As writers often do, the American scientist and historian Jared Diamond, who won a deserved Pulitzer for 1997’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, goes back to The Bard for a comparison he employs multiple times in this admirably transdisciplinary (history, sociology, economics, etc) examination of leadership.

An exceptional leader passes what he calls “the Hamlet test”. We know the work of Elizabethan contemporaries such as Johnson, Marlowe and Webster “but not even their best plays remotely approach in quality Hamlet” and if Shakespeare had died young or never been born at all, it wouldn’t have made their plays any better. There is “a strong argument then that Shakespeare was uniquely talented”.

Applying this to leaders in other fields, Diamond argues that we can’t be sure another citizen might not have achieved similar results if Napoleon, Franklin Roosevelt or many others had not come along. But there are leaders that do pass his Danish prince decider.

As the world’s third poorest country, Botswana didn’t seem to have much going for it when it gained independence in 1966. The landlocked, mostly barren and largely uneducated nation struck it lucky when “the world’s richest diamond reserves” were discovered there in 1967, something which surely upset the recently departed British. Still, it all could have been squandered but for the leadership of founding president Seretse Khama.

Khama was savvy enough to keep relations sweet with Botswana’s neighbours and, as a former chief of the Bangwato tribe on whose land the diamonds were found, he was able to secure them for the country’s benefit rather than the tribe alone. None of his fellow countrymen were equipped to pull off such a feat.

Diamond’s test is also applicable to business. He steps past figures such as Jeff Bezos because there were multiple online retailers which sprang up around the same time as Amazon, one of which would have cornered the market if Bezos hadn’t, and plumps instead for Lynda and Stewart Resnick, who created the pomegranate juice industry in the US because they did what others could not.

While Diamond gets slightly bogged down in statistics here and there, his treatise is an interesting one, which finds room for everything from sports coaching to inbred royal families, and an account of Christianity’s success (a good marketing man such as the apostle Paul helped, as did Constantine’s conversion). It’s also very entertaining.

Pat Carty is a freelance reviewer