Time & Perspective Quote by Arnold H. Glasow

Glasow’s line lands like a wry memo from the corner office: the future isn’t some distant, abstract horizon, it’s an invoice that shows up early, due immediately. As a businessman rather than a philosopher, he isn’t selling awe about progress; he’s naming a recurring operational failure. The joke hinges on “usually.” We like to imagine we’re rational planners, but in practice we’re reactive creatures who call our own delay “unexpected change.”

The intent is pragmatic and lightly accusatory: stop treating preparedness as a feeling and start treating it as a discipline. “Arrives” personifies the future as a guest who doesn’t respect your schedule, which is exactly how markets, technologies, and crises behave. The subtext is that readiness is rarely about information; it’s about the willingness to act before certainty. Companies see the trend, hear the warnings, commission the report and still get blindsided because readiness requires costs up front: training, redundancy, experimentation, and the political pain of telling people their current expertise won’t be enough.

Culturally, the quote fits a postwar-to-late-20th-century managerial worldview in which change is constant and the penalty for complacency is immediate. It also doubles as a personal indictment: you can read it as a jab at procrastination dressed up in corporate realism. The wit works because it collapses a grand concept (the future) into a familiar annoyance (bad timing), exposing how much of “being unprepared” is self-inflicted.