Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?

Can one person change the world? What qualities determine effective leadership? How do individual talent and historical circumstances combine to shape great leaders?

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, multimillion-copy bestselling classic Guns, Germs and Steel, a landmark study of leadership across politics, religion, business, and sports--seeking to decode how and why leaders matter.

"Jared Diamond's erudite, engaging and thought-provoking book takes us a huge step forward toward understanding how circumstances and individual talents, determination and strategy make leaders that have the potential to change our world (hopefully for the better)." -Daron Acemoglu, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics

In his acclaimed and influential books Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, he studies leaders throughout time to answer the question: do the actions of individuals truly influence history? Or is humanity subject to larger historical, technological, cultural, geographical forces, far beyond the influence of individuals, no matter how powerful they may seem?

On 13 March 1930, a truck sped into an intersection, headed straight for another car's right front door. The passenger of this chauffeur-driven car happened to be Adolf Hitler. If the truck had hit the door, Hitler would have been crushed and killed. But the chauffeur managed to accelerate, and Hitler survived. Would tens of millions of people have died in the Holocaust and World War Two if the chauffeur had been slower to react? Some believe Hitler was unique in his evil abilities, while others think the war was guaranteed by the harsh conditions imposed on Germany post-war.

Do leaders like Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Genghis Khan, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Belichick, or Christ really change our world? If yes, what qualities and circumstances are required of a leader to make their mark?

Drawing on his deep study of the life and career of a diverse cast of leaders famous and obscure- from Botswana president Seretse Khama, to environmentalist Rachel Carson, to legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden-Diamond reveals how leadership effectiveness is determined by a range of complex interrelated factors. Understanding these successes and failures and the opportunities leaders did (or did not) seize illuminates the influence of today's leaders and helps us to reflect on the value of our votes, our faith, our passions, and the people who happen to steer our ship.

With the same remarkable scope of Diamond's classic bestsellers, Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings takes readers on a rich journey through the lives of humanity's most well-known characters to reveal how time, place, and person can come together to change the course of history.

JARED DIAMOND is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the US National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Wolf Prize for Agriculture, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Rockefeller University's Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, and election to the US National Academy of Sciences. He has published over 200 articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines, plus 400 articles in technical scientific journals. Diamond is the author of the international bestselling books Guns, Germs, and Steel (which has sold over seven million copies), Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee, The World Until Yesterday, and Upheaval. The many prizes that these books have won include the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction, Britain's Science Book Prize (twice), Japan's Cosmos Prize, the California Book Award (twice), the Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Germany's Science Book of the Year, Japan's Asahi Shimbun Award for best book of the past decade, France's Lire Prize for best science book published in France, and book prizes of Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland.