InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 17, 1997
The Golden Gut: George Colony, Forrester
By Claire Tristram
It's a decision-making style he has elevated to a near-religion within Forrester. Colony, 44, has proven on more than one occasion that he has the most golden gut of all.
In 1992, when the Internet was still populated by geeks and nerds, Colony started thinking about what he called the Culture Beast-a mysterious force in popular culture that makes trends happen. Colony hired college students to track down the answers to the questions that kept him up at night: Who decides that this year's fall color is chocolate? How come everyone's listening to these songs on the radio? How does culture happen?
From that research sprang his belief that technology was on the verge of changing popular culture foreve
r. So Colony created a New Media Services group within Forrester. It was a radical departure from his core IT advisory business, but it now represents nearly half
of Forrester's revenue.
"The launch of Wired in 1994 was the first evidence that George was right," says Mary Modahl, a 10-year veteran of Forrester who now heads New Media research along with Bill Bluestein. "George started the service before
Mosaic even shipped. He had a gut about it."
Colony studied government at Harvard, then worked briefly as a paralegal. In 1980, Dale Kutnick, then an executive at the Yankee Group, hired Colony and gave him his first taste of the research business. Three years later, Colony left Yankee to found Forrester.
Kutnick has also moved on, founding Meta Group, a competitor of Forrester. Predictably, he is no fan of Colony's golden-gut decision-making. "Forrester's hallmark is making wild predictions," says Kutnick. "We think customers prefer a more considered approach."
But Colony objects to the n
otion that he and his firm go out of their way to be controversial. "We're in the business of analyzing things that are controversial to begin with," he insists. "We've always been known for making the call. We're always willing to put a stake in the ground. It means we're wrong sometimes, but if we're batting .700, we're doing great."
Colony adds that Forrester focuses on strategic direction, not implementation, on deploying future technologies, not extending the life of existing ones. This model, he adds, helps differentiate Forrester from industry leader Gartner Group. In fact, Colony says 90% of his clients also subscribe to Gartner.
"Clients come to us to define the future," Colony says. "They go to someone else for the implementation. Gartner, Meta, or Giga are in the business of helping the guys in the bowels of Citibank decide whether to buy disk drive A or disk drive B. That's very different from defining the future of the industry. I'm not saying one is better. It's just different."
eorge Colony, founder of Forrester Research, has a name for the kind of decision-making that starts with a question gnawing at the back of your head and ends with a new way of thinking. Colony calls it the
Golden Gut.
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