What Makes a Great Leader is a question that seems straightforward until we examine the forces that surround every consequential decision: circumstance, timing, opportunity, character, and the alternatives that might have existed if someone else had been in the same position. In this episode of The Passion Struck Podcast, John R. Miles sits down with Jared Diamond to explore a deeper question behind leadership itself: when do individual leaders actually matter, and how can we tell whether a person truly changed the course of events?
Drawing on his new book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?, Diamond brings the perspective of a scientist and historian to a subject often dominated by personality-driven theories. Rather than assuming that history is made by extraordinary individuals or, at the opposite extreme, that people are simply prisoners of circumstance, he examines the complicated relationship between individual agency and the conditions in which leaders find themselves.
The conversation moves across politics, business, sports, history, and Diamond’s own life. Along the way, Harry Truman becomes an unexpected example of leadership emerging without an obvious record of preparation, Winston Churchill illustrates how dramatically leadership effectiveness can depend on context, and Seretse Khama offers a striking case of someone who may have been uniquely positioned to change the future of an entire nation. Diamond also considers figures such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and John Wooden to ask whether their accomplishments depended on qualities that were uniquely their own or could have been achieved by others.
When Do Leaders Actually Matter?
The title of Diamond’s book begins with a deceptively simple question: when do leaders matter? His answer requires us to separate several ideas that are often collapsed into the word “leadership.”
A leader can make a difference because they possess something uniquely suited to a particular moment. Another leader may be highly capable but not uniquely necessary because many other people could have achieved a comparable result. And there are leaders who occupy positions of enormous authority yet make relatively little difference because the circumstances, institutions, or people around them would have produced much the same outcome without them.
Diamond describes his inquiry through three questions: do leaders matter, under what circumstances do they matter, and in what ways do they matter?
That framework complicates the familiar idea that history is primarily the story of extraordinary individuals. It also challenges the opposite assumption that circumstances determine everything. A person may possess enormous potential and still never encounter the conditions in which that potential can become consequential. Another person may appear unremarkable until circumstances demand qualities that nobody previously knew they possessed.
Leadership, in this sense, becomes a problem of fit, partly. The same person can be remarkably effective in one environment and poorly matched to another. That observation becomes especially important when we consider leaders whose reputations change depending on the period, institution, or crisis in which they operate.
The Leadership Question Jared Diamond Has Spent His Career Exploring
Diamond’s interest in leadership did not emerge in isolation from his earlier work. Throughout his career, he has asked questions about why societies develop differently, why civilizations collapse, how nations respond to crises, and how geography and environment influence human history. Leadership became the next layer of that inquiry: once we understand the larger forces shaping societies, how much room remains for an individual to change what happens?
The motivation is also personal. Diamond explains that his life has been spent under the shadow of leaders, both good and bad. He grew up in a world dominated by Hitler and married into a Polish family whose relatives suffered because of Hitler’s rule. As a scientist and teacher, he also experienced a quieter form of leadership: people who profoundly influenced his life and students who later told him that he had influenced theirs.
That combination of historical and personal experience gives his question unusual breadth. Leadership is not confined to presidents or CEOs. It appears in classrooms, families, laboratories, sports teams, businesses, governments, and religious movements. Diamond’s contribution is to ask whether the same analytical tools can help us distinguish genuine individual influence from outcomes that would probably have occurred anyway.
One of those tools is the idea of the natural experiment. Diamond explains that while researchers cannot ethically conduct controlled experiments on political leaders, history inadvertently creates comparisons when leaders die, are assassinated, are removed, are replaced, or remain in power. Similar comparisons arise when coaches are fired or when business leaders leave organizations. Those changes allow researchers to examine what happens before and after a leader’s departure and ask how much of the outcome can plausibly be attributed to the individual.
In this episode, you’ll learn
- Why individual leaders sometimes change history while others make surprisingly little difference.
- How Jared Diamond’s Hamlet test helps distinguish uniquely consequential leaders from highly capable but replaceable ones.
- What Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Seretse Khama reveal about leadership, timing, and circumstance.
- How natural experiments can help us study the real-world impact of political, business, and sports leaders.
- Why leadership effectiveness depends on context and why success does not necessarily equal admirable character.
- Why Diamond believes leaders should stop searching for one defining principle and instead focus on getting the many important things right.
The Hamlet Test: Could Someone Else Have Done the Same Thing?
One of the most memorable ideas in the book is Diamond’s “Hamlet test.” The test asks a deceptively difficult question: could someone else have done the same thing?
