phil mckinney
How to Improve Your Abductive Reasoning Skills: The Sherlock Holmes Method
School taught you deductive and inductive reasoning. The third kind, abductive reasoning, is where new ideas come from, and it is the one AI can't do.
The Customers Who Walked Away
Forty-two killer questions that survived years of testing, and the three places to aim them.
R&D Spending Is the Most Misleading Number in Business
The government collects the real R&D split from every public company. It's locked away by federal law. Here's how to estimate it anyway.
They're Everywhere
And we finally have a word for them.
How To Quit Defending Decisions You Know Are Wrong
The reason you can't let go isn't logic. It's that quitting would threaten who you believe you are.
How To Think for Yourself When Everyone Disagrees With You
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
Shell Had Six Years to Prepare. I Had Four Months.
Outstanding leaders under pressure aren't making great decisions. They're executing decisions they already made. The difference is preparation. And most leaders skip it.
I Told the Department of Education Their Graduates Were Useless
The room went silent. But I'd been watching this crisis unfold for decades—starting on a factory floor in 1981
5 Questions That Spot Breakthroughs Before They Happen
In October 1903, The New York Times published an editorial mocking the idea of human flight, stating that a successful flying machine might take "from one to ten million years" to develop through the efforts of mathematicians and engineers. Eight weeks later, on December 17, 1903, the Wright
I Evaluated Over 30,000 Innovation Ideas at HP: Here's Why Most Failed
Your best innovation ideas aren't losing to bad ideas – they're losing to exhaustion. I know that sounds counterintuitive. After 30 years of making billion-dollar innovation decisions at HP and CableLabs, I thought I understood why good ideas failed. Market timing. Technical challenges. Resource constraints. Sometimes
