Jared Diamond

On 13 March 1930, a speeding truck came within inches of killing a little-known political agitator riding in a chauffeured car. The chauffeur accelerated, the man survived, and three years later Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Would World War II and the Holocaust have happened anyway? In this keynote, drawn from his forthcoming book Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings (September 2026), Jared Diamond tackles one of the most consequential questions in leadership: when does an individual leader actually change the course of events, and when would history, business, or a team have arrived at much the same place regardless?
Ranging across history, business, sports, and religion, Diamond moves beyond the traditional biography, which too often lets different authors reach opposite conclusions from the same facts, and introduces two rigorous tools for real answers: natural experiments, where leaders live, die, or fall ill as events unfold, and the "Hamlet test," which asks whether any rival could have done what a given leader did. Applying them to figures from Jeff Bezos and Charles de Gaulle to Winston Churchill and Genghis Khan, he shows that some leaders deliberately chose the right moment, some recognized an opening they did not create, and some simply happened to stand in the right place at the right time. For executives, investors, and boards, it is a provocative, evidence-based framework for judging when leadership truly matters, how to value it, and even how to choose a career path with clear eyes about risk and reward.

Drawing on the research behind Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, Diamond examines the structural forces — geographic, environmental, and institutional — that have determined the fate of civilizations across millennia. For senior leaders, the lesson is not historical trivia but strategic insight: the same dynamics that caused past societies to flourish or implode are at work in today's organizations, industries, and nations. Audiences leave with a powerful long-lens framework for thinking about competitive advantage, systemic risk, and the decisions that compound over decades.

Some societies facing environmental and institutional stress adapted and survived; others collapsed. In this keynote, Diamond translates the findings of Collapse into a practical framework for organizational resilience — examining the warning signs that leaders miss, the short-term thinking that accelerates long-term failure, and the decision-making cultures that allow institutions to course-correct before crisis becomes irreversible. A rigorous, evidence-based session for executives grappling with sustainability, risk management, and the pressure of short-term performance cycles.

Based on his decades of fieldwork in New Guinea and the research behind The World Until Yesterday, Diamond explores what modern institutions — in healthcare, education, conflict resolution, and leadership — can genuinely learn from traditional societies. The talk dismantles the assumption that technological progress is synonymous with human progress, offering leaders a set of counterintuitive practices drawn from societies that solved, in their own ways, problems that modern organizations still struggle with.

Why are some regions consistently more innovative, more prosperous, and more strategically dominant than others? Diamond applies the analytical framework of Guns, Germs, and Steel to contemporary geopolitics and global business — examining how geography continues to shape trade routes, resource distribution, technological diffusion, and institutional design in the 21st century. Essential viewing for executives with global operations or an interest in the structural forces shaping international competition.