Shakespeare provides the model. Hamlet was not Shakespeare’s first play. He had experience, a theater company, and a body of work that demonstrated his abilities. Other Elizabethan dramatists were working at the same time, but their surviving work provides a basis for comparison. Diamond argues that in this particular case, Shakespeare appears to have been uniquely qualified to produce Hamlet.
The political application is much harder. Diamond argues that Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs were extraordinarily capable, but it is difficult to demonstrate that nobody else could have done something comparable. There were many technically capable people who might have entered the same emerging fields.
The distinction matters because it changes how we think about greatness. A leader does not have to be the only person capable of achieving an outcome in order to have made a difference. But the stronger the evidence that no plausible substitute could have produced the same result, the stronger the case for saying that the individual was uniquely consequential.
The Hamlet test therefore shifts attention away from admiration and toward counterfactual reasoning. Instead of asking only, “How impressive was this person?” we begin asking, “What would probably have happened if someone else had been there?”
Harry Truman: When Circumstances Reveal Hidden Potential
Harry Truman offers one of the most surprising cases in Diamond’s analysis because his historical importance was difficult to see in advance.
Before becoming president, Truman had led what Diamond describes as a completely undistinguished life. Even after becoming vice president, he was not treated as someone destined for greatness. Yet when Roosevelt died, Truman suddenly found himself facing decisions of enormous consequence, including how to end the war, whether to use the atomic bomb, how to respond to the Berlin crisis, how to deal with Russia, and whether to fire General MacArthur. Diamond emphasizes that Truman made these decisions courageously despite being disliked and scorned for them at the time.
Yet Truman does not pass the Hamlet test in Diamond’s strongest sense. There were 96 senators, and Diamond believes that 95 other people possessed sufficient experience and qualifications to have potentially done what Truman did. What cannot be known is whether they would have possessed the same courage when confronted with the same decisions.
That uncertainty is precisely what makes Truman so interesting. Leadership potential is not always visible before the moment arrives. Sometimes the circumstances themselves reveal capacities that had never been tested.
The Book Behind the Question
What Happened When Jared Diamond Went Looking for His Next Question?
There is an unexpectedly revealing story behind Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings. Diamond explains that his books were not the product of a carefully plotted intellectual roadmap. Instead, one question tended to lead to another.
After Guns, Germs, and Steel, he became interested in why some societies collapse while others survive. After Collapse, he considered writing a book about the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. Someone advised him that such a book might sell only around 50,000 copies, so he pursued another subject instead. After Upheaval, the question of leadership emerged.
The anecdote reveals something important about the book itself. Diamond’s intellectual life appears less like a straight line than a series of questions whose implications become visible only in retrospect. He describes having kept notebooks of rivers and animals from childhood and says that he has always been interested in many different things. The themes that eventually became later books were already present, in embryonic form, in his earliest work.
That makes Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings feel less like a departure from Diamond’s previous work than another turn of the same intellectual habit: looking at enormous human questions and trying to understand how individual choices interact with larger systems.
What Business, Sports, Politics, and History Teach Us About Leadership
Diamond’s framework becomes particularly useful when applied outside presidential politics. In business, he discusses the Resnicks and their role in creating an industrial-scale pomegranate juice industry. They encountered an opportunity that other growers either could not or did not want to pursue, invested heavily, and helped create a market that barely existed in the United States. Diamond considers them an example of leaders who were uniquely qualified to do what they did.
Jeff Bezos presents a different case. Diamond does not consider Bezos uniquely qualified in the way Shakespeare was uniquely qualified to write Hamlet. Other people could have created an online “everything store.” What distinguished Bezos was the way he pursued the opportunity. Mark Zuckerberg provides another variation: other people could have entered social media, but he built something in a distinctive way.
Sports provide an especially useful laboratory because results are visible and repeated. Coaches are hired, fired, replaced, and compared against measurable outcomes. Diamond discusses John Wooden, his former UCLA coach, as a particularly important example because Wooden’s influence cannot be reduced to championships or tactics. Some of his former players remembered the person they became more than the games they won.
Diamond treats that distinction as a question of values rather than an objective hierarchy. A leader such as Wooden may transform human beings, while a leader such as Konrad Adenauer may be more consequential through institutions and political outcomes. Both can matter, but they matter in different ways.
The broader lesson is that leadership cannot be evaluated without first deciding what kind of change we value. Outcomes, institutions, culture, character, and human development are all different forms of influence.
Why Leadership Cannot Be Separated From Context
One of Diamond’s most important qualifications is that leadership effectiveness is conditional. Churchill, for example, was a great wartime prime minister but an undistinguished peacetime prime minister. The qualities that made him particularly suited to crisis were not necessarily the qualities required for governing during peace. Diamond summarizes the broader principle simply: circumstances are important, and a leader who is effective under one set of circumstances may not be effective under another.
