IN MARCH 1930, an up-and-coming politician drove a car through an intersection in Munich. Just then, a huge truck crashed into it, stopping just in time to prevent the passengers inside from being crushed.
That politician was Adolf Hitler. Three years later he would become one Chancellor of Germany before you proceed to unleash the horrors of the World War II and the Holocaust, which killed tens of millions of people.
Would any of this have happened if Hitler had died in the accident?
Jeff Bezos in 1997
For many, history would have been different without Hitler’s evil ambitions and power. For others, harsh conditions are imposed Germany after the First World War made another war inevitable. As for the anti-Semitism that fueled the Holocaust, it was firmly rooted in Germany long before Hitler.
Do individuals make a difference? And how can we know that? Should companies continue paying seven-figure bonuses to their CEOs? Does changing coaches make a difference for a sports team? In this fascinating and far-reaching look at human history, Jared Diamond, a celebrated American academic and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, looks at the staggering evidence from all sides of the argument.
On the one hand, there’s the ‘Great Man theory’ – the idea that history has been dominated by exceptional leaders, from Oliver Cromwell to Jeff Bezos. The rival view is that leaders are limited by circumstances and have little influence over events. Then there’s the middle view, which Diamond prefers: sometimes they make a difference, sometimes they don’t.
To determine this distinction, Diamond devised the ‘Hamlet test’. If Shakespeare had died of smallpox at the age of ten, would any other playwrights have been able to write a play as rich and complex as Hamlet?
By 1599, Shakespeare had already written more than twenty plays, including several masterpieces. Could his contemporaries – such as Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe – have come close to writing such a brilliant play? Nowadays their work is hardly carried out. So, says Diamond, no one but Shakespeare could have created Hamlet. He was uniquely talented.
Diamond applies the same test to other exceptional characters. For example, there were many social media sites before and after Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004. So you cannot claim that without Zuckerberg there would have been no social media. But you could say that he is a distinctive personality who has made social media evolve in a certain way.
Online selling is a modern phenomenon that is widely used, but how did Bezos become uniquely successful at Amazon?
In 1988, a computer science professor from Columbia founded a new kind of hedge fund called DE Shaw, hiring computer experts because he recognized that the kind of mathematical modeling made possible by computers was ideal for the financial world. One of his first hires was a precocious 26-year-old named Jeff Bezos. One of the first tasks he was given was to investigate the business opportunities offered by the Internet. Bezos was surprised to learn that Internet use had increased by 2,300 percent in 1993.
One of the greats: Mr and Mrs Seretse Karma
What excited him most was the possibility of a “everything store,” a company that didn’t make anything itself, but operated as an intermediary between consumers and manufacturers, and could supply anything to anyone, anywhere. Bezos left DE Shaw and founded Amazon.
The company was launched with $10,000 of its own money and $1.25 million from its parents and investors and is now worth $2.8 trillion.
So was it leadership or circumstances that made Amazon so dominant? Bezos had very specific personality traits: he had an exceptional eye for detail; he prioritized customer satisfaction – for example, speed of delivery and ease of ordering – over profits and stock value; he was ruthless and risk-taker; he retained control of Amazon, thereby avoiding the fate of many startup founders who were forced out by investors. Many Americans shared one of Bezos’ qualities; but only he seized the moment.
But could the success of famous historical leaders depend on each being born in the right place at the right time?
Fascinatingly, says Diamond, in the case of history’s greatest conqueror, the answer is “yes.” The largest land empire in world history was conquered by the Mongolian chief Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Genghis was a military and administrative genius, but so were other leaders on the steppes of Central Asia, such as Attila the Hun.
Was Genghis more brilliant than she? No. What helped him was rain.
The decades of Genghis’ rise were the wettest on the steppes in modern history. More rain meant more grass for the animals, which meant more sheep to eat, more horses to ride, and more Mongolian children to ride those horses.
Genghis was brilliant, but if he had been born twenty years earlier, his skills would have been lost.
In a tense section, Diamond looks closely at Seretse Khama, founder and president of independent Botswana, a landlocked and hitherto poverty-stricken country in Africa. A brilliant administrator, a gifted athlete and a former student at Oxford University, Khama was able to enter both modern Western and traditional African society.
Wins, prophets, coaches and kings do available now from the Postboekhandel
When the world’s richest diamond reserves were discovered in Botswana in 1967, Khama used his tribal power to ensure that the resulting wealth became an asset to the entire nation.
Instead of exploiting the diamond revenues, he set up a long-term investment fund. He also developed an efficient civil service and was careful to support corrupt and violent black majority governments in nearby African countries. He was the right person in the right place at the right time to create a rich and successful country.
Diamond has a readable style that makes clear the perplexing issues he tackles.
Why, he asks, has a small Jewish sect, built around a charismatic prophet in the Holy Land, become the world’s dominant religion?
Part of the answer is Jesus, an eloquent reformer who focused on human behavior rather than religious law and ritual. He appealed to the entire society, including the poor, the sick and women.
Much of the credit for Christianity’s success goes to the Apostle Paul, the religion’s first organizing maestro, who traveled extensively throughout the Roman Empire. He emphasized that Christianity should not only be a religion for Jews, but also for Gentiles (non-Jews).
There was widespread literacy, allowing converts to read the nascent New Testament. Literacy appealed most directly to the Roman Emperor Constantine, who subsequently adopted Christianity as the religion of his empire.
This is a thought-provoking but sometimes quite tough book, as Diamond is a serious scientist, albeit with a stunningly broad view of the world.
