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Articles by Phil
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Which Weak Signal Is the Next Big Thing?
Which Weak Signal Is the Next Big Thing?
I had the only outside seat on Roche's diagnostics innovation board. Our job was to decide which ideas got funded.
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The Question Nobody Wanted to Ask
The Question Nobody Wanted to Ask
Something I keep seeing in boardrooms, innovation teams, and strategy sessions, including my own, is that the most…
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The Number Every CEO Trusts. It's Broken.
The Number Every CEO Trusts. It's Broken.
Two decisions this week. One I made twenty years ago and just reversed.
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Six Weeks, Six Lessons, One Question: Who's Actually Making Your Decisions?
Six Weeks, Six Lessons, One Question: Who's Actually Making Your Decisions?
I owe you a catch-up. The last Finding Ideas you got from me was on the changes at HP after Enrique Lores announced he…
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HP Has Burned Through 6 CEOs in 25 Years. Here's What Every Board Should Learn From It.
HP Has Burned Through 6 CEOs in 25 Years. Here's What Every Board Should Learn From It.
Six CEOs in twenty-five years. Not six retirements — six departures.
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I Thought I Was the Smartest Person in the Room. My Team Knew Better.
I Thought I Was the Smartest Person in the Room. My Team Knew Better.
Intelligence is a liability nobody warns you about. You can always find one more reason to wait.
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Mindjacking: When Smart People Stop Thinking
Mindjacking: When Smart People Stop Thinking
Last month, Sam Altman, who built ChatGPT, said something that should have made headlines: "People have a very high…
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Knowing How to Think Isn't Enough
Knowing How to Think Isn't Enough
Hope you had a good holiday. Before we roll into 2025, I wanted to share something I've been working on.
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The "Safe" Choice Is Usually the Expensive One
The "Safe" Choice Is Usually the Expensive One
Your gut is lying to you. Not maliciously.
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When Innovation Becomes a Mission: One SEAL's Fight to Protect Those Who Protect Us
When Innovation Becomes a Mission: One SEAL's Fight to Protect Those Who Protect Us
A decorated Navy SEAL asked a military doctor for help. His body was shutting down.
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12K followers
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Phil McKinney shared thisI built a security product. It sat on the shelf, waiting. Then computer viruses blew up. Front-page news, every company suddenly scared. My product was already there. That's when I won Security Product of the Year, my first major tech award, in front of the whole industry. I thought it was my gut. Years later I took an honest look at what actually happened. The award wasn't my judgment. It was timing I had nothing to do with. It was luck. A good decision and a lucky one produce the same win. Your gut files both as skill, and you spend a career learning the wrong lessons. Three ways to tell a skilled call from a lucky one ↓ ✅👉 https://lnkd.in/eKaRYbHQ #Innovation #CounterfactualThinking #DecisionMaking #Leadership
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Phil McKinney shared thisMarketers are pouring money into AI-made content. Their audiences are quietly backing away from it. In the last year, 79% of marketers spent more on AI creator content. Over the same stretch, the share of people who say they prefer AI content fell from 60% to 26%. Two numbers moving in opposite directions. Only one of them is telling the truth about where this goes. So I pressure-tested both sides. Is the backlash an early warning that something real is changing in what customers will pay for? Or a fad that fades by spring? Then I did the part most people who write about trends skip. I made a call. On the record. Dated and falsifiable, so you can hold me to it. It's about what the world's biggest advertisers will, and won't, dare to do this holiday season. I'm not going to soften it here. The full read, and the call, are in the first installment of my new series, The Call. ✅ https://lnkd.in/eqpmbwa2 (subscription required) ❓ So: canary or costume? Tell me where you land, and where you think I'm wrong. Anyone can have the idea. Few make the call. #AI #Innovation #Marketing
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Phil McKinney shared thisI had the only outside seat on Roche Diagnostics’ innovation board. One signal sat right in front of us. Growing fast. Impossible to miss. We explained it away. It became one of the fastest-growing chronic conditions in the world, and the whole category moved to the wearable monitors people use today. We saw it early. Our read was right. We just didn't move fast enough. This week's issue is about why that happens to good teams, and the first of three moves that fixes it. Read the newsletter 👇 #Innovation #ProductStrategy #DecisionMaking #WeakSignals
