The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

I cried on stage this week, in front of thousands of people. In front of the entire industry. The press in the room wrote about it . I couldn't believe it. Some people will tell you it isn't becoming for a CEO to cry in public, much less in front of the entire industry. They'll tell you it isn't good executive presence. So let me explain what happened in Atlanta last week. Let's get into it. On th...

Why do people believe you can build an innovation team by hiring a few smart people and giving them a creative space? In my experience, teams built on this false premise die within eighteen months. How do organizations get it so wrong? Innovation consultants have told them, or innovation books have taught them, that this is how you build an innovation team. Those experts have rarely built and led...

Any team can fill a whiteboard with ideas in an hour. What most teams skip is the analytical thinking that tells them if they're solving the right problem. An idea pointed at the wrong problem is wasted no matter how clever the idea is, and you usually don't discover this mistake for years. By the end of this episode, you'll have four steps you can run on a real problem this week, the three thinki...

Recognizing failure patterns is the closest thing an innovator has to seeing the future.   If you can recognize the patterns, you can change the future, because most failures are not original. They repeat, and that repetition is the pattern: the same handful of patterns reappearing in one organization after another, decade after decade.   This one stings a little.   In 2011, Bill Geiser told me, a...

Sherlock Holmes never once used deduction.   Open any of the stories and watch what he actually does. He notices a tan line on a wrist or mud dried on a boot and leaps to the best-fitting explanation. Then he went looking for evidence. Deduction guarantees its conclusions. What Holmes did was guess. He was better at it than everyone around him because he treated guessing as a discipline.   The dis...

Think about the last thing you almost bought and did not. You picked it up, you looked at it, you put it back down. You had a reason for choosing one item over its competitors, and you know exactly what it was. Did anybody ever ask you why you didn't choose the loser? Of course not. And somebody did the same thing to you this week. Something you made, or wrote, or suggested. An idea you put into a...

In 1974, a psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus showed a group of people a film of a car accident. Afterward, she asked half the group one question: how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? The other half got the same question with a single word swapped: smashed instead of hit. The smashed group estimated higher speeds. Same film. Same crash. One word.   A week later, everyone came ba...

What is half of thirteen? Stop. Answer it. Don't think ahead, just answer. You said 6.5. I know you did, because everyone does. Nobody chose to answer that question. Your brain solved it before you decided whether you even wanted to play along. That's the power of a question: whoever hears it cannot stop themselves from answering. Ask a person something and their mind starts working on it right aw...

You trust your gut because it's been right before. But "right" is exactly the thing you've been measuring wrong. A hitter never has this problem. His batting average is honest. It counts hits, nothing else, across a whole season, and he can't argue with the number. Your gut is supposed to work the same way: every decision an at-bat, every result feedback, a career sharpening your instincts the way...

Everyone collects weak signals now. Most of what they collect predicts nothing. A weak signal isn't a thing you spot, it's a prediction you make, and the edge goes to whoever bets on it while being wrong is still cheap. So how do you become the one placing the bet, not the one still collecting reports? Let's get into it. What a Weak Signal Actually Is A weak signal is a faint piece of evidence tha...

In 2000, Toys R Us paid Amazon $50 million a year to sell their toys online. It looked like a great deal. The company that defined toy retail for two generations was solving the internet problem in one move. Four years later they were suing each other. Seventeen years later Toys R Us was gone. Every store closed. Every job lost. And every step of what happened was visible from the day the deal was...

Every playbook, every case study, every innovation workshop is built on the same question: how do you succeed? You map the path forward. You model the upside. Nobody teaches you to ask the harder question. How would you guarantee this fails? That's inversion thinking. Charlie Munger called it one of the most useful tools he had, and he used it for sixty years. Most innovators know the quote. Almos...

Most product decisions get made by analogy. Someone says, "This is how we've always done it," or "This is what the market expects," or "This is what the competition is doing." The room nods. The decision gets made. And buried somewhere in the middle of all of it is an assumption nobody checked. First-principles thinking is the discipline of identifying assumptions before the market finds them for...

