Jared Diamond: The Thought Leader Interview

Near the opening of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), Jared Diamond poses a simple question that informs 480 pages of rich scholarship about the history of human civilization: "Why is it that the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and 168 other Spaniards could travel across the Atlantic Ocean and conquer the Inca Empire, at that time the most powerful state in the New World - instead of the Inca Emperor Atahualpa coming to Spain to capture its King Charles I?" Dr. Diamond, a professor of physiology at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine, wrote the book to show that ancient global forces, such as continental geography and the local availability of domesticable plants and animals, rather than genetic differences among people themselves, account for the successes and failures of civilizations over time. These historic advantages in turn explain why Eurasian civilizations, with their access, for example, to wild horses and wheat, were thriving as farmers and herders for thousands of years, while California Indians and aboriginal Australians continued to live as hunter-gatherers, unable to domesticate the local wild plants (e.g., oak trees) or animals (e.g., kangaroos). Farming societies also provided their members the time and opportunity to develop weapons and transportation; millenia of proximity to domestic animals additionally gave Eurasians immunity to the animal-derived diseases that felled the non-Eurasian peoples that they visited. Guns, Germs, and Steel revives an interdisciplinary approach to human history that passed from fashion after Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. But it's difficult to read this magisterial work, which draws upon ecology, molecular biology, paleobotany, genetics, linguistics, archaeology, and many other fields, without wondering about its specific relevance to contemporary business organizations. For Dr. Diamond's work is, at its root, not just a history of civilization, but a history of innovation and its travels across time, among peoples, and over spatial barriers - subjects near to the heart of any CEO in an organization undergoing change or experiencing competition. It's a subject Dr. Diamond, 64, is happy to engage.