Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do 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.
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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.
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Debatable, certainly, but not dismissible — that is the pleasure of a Diamond book ... Deflatingly for the reader, Diamond announces at the start that he will pursue a middle path ... For all the flaws in the argument, there is still great pleasure in considering Diamond’s examples.
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