Antiquity’s Lessons in Leadership

Old Mediterranean ruins offer perspectives for today

A few months ago, I found myself standing with my wife, Heather, among the ruins of Ephesus in modern-day Turkey.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, it was a thriving city of roughly 250,000 people, a centre of commerce, culture, and innovation. Today, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site of old stone. Tourists wander the streets where merchants once traded, while archaeologists carefully uncover what time has buried.

A few days later, sailing near Mykonos, we passed an island that once held another bustling city. At its peak, it was home to more than 100,000 people and served as a major trading hub for the eastern Mediterranean. Today, there are no permanent residents: just ruins, a few temporary trailers for archaeologists, and the echoes of what once was.

You can’t stand in places like that without gaining at least a little perspective.

It reminded me of another experience from years ago, paddling through the Grand Canyon. In some places, you can pull your raft alongside a sheer rock wall and touch stone that has been exposed for two billion years. You look straight up to see the sky and realize, in the grand scheme of things, we’re only passing through.

That perspective is strangely freeing. We matter, of course, but through the lens of antiquity, our careers, companies, and even civilization can seem a lot less significant than they do day-to-day. That’s a good thing.

Long-gone leaders, timeless patterns

As leaders, it’s easy to become consumed by quarterly targets, market volatility, organizational politics, or the latest crisis dominating the headlines. Every problem feels urgent, every setback monumental. But ancient history suggests otherwise.

Walking through Greece and Turkey, I was struck by how every tour guide seemed to tell a similar story, of empire and conquest, of leaders defeated and vanquished. It was astounding to stand in the place where a once-great civilization built something remarkable, only to learn of how the next victors would tear much of it down before building again. 

It made me wonder how much human energy has been spent destroying what others created rather than building on it. And that got me thinking about organizations and their cultures, and what it takes to build one that is, if not everlasting, durable. 

People often talk about great workplace cultures as though they simply exist, but culture is more like a garden than a monument. It requires constant attention. The moment you stop tending it, something else begins to grow. In physics, entropy describes the natural tendency of systems toward disorder. Left alone, things fall apart. Buildings decay. Gardens become overgrown. Organizations drift. This is also true of leadership.

If leaders stop investing energy into trust, communication, shared purpose, and development, those things don't remain frozen in place. They gradually erode.

I've seen it happen time and time again. Companies with incredible cultures slowly become bureaucratic. Teams that once collaborated openly retreat into silos. People who once believed deeply in a shared mission begin to feel like interchangeable parts.

The steady state of human nature 

Standing on the Acropolis in Athens, looking at structures that have endured for millennia, I found myself thinking less about ancient engineering and more about ancient leadership.

Somehow, 2,500 years ago, people quarried marble from mountains kilometres away, transported it without modern machinery, and coordinated thousands of individuals to create an epic architectural work. Whatever tools they lacked, they clearly understood something about shared purpose and collective effort. 

We visited a site often described as the birthplace of democracy. Whatever the imperfections and contradictions of this political system in ancient Greece and still today, it represented an extraordinary idea: that progress comes not from one person having all the answers, but from people participating in something larger than themselves.

Stewardship trumps dictatorship

When I look back at my decades-long career (a blink in history), I see that the most successful organizations and leaders share a democratic approach built around shared values, mutual trust, and the belief that everyone has something meaningful to contribute. It's messier than a command-and-control dictatorship. Consensus takes longer than issuing orders. Building alignment requires patience, but the results are more resilient.

That's why I continue to believe that leadership isn't really about authority, but stewardship. The ancient world, and its ruins that are preserved today, embody this physically. To me, they stand as a reminder that most of us are temporary caretakers of organizations that existed before.

Our responsibility isn't to leave our fingerprints on everything or tear down whatever’s in our paths. As we’re seeing today, the Silicon Valley adage to “move fast and break things” can leave a trail of destruction under its relentless push for innovation. Better to have a mindset of leaving things stronger than we found them. If we do our jobs well, they will continue long after we're gone.

History, repeating

The greatest lesson I brought home from Greece? The monuments endure because generation after generation chose to preserve them, and the civilizations that lasted shared a purpose bigger than any one ruler. Today, organizations that thrive do the same, continually investing in culture, developing leaders, and renewing their values. 

Leadership has always been hard. That was true  2,500 years ago, and it's true today. But it's also one of humanity's oldest and most rewarding pursuits: helping people accomplish together what none could achieve alone.  For me, a deep-time lens makes today's challenges feel less overwhelming, and the work of building something worthwhile feels even more important.