Briefly: I got paid — and still get paid — a lot more to find fault than I did to be nice to people. When I was an analyst at Forrester Research, my job was to know everything possible about the businesses and processes I wrote about. For ten years, that was the television industry….
The world is changing rapidly before our eyes. If you advise decision-makers, they crave your leadership right now. But it’s a terrifying moment — you can’t just charge blithely ahead, fast forwarding past a crisis that has affected all of us. Whether you call yourself an analyst, a thought leader, a public speaker, or an…
There’s a misconception that the purpose of experts is to tell you what to do. That’s not right. What they do is help you think. Imagine that you are a person making a momentous decision. You could be the CEO of a large company pondering an acquisition, a consumer deciding whether or not to buy…
The PRSA 2017 International Conference is in Boston this year, starting this weekend. My talk on Monday at 5pm is called “How to Think Like an Analyst (or Influence One).” It’s in the Suffolk room at the Marriott Copley Place. I’ll be covering topics including: What is a thought leader? How are thought leaders different…
Twenty years as an analyst warped my sense of time. Instead of living in the moment — I foraged, looking back, around, and forward for evidence and opportunity. To the analyst or futurist . . . The past is research fodder The analyst is constantly gathering fuel for arguments. The best fuel is lying around…
I spent 20 years as an analyst at Forrester Research. Now I sell my insights to companies and prospective authors as a consultant. While analysts and consultants have a lot in common, their approaches are different. The analyst focuses on talking over listening This is based on my experience as an analyst, working with and competing…
When you plan, do you imagine things will change, or stay pretty much the same? Both are biases; both are right; both are wrong. Technology analysts won’t ever come out and say it, but they have an inherent bias. They always see change coming over the horizon. Your business is shifting to the cloud. Television…
Too much of what I read, masquerading as analysis, is just polemics. That’s a shame, because polemics generates more heat than light. Basically, there are two ways of arguing. When you argue polemically, you start with a position. For example, you may start with the idea that social media marketing is effective, or that gun…
I’ve learned to anticipate what’s going to happen. You can, too, if you combine experience with seeing. I’ll be bombing down a busy city street on my bike, as I have for the last 40 years. I can read the car that’s angled 15 degrees to the left, the truck idling anxiously at the red light,…