How believing in empathy, relationships, and humanity both cost me and still gives me hope for what comes next.
I crossed the five-decade mark in my career with a feeling I did not expect. Gratitude, yes. Pride, often. But also a quiet, persistent frustration that has been growing louder the more biographies I read, especially Barry Diller’s Who Knew and Tom Freston’s Uncluttered. Diller’s title says it all.” Who knew?”
I thought I knew. I believed I understood the leaders I met with, consulted for, competed with, collaborated with, and in some cases even led. I believed the conversations in the room were the real conversations. I believed decisions were driven by strategy, values, and long-term vision more than by hidden incentives, personal fears, internal politics, or financial pressures invisible to anyone without a seat at a very specific table.
That was my naivete.
I have been fortunate beyond measure. I worked with every major legacy media company across every category. I collaborated with leaders at every major advertising holding company and trade association. I advised executives at more than thirty Fortune 500 companies, including deep partnerships with General Motors, Campbell Soup, TJX Corp, Saks Fifth Avenue, Coca-Cola, Sears, Coors, Clorox, Reebok, and others. I coordinated major business initiatives with Disney, Sony, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros. On paper, it looks like access, influence, success.
And yet, looking back, I now see how little I truly understood about the financial realities driving so many of the decisions that shaped our industry and, ultimately, led many of these companies to the struggles they face today. I mistook intelligence for wisdom. Power for clarity. Confidence for alignment.
That same naivete fueled my writing.
In 1998, I wrote Reconnecting with Customers in the Relationship Age, warning media companies that choosing commoditization over brand relationships would extract a long-term penalty far greater than any short-term digital gain. In 2006, HookedUp identified a rising generation and offered a tutorial on who they were becoming, long before anyone called them Gen Z. In 2026, The Future of Men predicted cultural and economic realities that others are now monetizing as if they were surprises. And in 2025, The Tao of Leadership in the AI Age doubled down on something many now dismiss as quaint.
Optimism.
Earlier still, in the 1990s, I co-founded a television production studio funded by ten leading advertisers to reinvent the economics of TV advertising. We underestimated the conspiratorial power of network sales organizations and agency media leaders to protect their own interests over those of their clients. I believed logic would prevail. I believed alignment was possible. I believed shared value mattered more than control. We see those same realities in an impressions marketplace defined by principal and retail media.
Who knew.
Today, leaders tell us technology is advancing four to ten times faster than Moore’s Law. Planning, they say, is obsolete. Strategy must be replaced by constant pivots. My instinct has always been to disagree. Not because technology is slow, because it isn’t, but because humanity should not be optional.
In The Tao of Leadership and my upcoming book, Your Third Brain, my naivete remains front and center. I continue to believe that the greatest and most sustainable growth comes from leading with empathy, listening, belonging, harmony, and balance. I continue to believe relationships drive premium value. That trust compounds. That cultures outperform code.
Yet at nearly every turn, business leaders choose the path of quarterly performance to satisfy the hunger of Wall Street. They optimize for short-term profit through technology-led and data-driven investments, hoping to stay just ahead of regulation, disruption, and economic instability. The future they pursue is rarely defined by service to their people, their customers, or the planet. It is defined by fear of missing numbers.
And still, I remain stubbornly hopeful.
I believe in co-intelligence. In technointelligence paired with technointuition. In artificial general intelligence not as a replacement for humanity, but as a mirror demanding that we show up more human, not less. I believe in the Nexus Generation, GenNexus, the first generation born after 2020, who will not separate technology from identity, ethics from innovation, or intelligence from empathy.
What I fear is not that we lack the ideas. It is that markets, leaders, and capital systems, even when they agree with these values, may be unable to resist the forces pulling us further from relationship, from empathic leadership, from environments where everyone belongs, from listening that actually hears.
This is not a lament. It is an invitation. For those who care. For those who believe. For those who are committed to a different answer.
Your support for The Myers Report @ Substack; the new podcast Lead Human with Jack Myers & Tim Spengler; my books (The Tao of Leadership, GenNexus: The Future of Being, and Your Third Brain: Powering a Future of Unimagined Possibilities, available at all booksellers and especially Barnes & Noble), is not about sales. It is about validation. It is about proof that a career spent arguing for humanity was not naive, not misguided, not misled.
If you walk with me, you give me hope that ‘Who Knew’ is not the final chapter. That knowing, together, is still possible.