This is why the story of Seretse Khama is so revealing. Diamond considers Khama, the founding president of Botswana, an example of someone who was uniquely positioned to alter the trajectory of his country. Botswana had very few college graduates at independence; Khama was chief of its largest tribe, and diamonds were discovered on his land. He therefore occupied a position from which he could make a consequential institutional decision: whether those resources belonged to his tribe or to the nation of Botswana.
The same individual in another country might have had little historical significance. Diamond makes the point that if Khama had been founding president of Somalia, we might never have heard of him in the same way. The person and the circumstance cannot be separated.
That insight has implications beyond history. In our own lives, we often evaluate ourselves as though our abilities exist independently of context. Yet opportunity, timing, institutions, relationships, and crises all influence whether a particular strength can become useful. Sometimes the challenge is developing a capability; sometimes it is recognizing the environment in which that capability can finally matter.
SPONSORED DEALS
FODZYME
We’re so excited to partner with FODZYME and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK.
SHOPIFY
It’s time to turn those “What Ifs” into SFX: CHA-CHING with Shopify today. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH passionstruck.
Vinted
Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing. With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn.
About Today’s Guest, Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond is a celebrated scientist, geographer, historian, author, and explorer whose work has examined some of the largest questions in human history. He is the author of influential books including The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, and Upheaval. His scholarship has explored human evolution, geography, environmental change, societal collapse, national crises, and the forces that shape civilizations.
Diamond is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a MacArthur Fellow. His career has also crossed disciplinary boundaries: in the interview, he describes beginning as a physiologist before moving into fieldwork on New Guinea birds and eventually working across geography, history, anthropology, and environmental science.
His latest book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?, applies this lifelong curiosity to leadership, asking when individuals genuinely change outcomes, when they are replaceable, and how circumstance determines whether a person’s abilities become historically consequential.
What Makes a GREAT Leader? The Answer Is Not What You Think | Jared Diamond
Learn More and Connect
👉 All episode links, my books You Matter, Luma, and The Mattering Effect, The Ignited Life newsletter, and the Start Mattering store are here: linktr.ee/John_R_Miles
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
What Makes a Great Leader?
A great leader cannot be defined by a single universal characteristic. Jared Diamond’s approach suggests that leadership has to be evaluated in relation to circumstances, opportunities, alternatives, and outcomes. Some leaders are uniquely qualified to accomplish what they did; others are highly capable but could have been replaced by someone else; and some make little difference because circumstances or institutions would have produced similar results.
When Do Individual Leaders Actually Matter?
Individual leaders matter when their decisions, abilities, or actions materially alter an outcome that might otherwise have been different. Diamond emphasizes that this depends heavily on circumstances. The same leader can be effective in one environment and poorly matched to another, which is why leadership has to be understood alongside the historical moment in which it operates.
Do Great Leaders Shape History or Are They Shaped by Circumstances?
Diamond rejects an overly simple choice between individual agency and circumstance. Leaders operate within conditions they did not create, but they can sometimes recognize, create, or exploit opportunities within those conditions. The historical outcome often emerges from the interaction between the person and the moment.
What Is Jared Diamond’s Hamlet Test?
The Hamlet test asks whether anyone else could have achieved the same thing. Diamond uses Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the model because Shakespeare appears to have been uniquely qualified to produce that particular work. In leadership, the test helps distinguish people whose accomplishments depended on highly unusual individual capabilities from those whose achievements could plausibly have been replicated by others.
What Can Harry Truman Teach Us About Leadership?
Harry Truman demonstrates that consequential leadership potential is not always visible beforehand. Diamond describes Truman as someone whose earlier life gave little indication that he would become an outstanding president, yet circumstances placed him in a position where he had to make extraordinarily difficult decisions. His example suggests that some leadership qualities become visible only when the right—or extraordinarily demanding—moment arrives.
Can a Successful Leader Be an Admirable Person?
Success and moral admiration are separate questions. Diamond explicitly distinguishes between leaders who produce significant outcomes and leaders whose character makes them worthy of emulation. His discussion of John Wooden, alongside more complicated examples, suggests that evaluating leadership requires us to ask both what a leader accomplished and what values, institutions, or human consequences were left behind.
What Is the Most Important Leadership Lesson From Jared Diamond?
Diamond’s answer is deliberately resistant to the search for a single principle. He says that when people ask for the “one thing,” his answer is that there are 37 things. For leaders, the lesson is to stop searching for one most important characteristic and instead focus on getting the many interdependent elements of leadership right.
