Aging & Wisdom Quote by Malcolm Forbes

Forbes lands the punch by treating corporate seriousness as a kind of literary genre. “Facts, not fiction” is the cliché businessmen like to wear as armor: rational, sober, numbers-first. Then he slips in the dagger: “old five-year projections,” a phrase that sounds like an accountant’s filing label but plays like a punchline. The joke is that the most revered artifacts of business culture - forecasts, roadmaps, targets - age like pulp novels. Read them a few years later and the plot holes are humiliating.

The intent isn’t to sneer at commerce so much as to puncture the self-mythology of it. Business wants the moral high ground over politics, art, and the media by claiming proximity to reality. Forbes, a publisher who spent his life around both storytelling and money, exposes the overlap: projections are narratives with numbers attached, designed to persuade investors, soothe boards, and impose order on uncertainty. Calling them “fiction” isn’t an accusation of lying as much as a reminder that prediction is always a form of authorship.

Subtext: the marketplace rewards confidence more than epistemic humility. Five-year plans often function as performative documents - less about being right than about proving you have a plan, a worldview, a storyline where growth happens on schedule. The context is late-20th-century managerial capitalism, when strategic planning became its own priesthood and spreadsheets gained an aura of objectivity. Forbes’ line reads like a publisher’s aside from the back row: the people who insist they don’t do stories are, quietly, some of the most committed storytellers in the room.