Ideas And Book Recommendations In London

This week, I have been in London at two Forrester events, B2B Forum EMEA and Technology & Innovation Forum EMEA. It was a wonderful week spent with clients and Forum attendees. We were immersed in intriguing and breakthrough ideas including minimum viable sovereignty, AEGIS, the B2B go-to-market singularity, and the visibility vacuum — amazing week!

On Monday and Wednesday night, I was at dinners with our Executive Leadership Exchange, executives from some of our leading clients in EMEA including Thales, Bosch, Xerox, SBS, Riyad Bank, Visa, Air Liquide, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, Ericsson, and Shell. The amazing chef staff at Raffles London is shown at left — fantastic dinner!

At the B2B dinner, we discussed a fascinating question: “Given all that is changing in B2B marketing, where should the ‘brand/demand knob’ be tuned?” In other words, how much of the budget should go to brand versus demand generation? Let me say that we had no consensus: Half of the room advocated for a 40:60 brand/demand ratio; the other half of the room went for 100:0 — all brand. This was a real-time reflection of the GTM singularity.

At the tech dinner, we asked, “What does your CEO believe about AI that is untrue?” Great list: “Everything is AI”; “AI will kill all of us”; “Agentic AI will affect B2C but not B2B”; “We have everything we need to build AI in the company.”

Here are the books recommended by the clients:

1. The Algorithm: Musk’s operating model
2. Unreasonable Hospitality: CX on steroids
3. Designing Your Life: as it says
4. Agrippa: how Rome drifted into dictatorship
5. A Year in Provence: escaping to the country
6. Supremacy: the race to dominate AI
7. The Rest Is Science: podcast on how the world works
8. The Center Seat: 55 years of Star Trek — nerd alert!
9. The Hour of the Predator and The Wizard of the Kremlin: charting the rise of autocracy
10. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley destroys democracy
11. The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post: an heiress with an original mind
12. The Art of Fighting: constructive conflict
13. The One Minute Manager: the original business book about letting your reports do their thing
14. The Activator Advantage: how to keep your clients in the professional services world

Thank you to all contributors!