Life & Wisdom Quote by Jared Diamond

Diamond is selling a kind of hard-earned optimism that still keeps its knife out. The opening nod to pessimism flatters the listener’s cynicism - yes, it used to be rational to assume corporations would always choose profit over planet or people - then pivots to a claim that would have sounded naive in the late 1990s: major companies can behave “remarkably cleanly.” The adverb matters. He’s not promising purity, just a noticeable shift from the old baseline of impunity.

The subtext is strategic: if you want environmental or social progress at scale, you don’t get it by pretending business is irrelevant. You get it by forcing, coaxing, or incentivizing corporate power to align with public goals. Diamond’s career is built on showing how societies collapse when they ignore ecological limits; here, he’s implying that the modern twist is corporate self-preservation. “Cleanly” isn’t just ethics, it’s risk management: supply chains, litigation, reputational blowback, investor pressure, regulation-on-the-horizon.

Then he slips in the most controversial idea: the CEO as “driving force.” That’s both a pragmatic observation and a subtle warning about how fragile the progress is. If change depends on a leader’s will, it’s vulnerable to succession, activist investors, or a bad quarter. The careful qualifier - “in some cases, although not all cases” - is Diamond protecting himself from hero worship while still gesturing at agency: institutions matter, but individuals can accelerate or stall them.

Contextually, it’s an argument shaped by the post-ESG era: less “capitalism will save us,” more “the incentives are shifting, and we’d be foolish not to use that leverage.”