Success Quote by John Naisbitt

It’s a throwaway jab with a consultant’s precision: not “lawyers are snakes,” but “lawyers are beavers,” diligent creatures whose talent is turning moving water into a stoppage. Naisbitt, a business-minded futurist, isn’t condemning law as immoral; he’s targeting how legal thinking behaves inside institutions. The “mainstream” is where momentum lives: markets, innovation, decisions that have to ship on Tuesday. Put lawyers there, he implies, and they do what they’re trained to do - reduce uncertainty, contain risk, build structures. Those structures can be smart engineering, but they’re also, by design, obstruction.

The subtext is managerial frustration with a particular kind of power. Lawyers rarely have to “win” in the marketplace; they win by preventing losses, avoiding liability, keeping options open. That incentive system rewards “no” more reliably than “go.” So the joke masks a serious critique of modern bureaucracy: a culture that treats movement as danger and process as virtue. The beaver metaphor lands because it’s not malevolent. Beavers are industrious, even admirable. The dam is useful - until it floods someone else’s field, blocks migration, or turns a river into a stagnant pond.

In context, Naisbitt’s era was defined by accelerating change and a rising compliance state: more regulation, more litigation, more reputational risk. The line flatters entrepreneurs and executives as the natural current, while casting counsel as internal environmental engineers whose success can look indistinguishable from paralysis. It’s a warning delivered as a joke: if your default response to complexity is to build dams, you’ll eventually run out of river.