Ancient Egypt - Lessons in Leadership (Maxim 1)

Leadership is achieving goals through other people so the best leaders harness all their people’s talents and knowledge. Leaders and experts, be they political, military or commercial, should listen to the lower ranks who often have more knowledge and see more clearly.

Leaders and experts who intimidate people are more likely to make bad decisions. Followers will not speak truth to power if they feel intimidated. One strategy for the leader is to encourage different points of view and judge each on its merits to arrive at the best decision.

As we will see, these truths have been known since the beginning of history.

What was the Instruction of Ptah-hotep?

Ptah-hotep was a vizier (chief minister) in ancient Egypt under Pharaoh Djedkare Isesi of the Fifth Dynasty, ruling around 2400–2350 BCE. The aged Ptah-hotep is approaching death and he addresses his lord, the Pharaoh:

O Prince, my Lord, the end of life is at hand; old age descendeth upon me, feebleness cometh and childishness is renewed.

He asks permission from the pharaoh to compose a guide for his son and successor. The Pharaoh commands Ptah-hotep in turn:

Instruct him then in the words of old time, may he be a wonder unto the children of princes.

There follows a guide with 37 maxims on how to deal with people in different stations of life. These maxims are sometimes considered to be the earliest known book in history. However, the surviving text is the Middle Kingdom Prisse Papyrus, centuries later than Ptah-hotep, and most Egyptologists treat the attribution as a literary convention.

Maxim 1:

Be not proud because thou art learned; but discourse with the ignorant man as with a sage. >For no limit can be set to skill, neither is there any craftsman that possesseth full advantages. Fair speech is more rare than the emerald that is found by slave-maidens on the pebbles.

Battiscombe Gunn 1906 translation (The Instruction of Ptah-hotep and the Instruction of Ke’gemni: The Oldest Books in the World)

Do not discount what others say or look down on them even if they are less powerful or less knowledgeable than you, for ability and intelligence are relative. Precious stones such as emeralds stand for gems of knowledge that are found by slave-maidens, the lower social orders, amongst the pebbles of common knowledge strewn everywhere.

How can leaders and experts make better decisions?

Machiavelli believes that the common man can bring useful perspective to decision-making for leaders:

Nor do I hold with those who regard it as a presumption if a man of low and humble condition dare to discuss and settle the concerns of princes; because, just as those who draw landscapes place themselves below in the plain to contemplate the nature of the mountains and of lofty places, and in order to contemplate the plains place themselves upon high mountains, even so to understand the nature of the people it needs to be a prince, and to understand that of princes it needs to be of the people.

Machiavelli, The Prince, DEDICATION To the Magnificent Lorenzo Di Piero De’ Medici, Translated by W. K. Marriott

Ray Dalio explicitly lays this out as a vital leadership tool:

The more open-minded you are, the less likely you are to deceive yourself—and the more likely it is that others will give you honest feedback. If they are “believable” people (and it’s very important to know who is “believable” ), you will learn a lot from them.

Principles: Life and Work, Part 2 Life Principles 1.3

Leaders should not assume that they are the most intelligent person in the room but allow for the possibility that their followers are smart and will work things out. All knowledge is relative. The wise leader learns instead of knowing it all. Expertise can make people less willing to learn because they stop seeing what else there is to learn.

This is set out in Ptah-hotep’s phrase, “no limit can be set to skill”. You need to be secure enough in your abilities and knowledge to admit your limits. The pride of a powerful or knowledgeable person can be an obstacle in decision-making.

How can subordinates support their leaders besides obeying them?

Leaders are more effective if they assume that their subordinates know things that they do not. Subordinates are closer to what is really happening on the ground and are not limited by their preexisting knowledge.

In large, complex organizations, the person at the top may have the big picture but cannot know everything. The best way to find out is through those who work at the more granular level. Good ideas can come from anyone regardless of rank.

Ptah-hotep says this, “discourse with the ignorant man as with a sage”. Talk to somebody even if they are your subordinate or appear less well-educated and knowledgeable because they may still tell you something you do not know or give you an insight you did not think of. Even the weakest person may have something that nobody else has.

Machiavelli believes that common people often know better than a prince and their rule has often produced better government than rule by a prince. In this case, the people govern. In a republic, the leader cannot ignore the people’s judgment because the people hold power. The institution forces the leader to listen while a prince may choose whether to listen or not:

Further, we find that those cities wherein the government is in the hands of the people, in a very short space of time, make marvellous progress, far exceeding that made by cities which have been always ruled by princes; as Rome grew after the expulsion of her kings, and Athens after she freed herself from Pisistratus; and this we can ascribe to no other cause than that the rule of a people is better than the rule of a prince.

Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book 1, Chapter 58 ‘The Multitude is Wiser and More Constant than a Prince’, translated by Ninian Hill Thomson (1883)

For Dalio, you should listen to ‘believable’ people:

believable opinions are most likely to come from people 1) who have successfully accomplished the thing in question at least three times, and 2) who have great explanations of the cause-effect relationships that lead them to their conclusions.

Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work Part 3 Work Principles 5.2b

Dalio’s believability weighting is a filter to track competence rather than rank. He does not necessarily believe that good ideas can come from anyone regardless of rank and that he should talk to an ignorant person as if they were a sage. Instead, he holds that competence is a preliminary filter that makes a person’s ideas more credible. Ptah-hotep says to listen to everyone while Dalio weighs their track record.

What happens if subordinates feel intimidated?

