Can one person change the world? What qualities determine effective leadership? How do individual talent and historical circumstances combine to shape great leaders? From Jared Diamond, a study of leadership across politics, religion, business, and sports—seeking to decode how and why leaders matter.
Diamond is a wonderfully likable and curious writer — as enthusiastic about public health policy as he is about baseball. But at almost every turn his book runs into the shortcomings of its own methodology ... Diamond is always a fun time, and over the decades his writing has shaped the popular history field in a way that must be considered a unique personal achievement rather than a historical-structural event. But other writers have considered leadership in greater depth and with a clearer sense of what they are trying to demonstrate ... [An] uneven joining of unjoinable dots.
Mr. Diamond’s book would have benefited from a breakdown of leadership into various traits—humility, arrogance, decisiveness—and a discussion of their bearing on success or failure. The author looks at such characteristics in his individual profiles, but he doesn’t report any studies that examine them across many cases, possibly because they don’t lend themselves to social-scientific measurement ... Mr. Diamond’s emphasis on common benchmarks for success—a country’s economic growth, a corporation’s profits—leaves unexplored the possibility that each unique leader might harbor his or her own criterion of achievement.
Diamond is not interested in what literary scholars think ... Indeed, he is not much interested in what scholars of history, or ethics, or business studies think either, because this is one of those books that pretends the subject is one nobody has thought rigorously about before ... Unreliable.
