Do Great Leaders Need Charisma? History's Near Misses

Jared Diamond was born in 1937, and by his own account his first memory is a photograph. It is the Life magazine cover that showed two American soldiers lying face down on Buna-Gona beach in New Guinea, and he grew up, as he puts it, in the shadow of Hitler. That shadow shapes the spine of his book on leadership, which asks when leaders actually matter and when they are interchangeable with the circumstances that produce them. In a long conversation with Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab podcast, Diamond argues that the most popular idea about leaders, that they must be charismatic, is simply wrong; that history turns on chance events that a tidy theory of great men cannot explain; and that the most useful generalizations about leadership concern patterns of behavior rather than personality. Along the way he moves from the Cambridge physiology lab where a flooded floor nearly ended his career, to the cult leaders who hold a group together, to the birds of New Guinea that taught him how to observe human nature without the distortions of the human observer.

What does "prophets" mean in a book about leadership?

Diamond's book examines leadership across four spheres: politics, business, sports, and religion. The title's first word is his shorthand for the last of those. As he explained to Huberman at the outset (Huberman Lab, 3:34), "prophets" refers to religious leaders, and the choice was partly about sound: it made for a catchy title. He is careful to say he does not mean people who foretell the future. The word is a label, not a prediction.

That kind of precision runs through the whole conversation. Diamond is not interested in grand pronouncements about a single type of great person. He is interested in how leadership works in different arenas, and what can be learned by comparing them side by side.

Is charisma really required to be a leader?

This is the claim Diamond takes on first, and he does it bluntly. People, he says, constantly look for generalizations about leaders' personalities, and the most common is that a leader must be charismatic:

"Perhaps the commonest generalization is that leaders have to be charismatic. Nonsense. Some leaders are charismatic." (Jared Diamond, Huberman Lab Podcast, 0:00)

He follows the rebuttal with a counterexample. Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, was in Diamond's telling totally uncharismatic, and he was nonetheless an effective leader in the sense that matters to him: someone who could hold power and make decisions that stuck. Diamond's conclusion is that there are "about 37 ways to be an effective leader, of which charisma is one." Charisma is a tool that some leaders have and many do without.

The useful question, then, is not "what personality does a leader have?" but "what did this person do, under these conditions, that produced an outcome?" Diamond concedes that there are generalizations about leaders. What he rejects are generalizations about personality, because the same personality can lead to very different results, and very different personalities can lead to the same ones. This is why the book is a comparative study across politics, business, sport, and religion rather than a portrait gallery of heroes.

How close did history come to there being no adult Hitler?

Diamond opens his book with a near miss, and he returns to it in the podcast as a question that is more than rhetorical. In 1930, three years before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, his limousine was being driven into an intersection when a large truck entered at a right angle. The truck struck the car head-on and pushed it against the curb, nearly riding up over it. Hitler was injured but not killed. As Diamond framed it on the podcast, the consequence of that accident is almost too large to contemplate:

"If he had died in 1930, would there have been World War II and would there have been a Holocaust?" (Jared Diamond, Huberman Lab Podcast, 7:36)

The second near miss came in 1944, in the next-to-last year of the war. Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who had become disillusioned, brought a briefcase carrying a bomb into the conference room at the Wolf's Lair. He placed it beside Hitler's feet and the device detonated, but just before it went off, Hitler leaned forward. Diamond's point is not that a single leader's survival is a footnote. It is that the arc of a century can hinge on a movement of a few inches, a truck's timing, a driver's reflex. Any theory of leadership that ignores that contingency is describing a world that did not happen.

Diamond's interest in these moments is not purely academic. His family came from Eastern Europe and was Jewish, and the last of his relatives there disappeared in the Holocaust. His wife's family is Polish, and her mother survived Auschwitz. Diamond has said that his own life, and his wife's, were formed in the shadow of Hitler. When he asks whether a 1930 truck crash would have changed what came after, he is asking about his own family's survival, and that personal stake gives the chance-events argument its weight.

What does a flooded lab teach about leadership?

