Winston Churchill was asked in 1947 to send birthday greetings to Stanley Baldwin, one of his predecessors as prime minister, who had slow-walked Britain’s rearmament while Nazi Germany built up. Churchill declined, and offered a judgment instead: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better had he never lived.”
That is where Andrew Stark opens his review of Jared Diamond’s “Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings,” and it frames the book’s question neatly: how much do individual leaders actually matter?
Sometimes, irreplaceably
Diamond’s best case is Seretse Khama, hereditary chief of Botswana’s largest tribe, who became the country’s first president in 1966. By voluntarily transferring ownership of all the diamond mines on his tribe’s lands to the government, he persuaded the smaller tribes to do the same — giving the new state revenue to build roads, schools and hospitals. For several decades Botswana had the world’s fastest-growing economy.
Nobody else could have done it, Diamond argues, for a reason that is almost tautological and completely convincing: no one else was the chief of the largest tribe. The act required the specific authority of the specific man.
He makes a similar case in religion. Asked why Christians, among all the competing Jewish sects of the first century, founded a world religion, Diamond starts with Jesus but gives much of the credit to St. Paul — who dispensed with dietary law, circumcision requirements and prohibitions against intermarriage, and in doing so broadened the appeal enormously.
Often, not at all
Then the other side, and this is where it gets uncomfortable for anyone who reads business biographies.
Jeff Bezos, Diamond notes, is a skilled strategic planner with keen attention to detail, a risk-taker, a hard-driving boss and a tireless worker. Those qualities are shared by many Americans. It is likely that had Bezos never lived, another visionary would have created an online everything store once the internet arrived. The opportunity was the scarce thing; the temperament was not.
And then Genghis Khan, which is the passage worth memorizing. The decades of his rise were Central Asia’s rainiest in 2,000 years. That meant, in Diamond’s telling, “more grass for grazing animals, hence more sheep and goats to eat, more mares’ milk to drink, more horses to ride into battle, and more Mongol babies to rear to adulthood and to ride those horses.” His conclusion: “While Genghis may have been the most skilled chief among his Mongol contemporaries, his skills would have been wasted if he had been born 20 years earlier, or 200 miles to the south.”
The greatest conqueror in history needed it to rain.
The coaching test
Diamond finds that coaches’ effect on outcomes, while significant, is “not overwhelming” — other factors like great players and front-office money matter as much or more.
His example is the cleanest natural experiment in American sports. Bill Belichick coached the New England Patriots from 2000 to 2023 and won six Super Bowls with Tom Brady at quarterback. When Brady left in 2020, he promptly won another with Tampa Bay while the Patriots struggled. Much of Belichick’s success, Diamond suggests, may derive from the fortuitous circumstance of having coached the game’s best quarterback.
Stark pushes back usefully in his review, noting the book would have benefited from breaking leadership into traits — humility, arrogance, decisiveness — and that “ego” is strangely absent from a book about consequential decisions. He also objects that Diamond’s benchmarks for success are conventional ones: economic growth, corporate profits, widespread devotion. A chief executive might care more about technological innovation or employee welfare and be succeeding by a measure the book doesn’t score.
Why this is an investing book in disguise
Because the attribution problem Diamond is wrestling with is the same one behind every performance record you will ever be shown.
A fund manager with five strong years has either skill or a tailwind, and the returns look identical either way. Value managers looked brilliant for a decade and then foolish for a decade, with no change in method. A concentrated technology bet has been the rainiest 2,000 years in Central Asia for anyone who made it.
The discipline is to ask what the weather was doing. Not to dismiss skill — Khama was real, and irreplaceable — but to notice how often a track record is a climate record, and to size positions as though you might be looking at one.
Baldwin, incidentally, got a kinder ending than Churchill gave him. Appearing in public for the last time in 1947, long since deaf, he noticed an animated crowd reacting to his arrival and asked whether they were booing him. They were cheering.