The Best of The Money Show: Leadership, hiring decisions, building A2X and retirement property choices

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

You're listening to the best of The Money Show.

Stephen Grootes (0:07)

Welcome to the best bits of The Money Show, a digest of some of the most important comments, thoughts and interviews from the show this week. If you'd like to hear more, please go to our website or go to your podcast app and search for The Money Show. Often a good idea to share something you thought is valuable with someone you think might gain some value from it. Well, tonight we start with our business book review and we spoke to Ian Mann, the Managing Director at Gateways Business Consultant. The book is written by Jared Diamond, I mean, one of the great polymaths of our time, someone who has such an interest in so many parts of our world. His book is called Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, When Do Leaders Make a Difference?

He looks at whether individual leaders really do alter history or whether it's all about circumstance. Here's Ian Mann.

Ian Mann (0:54)

He makes a point in the book that this is not a book to teach you how to be a leader. It's about leadership, but not how to teach. And he doesn't have a very high opinion on how much you can change as a leader just by going to a public course.

Stephen Grootes (1:11)

Yes, well, I can't blame him, yes.

Ian Mann (1:13)

He has a thought experiment that I think captures what he's talking about most. He says, in 1930, Hitler's car got into an accident. Fortunately, his driver was quite good and he managed to avoid killing anybody. Hitler was injured and Hitler gets out of the car and looks around and says, is anybody else injured? You ask yourself the question, what would happen if he had died?

Would World War II have happened? Or could we presume that it wouldn't have happened? This is a thought experiment, and which is the heart of the whole book. Do leaders make a difference? Yeah.

Would the Versailles Treaties' harshness towards Germany have created a rebellion against anyway? They pretty much impoverished the middle classes as a result of which there would have been a backlash anyway. And you wonder how much does a person matter in leadership and where does it all come from and how does it all work? So that's his whole thesis.

Are circumstances shaped by leaders or leaders shaped by circumstance? If you had to look at the great IT leaders, for example, you'd have to say that Zuckerberg must be up there with the big guys. Yes. The question is, if he had never existed, would we still have social media? And the answer is absolutely, mainly because social media was around at the time. He just picked up on it.

Stephen Grootes (2:49)

MySpace and Co.

Ian Mann (2:51)

Yeah, indeed. Indeed. So we have to worry about that. And then he also, his book covers quite a few different leadership and different, it's business, the sport, this history, this religion. And he said, by the way, that's not the whole scale, but that's once he dealt with. If, if, if Jesus hadn't been, if Jesus hadn't been Jesus, would, would somebody else have done what he had done and created a religion in the Middle East that just spread out them to Europe and the rest of the world? So we, the question is, what does it matter to you as a business person? Well, quite a lot, because if you look at the top, top one, top 40 on the companies on the JSC, their executives compared to chief executives, senior people compared to chief executives, chief executives earn between 10 and 20 times as much as the others. If you drop all the way down to the next 200, it goes down to a mere 8 or 12 times as much. The question is, do they make such a big difference?

He uses a fascinating idea which I think can be used in all sorts of situations, which he calls the Hamlet Test.

If Shakespeare was born in a time when smallpox is very prevalent, if he died at 10 years old like everybody else, would the book Hamlet ever have been written?

Stephen Grootes (4:14)

Yes.

Ian Mann (4:14)

It's an interesting thought to experiment, because surely there must have been other playwrights around that could have done exactly the same thing. He writes, Hamlet is one of the greatest pieces of art that come out in that particular sphere. He said that the only Hamlet could ever have done it, and the reason only Shakespeare could ever have written Hamlet, that was his 22nd successful book of about 32

There weren't any writers who were as prolific as that, and it took so many books before you go really brilliant. So his idea about the test, it's a way, if you think of leadership in terms of the Hamlet test, could have been replaced very easily by anybody else. So there are two ways to study leadership like this. One way would be to say, well, let's look at biographies. And the other way is to look at, let's look at experiments.