George F. Colony
As founder, chairman, and CEO of Forrester Research, George is one of the most influential thought leaders in the world of business and technology. Forrester works to ensure clients thrive in their professional roles, and as CEO, George spends much of his time advising chief executives. Over the years he has become a trusted advisor to leaders of top global companies, helping them make great decisions and guiding their success in the complex world of business technology. These organizations include many of the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 — retail companies like Best Buy, media companies like Condé Nast, and tech companies like Cisco.
George personifies the Forrester experience and the company's values with direct, honest advice. Clients seek his guidance on business technology and marketing strategies, IT and personal technology trends, and a range of leadership issues. Throughout his career, George has made provocative, tenacious, and groundbreaking business technology calls, including the birth of client/server computing, the dot-com implosion, the rise of Social Computing, the transition from IT to BT (business technology), and the burgeoning opportunities enabled by the extended Internet (X Internet), which connects the physical world of things to the digital world of information. More recently, he focuses on social technologies — specifically how CEOs can effectively and efficiently enter the social realm and how companies can use product feedback collected through social channels to improve their products — a phenomenon he calls Social Sigma. He is also on the leading edge of what Forrester calls App Internet — the new computing model combining the power of local devices with the scale of the cloud.
Since its inception in 1983, Forrester has become one of the most successful global research and advisory firms, earning awards from Forbes and Fortune, as well as twice being named one of the top places to work in Massachusetts by The Boston Globe.
George has participated in the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, for the past 10 years. There, he has moderated and spoken on panels covering key business technology issues, such as the demise of the Internet bubble, the future of open source, and the evolution of global Innovation Networks, and led a workshop examining the effect of social networking on society. Most recently, George facilitated sessions on succeeding in a universally networked world and governing in the age of the Internet and social media. He also serves as a member of the Forum's Tech Pioneers selection committee.
George has also addressed many other national and international audiences, including the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Aspen, Colo.; the Fortune Global Forum; the SBS Seoul Digital Forum; the United Nations conference, "The Net World Order: Bridging the Global Digital Divide"; the ICT World Forum @ CeBIT; The Commonwealth Club of California; the Media Dealmakers Summit, Cambridge University, and the Churchill Club. He has also spoken at numerous customer events including those for Reed Elsevier, Sogetti, Siemens, and Razorfish.
George's analysis has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Wired, BusinessWeek, Forbes, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, La Tribune, Handelsblatt, and Mashable, among numerous other publications and social media channels, and he has been interviewed on prominent broadcast outlets, such as ABC, CNN, CNBC, and NPR. You can read about George's latest thinking on his blog, The Counterintuitive CEO, and on Twitter.
George was a 2006 recipient of the national Ernst & Young "Entrepreneur of the Year Award" in the services category.
George is a graduate of Harvard University.