The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

In 1974, a psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus showed a group of people a film of a car accident. Afterward, she asked half the group one question: how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? The other half got the same question with a single word swapped: smashed instead of hit.

The smashed group estimated higher speeds. Same film. Same crash. One word.

A week later, everyone came...

What is half of thirteen?

Stop. Answer it. Don't think ahead, just answer.

You said 6.5. I know you did, because everyone does. Nobody chose to answer that question. Your brain solved it before you decided whether you even wanted to play along. That's the power of a question: whoever hears it cannot stop themselves from answering. Ask a person something and their mind starts working on it righ...

You trust your gut because it's been right before. But "right" is exactly the thing you've been measuring wrong.

A hitter never has this problem. His batting average is honest. It counts hits, nothing else, across a whole season, and he can't argue with the number. Your gut is supposed to work the same way: every decision an at-bat, every result feedback, a career sharpening your instincts the way a season...

Everyone collects weak signals now. Most of what they collect predicts nothing. A weak signal isn't a thing you spot, it's a prediction you make, and the edge goes to whoever bets on it while being wrong is still cheap.

So how do you become the one placing the bet, not the one still collecting reports? Let's get into it.

What a Weak Signal Actually Is

A weak signal is a fain...

In 2000, Toys R Us paid Amazon $50 million a year to sell their toys online. It looked like a great deal. The company that defined toy retail for two generations was solving the internet problem in one move.

Four years later they were suing each other. Seventeen years later Toys R Us was gone. Every store closed. Every job lost. And every step of what happened was visible from the day the deal was signed. ...

Every playbook, every case study, every innovation workshop is built on the same question: how do you succeed? You map the path forward. You model the upside.

Nobody teaches you to ask the harder question. How would you guarantee this fails?

That's inversion thinking. Charlie Munger called it one of the most useful tools he had, and he used it for sixty years. Most innovators know the quote. A...

Most product decisions get made by analogy. Someone says, "This is how we've always done it," or "This is what the market expects," or "This is what the competition is doing." The room nods. The decision gets made. And buried somewhere in the middle of all of it is an assumption nobody checked.

First-principles thinking is the discipline of identifying assumptions before the market finds them for you. By t...

Last June, I was on a business trip in Silicon Valley when a second cardiac device failed. Same problem with a second surgical team six months apart.

The full story is on philmckinney.com.

What changed everything was one doctor who stopped treating what everyone else had diagnosed and asked whether they even had the right problem. That one question uncovered what two surgical teams had missed.

Confirmation bias is shaping your decisions right now. Not occasionally. Every day. And the unsettling part is that the smarter you are, the harder it is to see it happening.

By the end of this episode you'll know exactly what confirmation bias is. How to recognize when it has taken over a room. And three specific practices that actually work. Not borrowed frameworks, but what forty years of high-stakes de...

Twelve official definitions for R&D. Zero agreement.

The US government publishes at least a dozen distinct official definitions across agencies, accounting standards, tax authorities, and international bodies. Not one agrees with the others on where research ends and development begins.

Trillions of dollars flow through R&D budgets every year. Boards approve them. Investors evaluate th...

Every public company's R&D number is a lie hiding in plain sight.

Not because anyone falsified it. Because the number was never built to tell the truth. It was built to satisfy an accounting standard written in 1974. And for fifty years, boards, analysts, and CEOs have been making billion-dollar innovation decisions based on a number designed by accountants to solve a different problem entirely.

Here's what makes this genuinely...

Every public company in the technology industry measures innovation spending the same way. R&D as a percentage of revenue.

Why? Because Wall Street tracks it. Boards benchmark it. CEOs get fired over it.

And it tells you almost nothing about whether the spending is working.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard knew that. From the very beginning, they measured something different. Som...

Twenty years. Nearly one thousand episodes on this show. And starting today, we're going to try something a little different this season.

Season 21 is about the decisions that actually determine whether innovation lives or dies inside any organization. The real calls. Not the fluff stuff we read in academic textbooks. I want to actually put you in the rooms where these decisions are happening. What went ri...

The best decision-makers aren't better at deciding. They're better at controlling when, where, and how they decide. It took me twenty years to figure that out.

Most people spend that time trying harder: more discipline, more willpower, more resolve to think clearly under pressure. It doesn't work. That's when mindjacking wins. Not through force. Through the door...

Ron Johnson was one of the most successful retail executives in America. He'd made Target hip. He'd built the Apple Store from nothing into a retail phenomenon. So when J.C. Penney hired him as CEO in 2011, expectations were sky-high.

Johnson moved fast. He killed the coupons. Eliminated the sales events. Redesigned the stores. When his team suggested testing th...

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 a minute. But firs...

"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.

Is that deadline real?

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