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Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

By: Phil McKinney
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 Step into the world of relentless creativity with the Killer Innovations Podcast, hosted by Phil McKinney. Since 2005, it has carved its niche in history as the longest-running podcast. Join the community of innovators, designers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who are constantly pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. Discover the power of thinking differently and taking risks to achieve success. The podcast covers a wide range of topics, including innovation, technology, business, leadership, creativity, design, and more. Every episode is not just talk; it's about taking action and implementing strategies that can help you become a successful innovator. Each episode provides practical tips, real-life examples, and thought-provoking insights that will challenge your thinking and inspire you to unleash your creativity. The podcast archive: KillerInnovations.com About Phil McKinney: Phil McKinney, CTO of HP (ret) and CEO of CableLabs, 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 Innovation Guru," MSNBC and Fox Business calling him "The Gadget Guy," and the San Jose Mercury News dubbing him the "chief seer."See http://philmckinney.com Economics
Episodes
  • Make Better Decisions When Nothing is Certain

    Make Better Decisions When Nothing is Certain
    Nov 4 2025
    You're frozen. The deadline's approaching. You don't have all the data. Everyone wants certainty. You can't give it. Sound familiar? Maybe it's a hiring decision with three qualified candidates and red flags on each one. Or a product launch where the market research is mixed. Or a career pivot where you can't predict which path leads where. You want more information. More time. More certainty. But you're not going to get it. Meanwhile, a small group of professionals—poker players, venture capitalists, military strategists—consistently make better decisions than the rest of us in exactly these situations. Not because they have more information, but because they've mastered something fundamentally different: they think in probabilities, not certainties. I learned this the hard way—I once created a biometric security algorithm that the NSA reverse-engineered, where I mastered probabilistic thinking perfectly in the technology, then made every wrong bet with the business around it. By the end of this episode, you'll possess a powerful mental toolkit that transforms how you approach uncertainty. You'll learn to estimate likelihoods without perfect data, update your beliefs as new information emerges, make confident decisions when multiple uncertain factors collide, and act decisively even when you can't guarantee the outcome. This is the difference between paralysis and power, between gambling recklessly and betting wisely. What Is Probabilistic Thinking? But what does probabilistic thinking actually entail? At its core, it's the practice of reasoning in terms of likelihoods rather than absolutes—thinking in percentages instead of yes-or-no answers. Instead of asking "Will this work?" you ask "What are the odds this will work, and what are the consequences if it doesn't?" This approach acknowledges that the future is uncertain and that every decision carries risk. By quantifying that uncertainty and weighing it against potential outcomes, you make smarter choices even when you can't eliminate the unknown. The Cost of Demanding Certainty Today's world punishes those who demand certainty before acting. Research from Oracle's 2023 Decision Dilemma study—which surveyed over 14,000 employees and business leaders across 17 countries—found that 86% feel overwhelmed by the amount of data available to them. Rather than clarity, all that information creates decision paralysis. And the paralysis has real consequences. When we can't be certain, we freeze. We endlessly research options, seeking that final piece of data that will guarantee success. We postpone critical decisions, waiting for perfect information that never arrives. Meanwhile, opportunities pass us by, problems grow worse, and competitors who are comfortable with uncertainty move forward. This demand for certainty doesn't just slow us down—it exhausts us. Decision fatigue sets in as we agonize over choices, draining our mental resources until we either make impulsive decisions or avoid deciding altogether. Neither outcome serves us well. What Certainty-Seeking Actually Costs You Here's what it looks like in real life: You're the VP of Marketing. Your CMO wants a decision on next quarter's campaign budget by Friday. You have three agencies to choose from, each with strengths and weaknesses. So you ask for more data. Customer focus groups. Competitive analysis. Agency references. By Wednesday you're drowning in spreadsheets and conflicting opinions. Friday arrives. You still can't be certain which choice is right, so you ask for an extension. Two weeks later, you finally pick one—not because you're confident, but because you're exhausted and the CMO is furious about the delay. The campaign launches late. You've burned political capital. And you still have no idea if you made the right choice. Meanwhile, your competitor's marketing VP looked at the same decision, spent two hours assessing the probabilities, and launched on time. If it works, great. If it doesn't, they'll pivot. They didn't need certainty. They needed enough information to make a good bet. That's the tax you pay for demanding certainty: missed timing, exhausted teams, and decisions made from fatigue rather than judgment. Meanwhile, a small group of professionals thrives in these exact conditions. Professional poker players like Annie Duke understand that good decisions sometimes lead to bad outcomes and bad decisions sometimes get lucky—so they judge their choices by process, not results. Venture capitalists often see that most of their investments will fail, but they bet anyway because one success out of twenty can return the entire fund. Military strategists make life-and-death decisions with incomplete intelligence, not because they're reckless, but because waiting for perfect information means defeat. The difference isn't access to better information. It's the willingness to act on probabilities rather than certainties. How To Make Better Decisions When Nothing Is Certain...
