Are Great Leaders Truly Great—or Just Lucky?

**Allison Beard** (0:01)
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Visit snhu.edu/idea.

**Adi Ignatius** (0:32)
I'm Adi Ignatius.

**Allison Beard** (0:33)
I'm Allison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

**Adi Ignatius** (0:44)
Allison, 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.

**Allison Beard** (1:03)
Yes, great men are great women. I do like that topic, especially in an era when boards are rewarding CEOs with astronomically large contracts. You can't help but wonder whether these leaders actually are bringing differentiated talent that's worth that kind of money.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:19)
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 he even has advice for leaders who want to increase their chances of doing well.

**Allison Beard** (1:35)
I imagine it has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:39)
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, 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 events, right? 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** (2:37)
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 to the debate because there are now two new powerful methods, methods of natural experiments that social scientists have pioneered for a vast few decades, and then a method that I introduced called the Hamlet test.

**Adi Ignatius** (3:06)
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** (3:16)
I call it the Hamlet test because you could ask, was Shakespeare the only person who could have written that great play, Amlet? Well, in that case, we know who were all the other Elizabethan playwrights at the time. There are about 25 of them. We got their plays, we could judge their plays. Some of them are slightly good, but none of them remotely approach Hamlet. 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 task, but Jeff Bezos does not pass the Hamlet task. But in other cases, you can identify a uniquely qualifying person. The founding president of Botswana, Soretzi Kama, was uniquely qualified because upon independence, Botswana had only 22 university graduates, and Soretzi Kama was the chief of the largest tribe, one on whose land diamonds were found.

**Adi Ignatius** (4:29)
All right. So in the business world, who does pass the Hamlet test?

**Jared Diamond** (4:33)
Few people pass the Hamlet test in the business world. One of the few is the founder of the pomegranate juice industry in the United States and the world. Until 2002, pomegranates have been domesticated for 4,000 years. And in some Middle Eastern supermarkets, the markets, you can get someone to squeeze one glass of juice. But there was no industrial production of pomegranate juice because pomegranate juice comes in this hard object, which is very difficult to squeeze. As of 2002, there were 22 people in the United States who grew pomegranates, and 21 of them didn't have much money and they had no motivation to make industrial scale pomegranate juice.