CEO, Forrester Research, Inc.
As founder, Chairman, and CEO of Forrester Research, George is one of the most influential thought leaders in the world of business and technology.
George founded Forrester in his basement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1983. He, alongside many talented and passionate colleagues, has built the company into one of the world’s most successful independent research and advisory firms, with locations in more than 21 countries. Forrester helps business and technology leaders use customer obsession to accelerate growth by being customer-led, insights-driven, fast, and connected — customer-obsessed organizations grow faster and are more profitable than their customer-aware competitors. George personifies the Forrester experience and the company’s values with direct, honest advice. “When I meet with a client, I have one mission,” George says. “To tell them something they don’t know.”
Throughout his career, George has made bold and counterintuitive calls about business and technology. These include the birth of client/server computing; the growth of the internet economy and the dot-com implosion; the rise of social computing; the transition from centralized IT to the cloud; and the emergence of the executable and extended internet. George has characterized true artificial intelligence applications as “… quietly valuable, modest, and they won’t impress your mother.” Most recently, he has thrown cold water on the blockchain market, predicting that only 16% of corporate systems will use the scheme by 2032.
George has addressed international audiences in a number of prestigious settings, including World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, and in Dalian, China; the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference; the SBS Seoul Digital Forum; the United Nations’ “The Net World Order: Bridging the Global Digital Divide” conference; the ICT World Forum @CeBIT; Le Web; Cambridge University; The Commonwealth Club of California; and the Churchill Club. He has also lectured at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
George’s analysis has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, MIT Sloan Management Review, and numerous other media outlets.
George is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut, and has advised the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in various capacities. You can read George’s latest thinking on his blog, The Counterintuitive CEO, or on Twitter at @gcolony.
George is a graduate of Harvard University.
