Success Quote by John Naisbitt

Naisbitt’s line flatters the reader’s appetite for inevitability while quietly selling a worldview: history has a direction, and smart people don’t waste energy fighting it. The horse metaphor does a lot of work. A trend isn’t a neutral data pattern; it’s a living force with momentum, temperament, and the capacity to throw you. That framing turns “forecasting” into a kind of practical horsemanship: less prophecy than balance, timing, and nerve.

The specific intent is managerial persuasion. In the corporate and policy cultures Naisbitt influenced, “adaptability” is a virtue and resistance is a cost center. By making the alternative to trend-riding sound like an amateur’s mistake (trying to steer a galloping animal backwards), he gives executives moral permission to align with whatever is already winning: technology shifts, demographic changes, market tastes. It’s a justification for reorgs, pivots, and “we had to” decisions that might otherwise look like capitulation or opportunism.

Subtext: agency is real, but limited. You can choose when to mount up and how to sit the saddle, yet the destination is partly prewritten. That’s comforting in an era obsessed with disruption, because it suggests there are handrails in chaos - the future has tracks if you look hard enough.

Context matters: Naisbitt emerged as a guru of “megatrends,” when late-20th-century America wanted big, legible narratives to navigate globalization and the information economy. The warning is also embedded: ride blindly and you’re still at the mercy of the animal. Trends reward alignment, not virtue.