Good advice and feedback become a rarer commodity the higher you climb. As you rise in a company, a military or at court, people are less likely to tell you the truth. Rather they tell you what they think you want to hear. They become flatterers. This is reinforced when pride prevents the leader from accepting advice or criticism as they think they appear weak in front of their inferiors. We can see this in current political figures such as Trump, Putin or Xi Jinping.

Trump is notorious for not being able to handle criticism. He sometimes says he wants input from others:

I like having two people with different points of view. I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go. I certainly have that, and then I make a decision.

Washington Times, March 2018, White House news conference

But at other times, Trump says openly that he trusts his own judgment over his advisers’. For example, the Washington Post reported in November 2018 that Trump said that the Federal Reserve is,

making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.

Washington Post, November 2018, interview with Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey

Trump often retaliates against anybody who offers a different opinion or even just reports facts which he does not like. For example, he fired Erika McEntarfer, the BLS Commissioner, in August 2025 after the July jobs data came in weaker than expected and the previous two months were revised down sharply. The report showed just 73,000 jobs added in July and 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than first estimated. He said the numbers had been rigged with no supporting evidence. Economists blamed the slowdown on his own trade and immigration policies. The data is the message and the person compiling it is the messenger and therefore responsible in his eyes.

Xi Jinping, at a Spring Festival gathering in February 2013 shortly after taking power, said that the Communist Party should be able to accept criticism. He urged non-Party figures to have the courage to tell the truth and “speak words jarring on the ear”. That phrase comes from a Chinese proverb that good advice grates on the ear. At the time, some compared it to Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign which encouraged criticism in 1956 and then punished the critics in the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957.

In a 2021 speech, he warned officials that they must hear the truth and research real problems when they went on inspection trips. He said the fundamental test of an official is whether he can tell the truth and address real issues. However, he punished Gao Shanwen, one of China’s best-known economists, for giving two candid speeches in 2024 about the growth of the economy.

Another case is that of Zhu Hengpeng. He was deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the main state think tank, which reports to China’s cabinet. He made private criticisms about the economy and Xi Jinping in a private WeChat group. He was investigated, removed from his posts and detained. His name disappeared from the CASS website and he has not been seen in public since April 2024.

Putin does not say he knows better but acts like he does. In a televised Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin went round his Security Council asking each member to endorse recognizing the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics”. The foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, began by suggesting that the West be given one last chance to seek peace, which was effectively a show of dissent. Putin cut him off repeatedly as a form of public humiliation. Probably his track record of personal loyalty to Putin saved him from any worse consequences.

How is decision-making affected when leaders and experts intimidate their subordinates?

When leaders signal that their followers’ input does not count, those people go silent and the organization misses errors that the lower ranks can see coming.

Cai Xia taught at the Central Party School in China, the institution that trains senior officials, for about 15 years until her retirement in 2012. In 2020, after a leaked recording in which she called Xi Jinping a “mafia boss” and said he was “killing a party and a country”, she was expelled from the Party and stripped of her pension, and she now lives abroad. She says that bad decisions persist because: “those below are too afraid to tell him and wrong decisions continue to be made until the situation is out of control”.

About five weeks into the Ukraine war in March, 2022, Britain and the U.S. made the claim explicitly that Putin would not accept bad news or feedback about the war, which was not going well for Russia at all.

Speaking in Canberra, GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming said Putin had “massively misjudged” the situation and added, “We believe Putin’s advisers are afraid to tell him the truth.” He said Putin had underestimated Ukrainian resistance, the strength of the international coalition, and the impact of sanctions.

A day earlier, the White House released declassified intelligence that Putin was being misinformed by his advisers. Communications director Kate Bedingfield said Putin felt misled by the Russian military.

The Kremlin denied all this. Dmitry Peskov said Washington simply did not understand Putin or how decisions are made in Moscow.

Defense Secretary Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in August 2025 after his agency’s initial intelligence assessment of damage to Iran’s nuclear sites from U.S. strikes had angered President Trump. Its assessment contradicted claims by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the strikes had totally destroyed the sites. What it actually found was that the nuclear program had only been set back by a few months.

While no official reason was given for the firing, Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called on the administration to show why Kruse was fired. Otherwise, he said, the only assumption could be that it was another politically motivated decision designed to create fear in the intelligence community.

Western intelligence said that Putin’s advisers were afraid to tell him the truth and a few years later, an American intelligence chief was removed after his agency did exactly this: told the president what he did not want to hear.

What is an effective strategy for the leader when taking advice from subordinates?

It is better for a leader to assume they may be wrong and seek out people who disagree with them in order to test their opinions and decision-making. Machiavelli agrees with this but with nuance. He says advisers should speak only when asked and only on the subject they are asked about. He warns that if everybody may tell you the truth, they may lose respect for you. He advocates a limited, controlled openness:

there is no other way of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you; but when everyone may tell you the truth, respect for you abates.

Therefore, a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires, and of none others; but he ought to question them upon everything, and listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions.

Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 23

Controlled openness beats fear because a leader who asks even a limited set of people gets fresh input while one who punishes an inconvenient truth gets nothing. Trump sometimes invites dissent and sometimes punishes it while Xi and Putin say they want truth and frank counsel but punish it in practice. All three cut themselves off from the information a leader needs. They isolate themselves and their bureaucracies have seen so many messengers shot, figuratively or literally, that they censor themselves. The institutions that should be there to support the leaders are weakened.

As Ptah-hotep says at the end of his first maxim, good counsel is “more rare than the emerald that is found by slave-maidens on the pebbles”. Good counsel is rare but leaders make it rarer for themselves if they scare it away. The slave-maidens may find the emerald amongst the pebbles but pharaohs and viziers may never see it if they create an atmosphere of fear.