil war. Yet his impact on Botswana cannot be separated from the gendered institutions that gave him access to power. More broadly, many leadership characteristics Diamond identifies are implicitly gendered. For instance, Diamond argues “charisma”, or the ability to command others, is necessary for impact. Men and women are socialised to behave differently – and often evaluated according to their gender. A man who displays “charisma” may be considered a “strong” leader. A woman who does the same can be regarded as “bossy”. The question of when leaders matter is therefore impossible to separate from questions of who gets to be a leader in the first place. Provocative and hard to put down Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings is unlikely to settle scholarly debates about leadership. Yet Diamond’s greatest strengths are in tackling an enormous question, assembling evidence from a variety of fields, and offering an elegant and accessible explanation. Like Guns, Germs and Steel, this book is ambitious, provocative and flawed. It’s also difficult to put down.