Do Leaders Matter — History by Jared Diamond

 

Jared Diamond’s books on history and anthropology have interested and entertained me in the past, especially Guns, Germs, and Steel,published 1997.

Diamond’s most recent book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, covers various impressive endeavors by individuals who enjoyed business success, sports greatness, political leadership, and religious charisma. His approach: “my focus is … on the opportunity, rather than on the particular person who seized the opportunity.” As in his earlier books, he engages you, the reader, with his own fascination with leaders you may never have heard of such as the African leader Botswana’s Seretse Khama, and a bit about leaders you have definitely heard of like Hitler.

The wrap-up is that “the political arena has offered us many opportunities to explore fundamental questions about leadership in vitally important contexts: did one person make a difference as a leader? Was that one person the only one who could have made a difference, at that time and place?” (p. 108)

While he acknowledges the success of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, he suggests that the types of business they founded would have come along in another way if they hadn’t started theirs. In contrast, he profiles another example of successful business leadership that is more obscure: he writes about the Resnicks, a couple who invested their money in pomegranate juice — specifically who farmed pomegranate bushes and created the brand of pomegranate juice Pom Wonderful. (Aside: I admit that I tasted it a few times when it first appeared on the market, but did not find it at all habit forming: my breakfast juice is orange juice, but whatever.)

Diamond writes that only a few people could possibly have done what the Resnicks did:

“The chances that anyone among that small fraction also had lots of pomegranate bushes and lots of money were vanishingly low. That’s why no one had founded a pomegranate juice industry in the centuries before the Resnicks. They are unusual people in many respects, but they are unique in the long history of pomegranates. Just as Shakespeare was uniquely qualified among the several dozen significant Elizabethan playwrights to write Hamlet, the Resnicks were uniquely qualified among California’s several dozen significant pomegranate farmers to found a pomegranate juice industry.” (p 119)

Several other leaders from many eras of history are also profiled, in this interesting and readable history book, but I don’t want to try to summarize the following chapters. On the whole, I think I liked Diamond’s other books better than this one. 

Review © 2026 mae sander