A common business adage these days is that "if you don't move forward, you will fall behind." This is reasonable, in a sense. There is a good chance that in a competitive environment, maintaining the status quo internally will give others an opportunity to make advances and leave you in the dust. In effect, you indeed fall backward.

I have a problem with this, in that it implies that our approach should be to aggressively stay ahead of the competition in order to survive.