The right way to learn from Genghis Khan

What biography and natural experiments reveal about leadership

Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings. By Jared Diamond. Mariner Books; 288 pages; $32. Allen Lane; £25

To conquer so much of Eurasia so quickly, Genghis Khan must have been a pretty decisive chap. Today macho executives striving to build empires sometimes wish he had left behind a book of leadership tips. What would Genghis do about that underperforming sales team? Alas, bar the odd (and possibly apocryphal) quote about the joy of making widows weep, the mighty Mongol’s insights are lost.

In any case, they might not be terribly useful. Genghis would have ascribed his success to courage, horsemanship and strategic genius. Actually, it was the weather, argues Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer-prizewinning historian. Analysis of tree rings on the Mongolian steppe reveals that the period of Genghis’s rise was unusually wet. More rain meant more grass, more sheep’s milk to nourish warriors and more spare horses to make the horde so devastatingly mobile. Had he been born 20 years earlier or 200 miles farther south, he might have been just another warlord. “Without knowing it (because he wasn’t a tree-ring dendrochronologist), Genghis had the good fortune to be born at the right time and place,” writes Dr Diamond.

The founder of the world’s most popular religion may be overrated, too. Sure, Jesus was charismatic. But so were thousands of other holy men. His gospel went global, while others did not, largely because of factors beyond his control. Jews two millennia ago were unusually literate and widely scattered across the Roman empire, so Jesus’s teachings were written down, widely distributed and widely read. The apostle Paul adapted his creed to make it appeal to non-Jews. Christianity spread across Europe when a Roman emperor converted, and to every continent when Europeans later colonised the world, often by very un-Christian means.

“Guns, Germs and Steel”, Dr Diamond’s best-known work, argued that geography and environmental factors, more than culture, enabled the rise of the West. In “Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings”, he turns his polymathic mind to leadership. It is a rollicking read.

Pondering why leaders are necessary in the first place, Dr Diamond describes a trip to New Guinea in 1964, where he watched an isolated highland village discuss some pressing problem. The entire population—perhaps 100 people—stood in a clearing. Anyone who felt like speaking did so, loudly. Everyone knew everyone else, so there was no need for a leader.

When societies grow more complex, however, someone has to co-ordinate decisions. In a town of 20,000, you can’t all stand in a square and shout. What is less obvious, though, is how much difference individual leaders make. There are two ways of assessing this. One is biographical: studying stories of great figures and trying to discern what made them distinct. The other is to look for statistical evidence. Dr Diamond uses both methods.

It is hard to conduct experiments with presidents. You cannot put Kamala Harris in charge of a duplicate America to see if she might have done a better job than Donald Trump. But you can devise natural experiments, such as observing what happens when leaders die of natural causes.

One study looked at 183 heads of government who died or were forced to retire between 1875 and 2004. Subsequent economic growth was on average the same as when a leader did not die in office. But this average disguised a wide variance: it was much more likely to increase or decrease a lot. The most probable explanation is that it really does matter who is in charge. When an economically incompetent leader falls from his horse, growth goes up; when a competent one does, the opposite happens. This effect, however, was concentrated in autocratic systems, where leaders have more unconstrained power, and was barely detectable in democracies.

The same method casts light on corporate leaders, too. A study in Denmark found that the death of a CEO reduced a company’s profits by 13% on average within two years. When a board member died, by contrast, it had no discernible effect.

Leaders, in short, are important. But how to become a better one? Being educated helps. When a college-educated president or prime minister is succeeded by one who never made it past high school, the economy tends to do worse. And the field of study that produces political leaders with the best economic record is, unsurprisingly, economics. But for a more fine-grained sense of how to lead, it helps to look at individual case studies.

Dr Diamond cites Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president, who set a poor, obscure country on a path to prosperity. At independence in 1966, Botswana’s prospects seemed dismal. It had seven miles of paved road, 22 university graduates, no known natural resources and no reason to suppose it would avoid the bloody strife that gripped post-colonial Africa.

Then it struck diamonds—lots of them—and its tribes had an obvious reason to fight. Khama kept the peace by assigning mineral rights to the state, rather than the tribe (his own) under whose land the gems were found. Having studied at Oxford, he knew enough about the modern world to create a modern, clean civil service. Yet he was grounded enough in local tradition to remain popular. (He always carried a bag of dried caterpillars, a village snack, in his pocket.) And he was cautious enough to stay out of the politics of Botswana’s neighbour, South Africa, even if he personally loathed apartheid. Under him, Botswana had the fastest-growing economy in the world. Dr Diamond makes a convincing case that no other leader could have done what he did.

You might conclude from this and other examples that good presidents seek to represent the whole country, rather than just their tribe; that they learn from the best minds and that they avoid picking fights with neighbours. Yet plenty of people win power without these qualities. Many voters like their leaders tribal, belligerent and scornful of expertise; hence the recent surge of populist nationalism.

In the end, trying to pin down what makes a good leader is hard because so many useful qualities are useful only in the appropriate dose. Tenacity is great, but not when it hardens into stubbornness. Courage, but not recklessness; compassion, but not being a soft touch; vision, but not loopiness. A point Dr Diamond hints at but does not explore is that the people who select leaders, in politics, business and other spheres, have a duty to choose soberly; that they should have realistic expectations of what a leader can accomplish and reject the conmen who promise instant golden ages. It is a duty often neglected. ■