Time & Perspective Quote by Warren G. Bennis

Bennis is warning leaders against a peculiarly corporate form of panic: the kind where you end up in the future by accident, apologizing your way into it. “Walk” versus “back” is doing a lot of work here. Walking implies sightlines, choice, and posture. You face what’s coming, you set a direction, you bring others with you. Backing in is the opposite: you’re moving, technically, but your eyes are fixed on the past - protecting legacy revenue, defending old hierarchies, optimizing yesterday’s metrics until disruption physically shoves you forward.

The intent is practical, not poetic. Bennis, a foundational thinker in leadership studies, spent decades pushing management culture away from command-and-control and toward what we’d now call adaptive leadership: leaders as sense-makers, not just operators. The subtext is that “strategy” isn’t a document; it’s a stance. Companies get trapped when they treat change as a compliance task - a reorg, a “digital transformation,” a new software stack - while the underlying assumptions remain untouched. Backing into the future looks like bolting innovation onto a business model you’re unwilling to interrogate.

Contextually, this lands in the late 20th/early 21st-century churn Bennis chronicled: globalization, accelerating tech cycles, flatter organizations, skeptical workers. The line also smuggles in a moral claim. Walking suggests responsibility. If you choose the direction, you own the consequences - for employees, customers, and the culture you build. Backing in lets leaders pretend the market made them do it. Bennis is calling that bluff.