Last June, I was on a business trip in Silicon Valley when a second cardiac device failed. Same problem with a second surgical team six months apart. The full story is on philmckinney.com. What changed everything was one doctor who stopped treating what everyone else had diagnosed and asked whether they even had the right problem. That one question uncovered what two surgical teams had missed. Tha...

Confirmation bias is shaping your decisions right now. Not occasionally. Every day. And the unsettling part is that the smarter you are, the harder it is to see it happening. By the end of this episode you'll know exactly what confirmation bias is. How to recognize when it has taken over a room. And three specific practices that actually work. Not borrowed frameworks, but what forty years of high-...

Twelve official definitions for R&D. Zero agreement. The US government publishes at least a dozen distinct official definitions across agencies, accounting standards, tax authorities, and international bodies. Not one agrees with the others on where research ends and development begins. Trillions of dollars flow through R&D budgets every year. Boards approve them. Investors evaluate them. Governme...

Every public company's R&D number is a lie hiding in plain sight. Not because anyone falsified it. Because the number was never built to tell the truth. It was built to satisfy an accounting standard written in 1974. And for fifty years, boards, analysts, and CEOs have been making billion-dollar innovation decisions based on a number designed by accountants to solve a different problem entirely. H...

Every public company in the technology industry measures innovation spending the same way. R&D as a percentage of revenue. Why? Because Wall Street tracks it. Boards benchmark it. CEOs get fired over it. And it tells you almost nothing about whether the spending is working. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard knew that. From the very beginning, they measured something different. Something the rest of th...

Twenty years. Nearly one thousand episodes on this show. And starting today, we're going to try something a little different this season. Season 21 is about the decisions that actually determine whether innovation lives or dies inside any organization. The real calls. Not the fluff stuff we read in academic textbooks. I want to actually put you in the rooms where these decisions are happening. Wha...

The best decision-makers aren't better at deciding. They're better at controlling when, where, and how they decide. It took me twenty years to figure that out. Most people spend that time trying harder: more discipline, more willpower, more resolve to think clearly under pressure. It doesn't work. That's when mindjacking wins. Not through force. Through the door you left unguarded. The answer isn'...

Ron Johnson was one of the most successful retail executives in America. He'd made Target hip. He'd built the Apple Store from nothing into a retail phenomenon. So when J.C. Penney hired him as CEO in 2011, expectations were sky-high. Johnson moved fast. He killed the coupons. Eliminated the sales events. Redesigned the stores. When his team suggested testing the new pricing strategy in a few loca...

When neuroscientists scanned the brains of people going along with a group, they expected to find lying. What they found instead was something far stranger. The group wasn't changing people's answers. It was changing what they actually saw . We'll get to that study in a minute. But first, I want you to remember the last time you were in a meeting, and you knew something was wrong. The numbers didn...

"We need an answer by the end of the day." Ten words. And the moment you hear them, something shifts inside your chest. Your pulse ticks up. Your focus narrows. Careful thinking stops. The clock starts. You probably haven't even asked the most important question yet. Is that deadline real? Most of the urgency you feel every day is fake. Manufactured by someone who benefits from you deciding fast i...

A nurse in Pennsylvania had been on her feet for twelve hours. She was supposed to go home, but the unit was short-staffed, so she stayed. During that overtime, a patient was diagnosed with cancer and needed two chemotherapy doses. She administered the first, placed the second in a drawer, and headed home. She forgot about the second dose. It wasn't discovered until the next day. The patient was f...

You've got a decision you've been putting off. Maybe it's a career move. An investment. A difficult conversation you keep rehearsing in your head but never starting. You tell yourself you need more information. More data. More time to think. But you're not gathering information. You're hiding behind it. What looks like due diligence is actually overthinking in disguise. The certainty you're waitin...