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Phil McKinney shared thisI had the only outside seat on a company's innovation board. Our job was to decide which ideas got funded. One signal was right in front of us. Growing fast. Impossible to miss. We explained it away. The hardest weak signals aren't the ones you fail to notice. They're the ones you see, predict, and still don't act on in time. Three moves for reading a weak signal before the market sees it. ✅👉 https://lnkd.in/e_BKV_k8 #Innovation #WeakSignals #DecisionMaking #Leadership
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Phil McKinney shared thisToys R Us paid Amazon $50 million a year to handle their toys online. It looked like a smart deal. Four years later they were suing each other. Seventeen years later, every store was closed. Every job was lost. The people who signed that deal weren’t fools. They were experienced retail executives making a reasonable call. The consequences just weren’t visible from where they were sitting. That same call is being made inside companies right now. In every meeting where the deal in front of you looks better than the deal underneath it. I wrote up where these failures actually happen, and the moment inside HP in 2006 when I sensed one coming and the team explained it away. ✅👉🏻 https://lnkd.in/gb-CSzQq #SecondOrderThinking #DecisionMaking #Innovation #Leadership
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Phil McKinney shared thisSteve Wozniak offered HP the first personal computer. Five times. They said no every time. So he left and built Apple. The people who turned him down weren’t fools. They were brilliant engineers making a reasonable call. The idea just couldn’t promise them a number yet. That same call is being made inside companies right now. In every meeting where the safe bet beats the unproven one. Economists looked at the data across chips, drugs, and science itself and concluded we are running out of ideas. I read the same data and reached the opposite conclusion. I wrote up what I think is actually happening, why smart leaders keep getting it wrong, and a single question you can ask your team on Monday to find out if it’s happening to you. ✅👉🏻 https://lnkd.in/gYsHbrJs
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Phil McKinney shared thisI handed Cisco and Zoom a $3.3 billion category. Not because we (HP) built the wrong product. Because nobody in the room asked the wrong question. This week's Finding Ideas is about that move. The one that surfaces a fatal assumption before it gets expensive. Charlie Munger used it for sixty years. Most innovators know the quote. Almost none of them run the exercise. The thing you're not questioning right now is probably the most important thing on your list. Ten minutes. Worth it.
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Phil McKinney shared thisHP spent $500,000 per room building the best telepresence system ever made. Then sold it for $89 million. Then bought it back for $3.3 billion. I was at HP when we built Halo. The team was brilliant. The technology was extraordinary. And we were completely wrong about the one thing that mattered. We believed quality wins. It felt so obvious that nobody in the room thought to question it. It wasn't quality the market was buying. It was access. Zoom figured that out and turned "good enough on any device" into a verb. We invented the category and handed it to them. The failure wasn't hidden. We just never asked the question that would have exposed it. "How would we guarantee Halo fails?" That's inversion thinking. Charlie Munger used it for sixty years. Most people know the quote. Almost nobody actually runs the exercise. This week's Studio Session walks through the three moves that would have saved Halo. ✅ https://lnkd.in/gAcjM45b ❓ What's your go-to move for exposing an assumption nobody else is questioning?
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Phil McKinney shared thisThe most dangerous assumptions in any room are the ones that feel like facts. First principles thinking is supposed to fix that. Most people think they do it. Almost nobody does. Here's what it actually looks like in practice. In 2005, a room full of experienced HP leaders made a generational decision based on a metric nobody questioned. The cost didn't show up the next quarter. It showed up over the following decade. The metric felt like a fact. It was a choice nobody remembered making. That's the problem first principles thinking is built to solve. Not the obvious assumptions. The inherited ones that stopped feeling like assumptions years ago. Why are the most experienced people in the room usually the last ones to spot them? ✅ This week's Studio Session: How To Improve Your First Principles Thinking Skills 👉 https://lnkd.in/dKR2bgxw Audio, video, and full transcript at the link. ❓ What's the best way you've seen someone expose an assumption nobody else noticed? #FirstPrinciplesThinking #Innovation #Leadership #DecisionMaking #CriticalThinking
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Phil McKinney liked thisPhil McKinney liked thisDiscover four priorities for creating a network that delivers better experiences, stronger security, and AI-ready performance.
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Phil McKinney liked thisPhil McKinney liked thisPleased to learn that our recent paper on “Quantum Time Synchronization in Star Networks” was accepted for presentation at ECOC 2026.
