about me

I’m Josh Bernoff.

I’ve been a professional writer since 1982. I’ve coauthored three books on business strategy, including Groundswell, which was a bestseller. And I’m passionate about clear, brief, fascinating communication.

For 20 years at Forrester Research, I wrote and edited reports on the future of technology. I learned to do kick­ass analysis of business strategy, then taught others to do so. In my last five years there, as Senior Vice President, Idea Development, I identified, developed, and promoted Forrester’s most powerful and influential ideas. I gave hundreds of speeches around the world, got quoted in every news source you can name, and gave strategy advice to countless clients from the world’s largest companies and tech vendors. I also created Technographics, the segmentation that launched Forrester’s highly successful consumer survey business.

While at Forrester, I cowrote three books.

• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (HBR Press, 2008), written with Charlene Li, is a BusinessWeek bestseller and the defining book for how companies can profit from blogs, social networks like Facebook, and other social media. Abbey Klaassen, the editor of Advertising Age, picked it as “the best book ever written on marketing and media.”
• The Mobile Mind Shift: Engineer Your Business to Win in the Mobile Moment (Groundswell Press, 2014), written with Ted Schadler and Julie Ask, is a comprehensive guide to mobile strategy. In his blurb about the book, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, said this: “Those who seize the opportunities described in The Mobile Mind Shift will grow at the expense of those who don’t.”
• Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, Transform Your Business (HBR Press 2010), written with Ted Schadler, is a book about management in the era of empowered customers and employees. We wrote it up in the Harvard Business Review.

At Forrester I edited two books by other analysts: Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business (New Harvest/HMH, 2012) by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine and Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation (Amazon Publishing, 2013) by James McQuivey.

Before Forrester I spent 14 years in technology startups writing everything from product definitions to online tutorials to press releases. I studied mathematics in the Ph.D. program at MIT and was a National Science Foundation fellow.

I like recreational biking and cracking wise in front of audiences. I am married with two children and I live in Arlington, Massachusetts.