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.
How to Build Innovation Thinking Skills Through Daily Journaling
Most innovation leaders are performing someone else's version of innovation thinking. I've spent decades in this field. Worked with Fortune 100 companies. And here's what I see happening everywhere. Brilliant leaders following external frameworks. Copying methodologies from people they admire. Shifting their approach based
The WSJ Got Quarterly Reporting Wrong
Michael Dell and his investors spent twenty-five billion dollars to buy back Dell Technologies. But they weren't really buying a company. They were buying freedom from quarterly earnings pressure. I'm Phil McKinney, former CTO of Hewlett-Packard, and I witnessed how this pressure shaped decisions for years.
How to Get Smarter by Arguing with People Who Disagree with You
What if I told you that the people who disagree with you are actually your secret weapon for better thinking? Just last month, my wife and I had a heated argument about studio changes I wanted to make here on the ranch. Her immediate reaction was about cost. Mine was
How to See Opportunities Others Miss
In 2005, I had a ten-minute conversation at San Jose Airport that generated billions in revenue for HP. But here's what's fascinating: three other HP executives heard the exact same conversation and saw nothing special about it. If you read Monday's Studio Notes, you
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 that
How To Master Lateral Thinking Skills
A software engineer grabbed a random word from a dictionary – "beehive" – and within hours designed an algorithm that saved his company millions. While his colleagues were working harder, he was thinking differently. This breakthrough didn't come from luck. It came from lateral thinking – a systematic approach
Why 'Fail Fast' Innovation Advice Is Wrong
The most popular piece of innovation advice in Silicon Valley is wrong—and it's killing great ideas before they have a chance to succeed. I can prove it with a story about a glass of water that sat perfectly still while a car bounced beneath it. My name
Innovation Partnership Autopsy: HP, Fossil, and the Smartwatch Market
Innovation partnerships can create breakthrough markets—or hand them to competitors through terrible decisions. I know because I lived through both outcomes. Bill Geiser from Fossil and I had it exactly right. We built the MetaWatch—a smartwatch with week-long battery life, Bluetooth connectivity, and every feature that would later
Why Great Innovators Read Rooms, Not Just Data
You know that moment when you walk into a meeting and immediately sense the mood in the room? Or when a proposal looks perfect on paper, but something feels off? That's your intuition working—and it's more sophisticated than most people realize. Every leader has experienced
