Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

Phil McKinney
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Why do smart leaders make terrible choices about breakthrough ideas? Phil McKinney draws on 40 years of innovation leadership — including as HP’s CTO and now CableLabs CEO — to share the thinking frameworks that separate breakthroughs from expensive mistakes. Weekly since 2005.

  1. 1D AGO

    How to Stop Overthinking Your Decisions

    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 […]

    14 min

  2. JAN 21

    Mindjacking: When Your Opinions Aren’t Yours

    You've built a toolkit over the last several episodes. Logical reasoning. Causal thinking. Mental models. Serious intellectual firepower. Now the uncomfortable question: When's the last time you actually used it to make a decision? Not a decision you think you made. One where you evaluated the options yourself. Weighed the evidence. Formed your own conclusion. […]

    14 min

  3. JAN 14

    CES 2026: Battle of the AI Robots

    This week, I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show 2026. If you've been following me for long, you know I do this every year. This is 20-plus years I've been coming to the Consumer Electronics Show. Normally, I don't cover tech and new products here—except for once a year at CES. […]

    12 min

  4. 12/23/2025

    Thinking 101: A Pause, A Reflection, And What Might Come Next

    Twenty-one years. That's how long I've been doing this. Producing content. Showing up. Week after week, with only a handful of exceptions—most of them involving hospitals and cardiac surgeons, but that's another story. After twenty-one years, you learn what lands and what doesn't. You learn not to get too attached because you never know what's […]

    5 min

  5. 12/16/2025

    Mental Models — Your Thinking Toolkit

    Before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA management officially estimated the probability of catastrophic failure at one in one hundred thousand. That's about the same odds as getting struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark. The engineers working on the actual rockets? They estimated the risk at closer to one in […]

    17 min

  6. 12/02/2025

    Numerical Thinking: How to Find the Truth When Numbers Lie

    Quick—which is more dangerous: the thing that kills 50,000 Americans every year, or the thing that kills 50? Your brain says the first one, obviously. The data says you're dead wrong. Heart disease kills 700,000 people annually, but you're not terrified of cheeseburgers. Shark attacks kill about 10 people worldwide per year, but millions of […]

    17 min

  7. 11/26/2025

    The Clock is Screaming (And My Grandson is Listening)

    I stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open. Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it. My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with her parents’ estate. Both had just died. […]

    12 min

  8. 11/11/2025

    Second-Order Thinking: How to Stop Your Decisions From Creating Bigger Problems

    In August 2025, Polish researchers tested something nobody had thought to check: what happens to doctors' skills after they rely on AI assistance? The AI worked perfectly—catching problems during colonoscopies, flagging abnormalities faster than human eyes could. But when researchers pulled the AI away, the doctors' detection rates had dropped. They'd become less skilled at […]

    23 min
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Why do smart leaders make terrible choices about breakthrough ideas? Phil McKinney draws on 40 years of innovation leadership — including as HP’s CTO and now CableLabs CEO — to share the thinking frameworks that separate breakthroughs from expensive mistakes. Weekly since 2005.

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