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Studio Sessions

The patterns behind innovation decisions. The signals to watch for, the questions that matter, and the thinking tools you can use immediately. New episodes every Wednesday. Audio wherever you get your podcasts. Video on YouTube. Twenty years and 20 million downloads. Now sharper than ever.

The Innovation Metric Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard Used

HP used this R&D benchmark for decades and still managed to forget it. Most companies never found it.

Image of Bill Hewlett and David Packard sharing a secret

The R&D Metric Mark Hurd and HP Got Wrong

How one flawed benchmark drove years of R&D decisions and quietly drained HP's innovation pipeline.

The R&D Metric Mark Hurd and HP Got Wrong

How To Think for Yourself When Everyone Disagrees With You

Why your brain treats disagreement like danger, and a simple two-minute technique to protect your thinking.

How To Think for Yourself When Everyone Disagrees With You

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

Protect Your Independent Thinking When Everyone Disagrees

How to Make Better Decisions Under Pressure

"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.

Better Decision Making Under Pressure

How to Beat Decision Fatigue

Your brain doesn't shut down when it's tired. It quietly lowers its standards and never tells you.

How to Beat Decision Fatigue

How to Stop Overthinking Your Decisions

Gathering more information feels responsible. There's a point where it tips into overthinking and keeps you stuck.

How to Stop Overthinking Your Decisions

Mindjacking: When Your Opinions Aren't Yours

Every day you make decisions you think are yours. Most aren't. The algorithm decided, the expert weighed in, the crowd chose. You just clicked agree.

Be careful for mindjacking. It is when others take over thinking for you.

Mental Models — Your Thinking Toolkit

NASA engineers and management had the same data. Their conclusions were 1000x apart. The difference? The mental tools they used to think.

Mental Models — Your Thinking Toolkit

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&

Thinking 101 - Pause and Reflect