Diamond's book is about famous leaders, but the lesson he takes most personally is about a leader whose name few people know. As a young scientist at Cambridge, he left a rubber-hose water pump running all night to dry out a radioactive isotope. The pump failed and flooded his lab, and the water also reached the lab below, which belonged to Lord Adrian, father-in-law of Diamond's thesis advisor and master of Diamond's college. The next morning he was summoned by the chair of the physiology department, Sir Brian Matthews. Diamond expected to be expelled.

"You know, that was sloppy. Don't do that again." (Jared Diamond, recalling Sir Brian Matthews, Huberman Lab Podcast, 5:33)

Diamond's reading of the episode is that Matthews had the power to end a career and chose not to. That choice, a rebuke instead of a dismissal, is what Diamond counts as leadership. He lists this among the decisively good acts of leaders who shaped his own life, and he contrasts them with people who "failed to do anything" and so were not leaders at all. The lesson is about institutional judgment: a leader decides not only what mistakes cost, but what they will teach.

That theme returns when the conversation turns to how leaders address their own mistakes and whether they can be forgiven. Huberman asked Diamond whether studying so many leaders' errors had made him more forgiving of others. Mistakes, in Diamond's account, are part of what a leader does, and the question is what follows them.

Why do followers follow, even into catastrophe?

Leadership is a two-way relationship, and Diamond spends time on the other side of it. The podcast's chapter on effective cult leaders, followers, and Jim Jones makes clear that he takes seriously the question of why people commit to a leader who leads them somewhere dangerous. Diamond's broader framework, which treats leadership as a set of different strategies rather than a single trait, applies here too. A leader who holds a group together is doing something specific, and understanding that specific thing is more useful than dismissing the leader as a madman.

Why do birds reveal something about human nature?

Huberman's introduction makes an unusual claim: that birds, because they rely so heavily on sight and sound, are one of the best windows into understanding human behavior and human nature. Diamond's own career helps explain why. He trained as a physiologist and moved into evolutionary biology and anthropology, and his research took him to the field. He has studied birds in the wild, including in the Bewani Mountains of New Guinea, where observation in the natural setting is the discipline.

The conversation dwells on taxonomy, lists, and names, because naming is where field biology begins. To know what you are looking at you have to classify it, and classification is an act of attention. Diamond describes the lived texture of this work: seeing a bird in the woods, and what that sighting requires of the observer. For a reader who wants to understand leadership, the method is the point. Diamond's comparative, observational approach to leaders mirrors his approach to birds. Watch the behavior, record it across many cases, and resist the story that the observer already believes.

How does curiosity move from one question to the next?

Huberman describes Diamond as a man whose curiosity has been present since childhood and has migrated from topic to topic, book to book, paper to paper. The conversation bears that out. Diamond's mother, Huberman notes, was a talented linguist, and the podcast treats language learning as one thread of Diamond's intellectual life. The chapters on curiosity, New Guinea birds, and success and support across different careers suggest a person who has moved repeatedly between disciplines without abandoning the one habit that connects them: asking a hard question and then going out to test it in the field.

The sports and business sections fit the same pattern. Diamond explored leaders in those spheres as he did in religion and politics, and he treats them as testing grounds for the same questions about chance, strategy, and what individuals bring to outcomes. His method is less about any one domain than about a habit of comparison.

Where to go from here

• Listen to the full conversation on the Huberman Lab podcast, and use the chapter markers to jump to the sections on Hitler, religious leaders, cult leaders, language learning, and birds. The show notes are at hubermanlab.com.
• Read Diamond's book, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, for the full comparative argument across politics, business, sports, and religion.
• Test the charisma claim on a leader you know well. List what they did that produced results, then ask how many of those actions depended on personality and how many on circumstance.
• Look at a leader's worst mistake and ask the question Diamond's Cambridge story raises: what did the response teach the people involved?
• Pick one local bird and spend a month naming it, tracking when it appears, and noting what it responds to. Diamond's method starts with the same patient observation.