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    23 mins
  • You Think In Analogies and You Are Doing It Wrong

    You Think In Analogies and You Are Doing It Wrong
    Oct 28 2025
    Try to go through a day without using an analogy. I guarantee you'll fail within an hour. Your morning coffee tastes like yesterday's batch. Traffic is moving like molasses. Your boss sounds like a broken record. Every comparison you make—every single one—is your brain's way of understanding the world. You can't turn it off. When someone told you ChatGPT is "like having a smart assistant," your brain immediately knew what to expect—and what to worry about. When Netflix called itself "the HBO of streaming," investors understood the strategy instantly. These comparisons aren't just convenient—they're how billion-dollar companies are built and how your brain actually learns. The person who controls the analogy controls your thinking. In a world where you're bombarded with new concepts every single day—AI tools, cryptocurrency, remote work culture, creator economies—your brain needs a way to make sense of it all. By the end of this episode, you'll possess a powerful toolkit for understanding the unfamiliar by connecting it to what you already know—and explaining complex ideas so clearly that people wonder why they never saw it before. Thinking in analogies—or what's called analogical thinking—is how the greatest innovators, communicators, and problem-solvers operate. It's the skill that turns confusion into clarity and complexity into something you can actually work with. What is Analogical Thinking? But what does analogical thinking entail? At its core, it's the practice of understanding something new by comparing it to something you already understand. Your brain is constantly asking: "What is this like?" When you learned what a virus does to your computer, you understood it by comparing it to how biological viruses infect living organisms. When someone explains blockchain as "a shared spreadsheet that no one can erase," they're using analogy to make an abstract concept concrete. Researchers have found something remarkable: your brain doesn't actually store information as facts—it stores it as patterns and relationships. When you learn something new, your brain is literally asking "What does this remind me of?" and building connections to existing knowledge. Analogies aren't just helpful for communication—they're the fundamental mechanism of human understanding. You can't NOT think in analogies. The question is whether you're doing it consciously and well, or unconsciously and poorly. The quality of your analogies determines how quickly you learn, how deeply you understand, and how effectively you can explain ideas to others. Remember this: whoever controls the analogy controls the conversation. Master this skill, and you'll never be at the mercy of someone else's framing again. The Crisis of Bad Analogies Thinking in analogies is a double-edged sword. I learned this the hard way. A few years ago, I watched a brilliant engineer struggle to explain a revolutionary idea to executives. He had the data, the logic, the technical proof—but he couldn't get buy-in. Then someone in the room said, "So it's basically like Uber, but for industrial equipment?" Instantly, heads nodded. Funding approved. Project greenlit. One analogy did what an hour of explanation couldn't. Six months later, that same analogy killed the project. Because "Uber for equipment" came with assumptions—about pricing, about scale, about network effects—that didn't actually apply. The team kept forcing their solution to fit the analogy instead of recognizing when the comparison broke down. I watched millions of dollars and two years of work disappear because nobody questioned whether the analogy was still serving them. The same mental shortcut that helps you understand new things can also trap you in outdated patterns. Consider Quibi's spectacular failure. In 2020, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman launched a streaming service with $1.75 billion in funding—more than Netflix had when it started. Their analogy? "It's like TV shows, but designed for your phone." They created high-quality 10-minute episodes optimized for mobile viewing. Six months later, Quibi shut down. What went wrong? The analogy was flawed. They assumed mobile viewing was like TV viewing, just shorter. But people don't watch phones the way they watch TV—they watch phones while doing other things, in stolen moments, with interruptions. YouTube and TikTok understood this. They built for distraction and fragmentation. Quibi built for focused attention that didn't exist. That misunderstanding burned through nearly $2 billion in 18 months. We see this constantly where complex issues get reduced to simplistic analogies that feel intuitive but lead to flawed conclusions. Someone compares running a country to running a household budget—"If families have to balance their budgets, why shouldn't governments?" The analogy sounds intuitive, but it ignores that countries can print currency, carry strategic long-term debt, and operate on completely ...
