Jared Diamond on Leadership: Why Charisma Isn't Required

Joseph Stalin could not charm a room. Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, had none of the magnetism people assume dictators need. Evolutionary biologist, geographer, and UCLA professor emeritus Jared Diamond argues in his new book, Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter?, that effective leadership does not require charm. Diamond, who is 89 and won a Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel, counts instead.

"There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader, of which, um, charisma is, is one." — Jared Diamond [00:26]

That number is not a throwaway line. It is the product of a mind that has spent a lifetime making lists, of bird species, of languages, of church cantatas, and now of leaders. The new book sorts leaders into four spheres: politics, religion, business, and sports (03:20). What unites the project is a method Diamond borrows from his first career as a laboratory biologist: the natural experiment, a comparison of cases that differ in one key variable, used when a controlled lab test is impossible.

He applies it first to Adolf Hitler. Most Hitler biographies read as single stories, and different historians, working from the same facts, reach opposite conclusions about whether Hitler mattered or whether any ambitious German nationalist would have done the same damage (10:50). Diamond prefers near misses. In 1930, three years before Hitler became chancellor, a truck nearly crushed his car at an intersection (06:45). In 1944, a bomb planted by army officer Claus von Stauffenberg went off under a conference table seconds after Hitler leaned forward, killing four other men in the room (08:14). Either accident removes Hitler from history. Diamond's own family history runs through that same accident of survival: his wife's mother survived Auschwitz, and other relatives did not (05:06).

Harry Truman gets a gentler kind of natural experiment. Truman was Franklin Roosevelt's forgettable fourth vice president, picked for small political reasons, and Roosevelt never once met with him in office (12:23). When Roosevelt died, Truman had not even been told about the atomic bomb, and the first decision on his desk was whether to drop it. He was "widely despised" at the time, Diamond says, for the Berlin Airlift, the hydrogen bomb, the Korean War, and firing General MacArthur (12:49). What made Truman effective, in Diamond's reading, was indifference to being loathed. He made the calls and let the hatred land.

What Counts as Luck, What Counts as Skill

Diamond's chapter on religious leaders asks why Christianity, and not five or six other first-century messianic movements named in the New Testament, became a world religion (26:46). His answer is not that Jesus was uniquely persuasive. It is that Jesus preached a universal message rather than one aimed at a single sect, that he was followed by a gifted organizer in Saint Paul, since Jesus himself died before building an institution, and that he happened to live inside the Western Roman Empire, the most powerful political entity of his era (29:03). Place and timing did the rest, Diamond argues, aided by Columbus, who nearly fifteen centuries later carried that empire's religion across the world.

Followers matter as much as leaders, Diamond insists, especially with cults. Jim Jones, who led more than 900 people to their deaths by cyanide-laced punch in Guyana in 1978, had earlier led the desegregation of housing in Indianapolis and later served as a housing commissioner in San Francisco (37:39). His followers in the People's Temple were not a random slice of the public. They were disproportionately poor, older, and Black. Diamond contrasts this with Hitler, whose Nazi party never won a parliamentary majority, meaning most Germans resisted him, and with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, whose supporters cannot be dismissed as psychologically vulnerable (39:22). A charismatic leader without a population primed to follow, Diamond suggests, does not get very far.

Power, once gained, is rarely surrendered. Diamond built a table of 22 outstanding political leaders since World War II and found only two who stepped down voluntarily: Nelson Mandela, who retired from South Africa's presidency in his eighties, and Lee Kuan Yew, who led Singapore for roughly three decades before stepping aside (43:16). Everyone else was assassinated, forced out by a coup, voted out, or committed suicide. That finding leads directly into Diamond's sports and business chapters, where he uses analysis of variance, a statistical method called ANOVA that splits an outcome into the share explained by different factors, to ask how much credit a coach or CEO actually deserves. Roughly 15 percent to 30 percent of a team's success traces to the coach, another chunk to the players, and the rest to the institution (95:37). In business, CEOs account for about 30 percent of the variance in outcomes, with industry conditions explaining a comparable share: perfume and tech companies run profitable, regulated utilities do not (96:13). Because about 70 percent of the outcome is effectively random with respect to the leader, firing a coach or CEO after one bad season usually looks like an improvement the following year for reasons that have nothing to do with the replacement's talent (96:47). John Wooden, who led UCLA basketball to nine national championships including seven in a row, is Diamond's exception. His star players said they learned more from him about life than about basketball.

"For him, basketball was not a sport. Basketball was a philosophy of life." — Jared Diamond [99:28]

A Life Built on Lists

Diamond's own biography reads like one of his natural experiments, a life that kept branching. He learned to read at age three and immediately began keeping lists, of rivers, of animals, of Boston streetcar numbers (51:34). He has since learned 13 languages, the last being Italian, picked up at age 61, which he now reads daily for pleasure and practices weekly in two-hour conversations with a professor (45:22). A trip to New Guinea in his twenties to watch birds, a place with roughly 600 bird species, turned into a second career running parallel to his original work in gallbladder physiology, and later a third career in history and geography that produced Guns, Germs, and Steel (53:27). He credits birds as the best window into animal and human behavior because birds, like people, rely mainly on sight and sound, while most other mammals navigate by smell, a sense impossible for a human observer to track in the field (70:00).

At 89, Diamond is doing the math on time left. He notes that an American man's life expectancy at birth is about 78, but a man who has already reached 70 has a life expectancy closer to 93, because the biggest risks are already behind him (81:47).

"When you've reached the age of seventy, your life expectancy is not seventy-eight. Your life expectancy is ninety-three because a lot of the risk is behind you." — Jared Diamond [81:53]

He is spending that remaining time on two long lists: a synthesis of bird colonization across New Guinea's ten isolated mountain ranges, data no one else has, and a slow listen through all 210 of Johann Sebastian Bach's surviving church cantatas, about one a week, a project he started because he realized the clock was not infinite (83:36). His closing advice is blunt. Work should pass three tests, Diamond says: something enjoyable, something you are good at, something useful to the world, and anyone who insists otherwise should be told, in his words, to go to hell (107:44). It is the same instinct that filled a three-year-old's notebook with lists of rivers: find what holds your attention, trust it, and keep the list going.