A conversation with historian and author Jared Diamond on reframing how we think about influential leaders.
How much does a leader actually matter to an organization’s success? We tend to credit CEOs, founders, and other powerful figures with shaping the institutions they lead, but historian Jared Diamond argues that we often underestimate the role of timing, circumstance, industry, and plain luck. Diamond explains his “Hamlet test,” which asks whether someone else could have achieved the same outcome or whether the leader was uniquely qualified to do it, and how it applies to many business leaders. He also explains why some leaders are able to seize a fleeting moment of opportunity, why founders can have an outsized influence on institutions, and why boards may overestimate the impact of replacing a struggling CEO. Diamond is author of Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?
ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ADI IGNATIUS: So Alison, today we’re going to be tackling an age-old question. Are successful leaders people who are uniquely qualified to handle their opportunity or do the context and circumstances they’re in largely dictate how they’ll perform? We’re essentially renewing the great man theory versus the idea that history rises from below.
ALISON BEARD: Yes. Great men or great woman. I do like that topic, especially in an era when boards are rewarding CEOs with astronomically large contracts. With astronomically large contracts, you can’t help but wonder whether these leaders really have the differentiated talent to justify that kind of money.
ADI IGNATIUS: And while the debate is in many ways unanswerable, Jared Diamond has tried to apply the rigor of research to look at the extent to which an individual leader can truly and deeply influence their institution’s success, and even has advice for leaders who want to increase their chances of doing well.
ALISON BEARD: I imagine it has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time.
ADI IGNATIUS: Absolutely. Look, it’s an interesting topic. Diamond is perhaps best known for his 1997 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. And his new book on leadership is called Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter. He spoke with me about the secret sauce that makes political, business and sports leaders succeed, and what can and can’t be attributed to the individuals in charge. Here’s our conversation.
So in this new book of yours, you’ve reopened the debate about how critical individual leaders are in the unfolding of events. So there’s the great man theory of history where we credit individual leaders in business, in politics, in religion, in sports for uniquely affecting historical developments. And then there’s an opposing view, which is that leaders are constrained by the context and the circumstances they’re in and have little influence on events. My first question is, why dig that up again?
JARED DIAMOND: Because the debate still remains unresolved. The traditional way in which historians and biographers have tried to settle the role of the leaders is by writing biographies. But biographies don’t settle things. So I reopened, quotes, the debate, because there are now two new powerful methods, methods of natural experiments that social scientists have pioneered for the vast few decades, and then a method that I introduced called the Hamlet Test.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so let’s talk about the Hamlet Test. So as I understand it, if you’re going to assess a leader’s greatness, you need to identify, you need to evaluate all the plausible alternatives.
JARED DIAMOND: I call it the Hamlet Test because you can ask, was Shakespeare the only person who could have written that great play, Hamlet? Well, in that case, we know who were all the other Elizabethan playwrights at the time. There are about 25 of them. We’ve got their plays, we can judge their plays. Some of them are slightly good, but none of them remotely approach Hamlet. And in addition, Hamlet was Shakespeare’s 22nd play. He had already written Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. He had established himself as a good player.
In the case of say, Jeff Bezos, was Jeff Bezos uniquely qualified to found Amazon? Well, the population of the United States is about 340 million and it’s impossible to make an argument that out of those 340 million, the only one who could found Amazon was Jeff Bezos. So Shakespeare passes the Hamlet Test, but Jeff Bezos does not pass the Hamlet Test.
But in other cases, you can identify a uniquely qualified person. The founding president of Botswana, Seretse Khama, was uniquely qualified because upon independence, Botswana had only 22 university graduates and Seretse Khama was the chief of the largest tribe, the one on whose land, diamonds were found.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so in the business world, who does pass the Hamlet?
