Research on business leadership, discussed by historian Jared Diamond, found that individual leaders account on average for between 15 to 30% of the variation in company profits, with the calendar year contributing about 2%, and industry and company history accounting for the rest. Diamond also found that most leaders, tested against alternative candidates who could plausibly have done the same job, do not meet a standard of unique qualification: for example, out of a population of about 340 million people in the United States, no single figure such as Jeff Bezos could be shown to be the only person capable of founding Amazon.
The findings appeared in Harvard Business Review, published on 1 September 2026, in an HBR IdeaCast interview with Jared Diamond, author of Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?
Source: Harvard Business Review, 2026-09-01.