"You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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