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    27 mins
  • How To Master Causal Thinking

    How To Master Causal Thinking
    Oct 21 2025
    $37 billion. That's how much gets wasted annually on marketing budgets because of poor attribution and misunderstanding of what actually drives results. Companies' credit campaigns that didn't work. They kill initiatives that were actually succeeding. They double down on coincidences while ignoring what's actually driving outcomes. Three executives lost their jobs this month for making the same mistake. They presented data showing success after their initiatives were launched. Boards approved promotions. Then someone asked the one question nobody thought to ask: "Could something else explain this?" The sales spike coincided with a competitor going bankrupt. The satisfaction increase happened when a toxic manager quit. The correlation was real. The causation was fiction. This mistake derailed their careers. But here's the good news: once you see how this works, you'll never unsee it. And you'll become the person in the room who spots these errors before they cost millions. But first, you need to understand what makes this mistake so common—and why even smart people fall for it every single day. What is Causal Thinking? At its core, causal thinking is the practice of identifying genuine cause-and-effect relationships rather than settling for surface-level associations. It's asking not just "do these things happen together?" but "does one actually cause the other?" This skill means you look beyond patterns and correlations to understand what's actually producing the outcomes you're seeing. When you think causally, you can spot the difference between coincidence, correlation, and true causation—a distinction that separates effective decision-makers from those who waste millions on solutions that were never going to work. Loss of Causal Thinking Skills Across every domain of professional life, this confusion costs fortunes and derails careers. A SaaS company sees customer churn decrease after implementing new onboarding emails—and immediately scales it company-wide. What they missed: they launched the emails the same week their biggest competitor raised prices by 40%. The competitor's pricing reduced churn. But they'll never know, because they never asked the question. Six months later, when they face real churn issues, they keep doubling down on emails that never actually worked. This happens outside of work too. You start taking a new vitamin, and two weeks later your energy improves. But you started taking it in early March—right when days got longer and you began going outside more. Was it the vitamin or the sunlight and exercise? Most people credit the vitamin without asking the question. But here's the good news: once you understand how to think causally, these mistakes become obvious. And one of these five strategies can be used in your very next meeting—literally 30 seconds from now. Let me show you how. How To Master Causal Thinking Mastering causal thinking isn't about becoming a statistician or learning complex formulas. It's about developing five practical strategies that work together to reveal what's really driving results. These build on each other—starting with basic tests you can apply right now, and progressing to a complete system you can use for any decision. Strategy 1: The Three Tests of True Causation Think of these as your checklist for evaluating any causal claim. The Three Tests: Test #1 - Timing: Confirm the supposed cause actually happened before the effect. If traffic spiked Monday but you launched the campaign Tuesday, that campaign didn't cause it. The cause must always come before the effect. Test #2 - Consistent Movement: When the supposed cause is present, does the effect reliably occur? When the cause is absent, does the effect disappear? Document instances where they occur together. Then examine situations where the cause is absent. If the effect happens just as often without the cause, you're looking at correlation, not causation. Test #3 - Rule Out Alternatives: Think carefully about what else could explain what you're seeing. Actively try to disprove your idea rather than only looking for supporting evidence. If you can't eliminate other explanations, you don't have causation. Strategy 2: Ask "Could Something Else Explain This?" Here's a technique you can implement in the next 30 seconds that will immediately improve your causal thinking: whenever someone presents a causal claim, ask out loud: "Could something else explain this?" This single question is remarkably powerful. It forces the speaker to consider hidden factors they ignored. It reveals whether they've actually done causal analysis or just noticed a correlation and declared victory. It shifts the conversation from assumption to examination. Try it in your next meeting when someone says "We did X and Y improved." Watch how often they haven't considered alternatives. Watch how often their confident causal claim becomes less certain when forced to address ...
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    25 mins
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