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Phil McKinney liked thisThank you, Tom pacheco for sharing. Please read below. Zero chance you won't smile and be happy.Phil McKinney liked thisEver had a tiny part break and completely stall your operation? Recently, I accidentally knocked the bearing cover off a specialized piece of equipment. I tried every traditional route: the manufacturer only sold the incredibly pricey entire assembly, local bearing suppliers didn’t have the size, and commercial 3D printing shops told me the job was too small to be cost-effective. Then, a chance encounter changed everything. At the T.A.C.T. (Teaching the Autism Community Trades) car show, I met the parents of Seamus Rollins, a student at T.A.C.T. They showed me some of his custom design and 3D printing work, and I knew I had to reach out. Not only did Seamus take on the project without hesitation, but he also gave me a fantastic quote and turned the part around in just one day. The fit was perfect. When he delivered the part, Seamus thanked me for "giving him a chance." He mentioned that people sometimes shy away from working with him due to assumptions about autism. Honestly, the pleasure was entirely mine. Seamus is an incredibly talented, capable young man, and our industry needs more bright minds like his. Huge shoutout to Seamus for getting me back up and running, and to organizations like T.A.C.T. that provide the resources and platform for this next generation of technical talent to thrive! #Innovation #3DPrinting #NeurodiversityInTech #SupportLocal #ProblemSolving
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Phil McKinney liked thisPhil McKinney liked thisComplexity is the currency of technical prestige in today's engineering landscape. Sophisticated systems earn accolades while simple solutions are often overlooked. Many architects chase complexity to boost their resumes, but this rewards the wrong behavior. Organizations bear the hidden costs: cloud invoices, operational overhead, and maintenance of unnecessarily complex systems. It's time to rethink our approach to architecture. Read the full article to explore this critical issue: https://lnkd.in/gSDnZy8Y Support insightful content like this by subscribing at https://lnkd.in/gYcxC97b.The Status Architecture: Why Complexity Is the Currency of Technical Prestige and Who Pays the BillThe Status Architecture: Why Complexity Is the Currency of Technical Prestige and Who Pays the Bill
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Publications
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Beyond The Obvious
Hyperion
See publicationBeyond The Obvious
A rule-breaking approach to harnessing the power of innovation.
This book dispels the myth that you have to be born with the gift of creativity and innovation. Everyone is creative and this books shows you how.
This book will transform you by ...
- Showing you how to re-awaken your inherit ability to be highly creative.
- Revealing the tricks on how to pitch your idea so that anyone (including your boss and VCs) will fund your idea.
-…Beyond The Obvious
A rule-breaking approach to harnessing the power of innovation.
This book dispels the myth that you have to be born with the gift of creativity and innovation. Everyone is creative and this books shows you how.
This book will transform you by ...
- Showing you how to re-awaken your inherit ability to be highly creative.
- Revealing the tricks on how to pitch your idea so that anyone (including your boss and VCs) will fund your idea.
- Sharing with you the right questions that will unlock you and your teams ability to discover never before conceived ideas.
- Showing you the steps to go from a raw idea to shipping a game-changing innovation that anyone can follow.
The book is available in hardcover, e-book and audio in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.
About the Author:
Phil is an award winning innovator of technologies and products used by millions of consumers and businesses worldwide -- and the host of the award winning Killer Innovations™ podcast.
Phil has been credited with forming and leading multiple teams that FastCompany and BusinessWeek list as one of the “50 Most Innovative”.
His recognition includes Vanity Fair naming him the “The Innovation Guru”, MSNBC and Fox Business calling him "The Gadget Guy" and the San Jose Mercury News dubbing him the "chief seer".
For more information on Phil visit his blog at philmckinney.com.
Honors & Awards
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25 Most Influential People in Mobile Tech
LAPTOP Magazine
In 2010, Laptop magazine named Phil to list of the most influential people in mobile technology. He landed at number 18.
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50 Most Innovative Companies (2008, 2009 and 2010)
FastCompany
HP has been named to the FastCompany list of most innovative companies for three years running (2008-2010). The write-ups as to why HP has been named to the list each year credits a new found focus on innovation and products — all originated in the Innovation Program Office which was founded and run by Phil. In 2008, HP emerged (first time in the history of the company) on the list at #18, jumped to #12 in 2009 and then #10 in 2010.
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CEO of the Year — APEX Awards
Colorado Technology Association
Recognized for leadership in advancing broadband technology and innovation at CableLabs.
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