At The Myers Report, we’ve spent decades building trusted economic forecasts, strategic marketing insights, and actionable operating models for leaders in media, advertising, and technology. Our white papers are not academic exercises; they are blueprints for growth. But they are also, increasingly, roadmaps for resilience. In a world where technological disruption is no longer a future event but a daily reality, our job as intelligence providers is not only to illuminate what’s happening in the marketplace, but to offer guidance on how to lead through it — humanely, wisely, and sustainably.
That’s why this particular white paper — Countering the Boss Culture Comeback: Leadership in the Age of Disengagement and Distraction — may be the most urgent in our 24-paper series. It exists not only to analyze the measurable return of authoritarian, top-down management styles, but to challenge their reemergence and the dangerous assumptions behind them. Link below to download the white paper.
Make no mistake: Boss Culture is back, and it’s growing. Rigid return-to-office mandates. Quiet hostility toward DEI initiatives. C-suites embracing transactional models of leadership while workforce trust erodes. Across industries, leaders are mistaking pressure for performance and control for competence. In this moment of uncertainty, it may feel expedient — even personally opportune — for executives to reassert dominance in response to investor scrutiny, AI anxiety, or cultural unrest. But this is a dangerous folly.
The return of Boss Culture is not merely outdated; it’s a leadership regression that threatens to reverse decades of progress in employee well-being, organizational agility, and inclusive growth. It may temporarily mask dysfunction, but it compounds risk. It undermines trust, increases attrition, drives disengagement, and ultimately depletes the very creative, human capital that will differentiate successful organizations in the AI era.
That’s why this white paper belongs not only in your hands as a senior leader — it belongs in the hands of everyone in your organization responsible for people management. Your HR leads. Your department heads. Your emerging team managers. Anyone shaping culture, mentoring others, managing talent pipelines, or overseeing professional development. Because what’s truly at stake here isn’t just leadership style; it’s the future of your company’s ability to attract, retain, and grow its next generation of talent. And the financial implications of that are enormous.
We understand the business pressures you face. Today’s “future” used to be forecast in five-to-ten-year plans. Now, it shifts daily. Every advance in generative AI, machine intelligence, and cloud automation demands new decisions and recalibrated organizational responses. We know what it means to balance quarterly earnings expectations against long-term imperatives. But retreating to Boss Culture is not a viable strategy. It is not adaptive. It is not resilient. It is not human.
That’s why we’re offering this white paper free of charge. Our white paper series, from our 70-page 2025/2026 Media and Marketing Economic Forecast, to our insider’s view of agency holding company operating models, to our deep dives on retail and commerce media, Agentic AI, and workplace reinvention — these papers are designed to support your organization in both growing and evolving. We publish them to help you not only understand the shifting dynamics of our industry but to lead through them.
I hope you’ll read this paper with a wide lens. Use it to audit your own leadership culture. Use it to engage your teams in discussion. Use it to ask the hard questions: Are we designing for high performance or just enforcing compliance? Are we listening to our teams or managing by assumption? Are we investing in the skills that will future proof our talent or reverting to short-term comfort zones that will cost us dearly?
The challenges ahead are real. Contraction, consolidation, and the concentration of capabilities are reshaping every corner of our business. But those same forces, if met with empathetic, emotionally intelligent leadership can catalyze renewal, innovation, and cultural strength.
That’s the future we’re committed to. That’s the leadership model we believe in. And that’s what you’ll find in the white paper available for download here.
Thank you for reading — and for sharing your comments addressed to myersreport@gmail.com.
Jack Myers
Chairman, MediaVillage and The Myers Report
Author, The Tao of Leadership: Harmonizing Technological Innovation and Human Creativity in the AI Era and The Future of Men: Masculinity in the 21st Century
