Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney cover art

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

By: Phil McKinney
Listen for free

About this listen

 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
  • How to Get Smarter by Arguing with People who Disagree with You

    How to Get Smarter by Arguing with People who Disagree with You
    Sep 16 2025
    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 about productivity and creativity. We were talking past each other completely. But when I applied what I'm about to teach you, we discovered we were both right—and found a solution that addressed both concerns without compromising either. What started as an argument became a session where each of us was heard and understood. Sounds crazy, right? By the end of this video, you'll not only believe it—you'll have experienced it yourself. Think of someone you disagree with about something important. Got them in mind? Good. In 25 minutes, you'll see that person as your thinking partner. You know that sinking feeling when a simple conversation with someone turns into a heated argument? You walk away thinking, "How did that go so wrong?" The problem isn't the disagreement itself—it's that most people never learned how to use disagreement to think better. We encounter difficult disagreements almost daily. Your spouse questions your spending. Your boss pushes back on your proposal. Your friend challenges your weekend plans. Each disagreement is an opportunity for your thinking to become sharper. When you approach it right, others often think more clearly too. Your Brain Gets Smarter Under Pressure During solo thinking, you operate in your thinking "comfort zone". Familiar patterns feel safe. Trusted sources get your attention. Comfortable assumptions go unchallenged. It's efficient, but it also limits intellectual growth. In our Critical Thinking Skills episode—our most popular video—we taught you to question assumptions, check evidence, apply logic, ask good questions. If you haven't watched that episode, pause this and watch that first—it's the foundation for what comes next. What we didn't tell you in that video is that intelligent opposition makes these skills far more powerful than solo practice ever could. Let me show you what I mean. Take any belief you hold strongly. Now imagine defending it to someone smart who disagrees with you. Notice what happens in your mind: You suddenly need better evidence than "I read somewhere..."Your own assumptions come under sharper scrutinyLogic becomes more rigorous under pressureQuestions get sharper to understand their position That mental shift happened because I introduced opposition. Your brain got more demanding of itself. And when you engage thoughtfully, something interesting happens—the other person thinks more carefully too. Think of it like physical exercise. Muscles strengthen through resistance, not relaxation. Your thinking muscles work the same way. Intellectual resistance—smart disagreement—strengthens your reasoning, your evidence gathering is more thorough, and your conclusions are more robust. This is where things fall apart for most people. The Critical Mistake That Kills Thinking Most people will never learn this because they're too busy being right. They miss the thinking benefits because they fail at disagreement basics. They get defensive. They shut down. Conversations become battles. Someone challenges their ideas, fight-or-flight kicks in. Instead of seeing an opportunity for better thinking, they see a threat. Imagine your boss questioning your budget request in a meeting. Your heart rate spikes. Your face flushes. You start defending instead of listening. Twenty minutes later, you've missed valuable insights about organizational priorities, they've tuned out your reasoning, and maybe both of you damaged a key relationship. Look, this makes total sense. Your brain can't tell the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and someone attacking your political views. The same threat response kicks in. When you get defensive, it often triggers defensiveness in others because they interpret your reaction as confirmation that this is a fight, not a discussion. Once this happens, thinking improvement stops immediately. Your emotional brain takes over. Pure survival mode. No learning happens. No growth occurs. The chance for better thinking vanishes. The solution? Learn how to keep disagreements constructive instead of destructive. How To Make Disagreements Constructive The difference between a constructive disagreement and a destructive argument isn't the topic—it's how you handle the interpersonal dynamics. These four skills transform how you approach disagreement and create conditions where others are more likely to think clearly, too. When you use these skills, something remarkable happens: you stay open and curious instead of defensive and closed. When others see you thinking clearly under pressure, they're more likely to follow suit. Think of these as the basic requirements for constructive disagreement. Miss any one of them, and even the best critical thinking ...
    Show More Show Less
    39 mins
  • How to See Opportunities Others Miss

    How to See Opportunities Others Miss
    Sep 9 2025
    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 know this story from the emotional side—what it felt like to have that breakthrough moment, the internal resistance I faced, the personal transformation that followed. Today I'm delivering on my promise to give you the complete tactical methodology behind that insight. I'm going to show you the systematic framework I call high-resolution thinking—and how you can train yourself to see opportunities that others miss entirely. By the end of this episode, you'll understand the three-stage system that turns casual conversations into breakthrough innovations, you'll have nine specific methods you can practice, and you'll walk away with a week-long exercise you can start immediately. Here's what I want you to do right now: think of one conversation you had this week where someone mentioned a frustration, a side project, or something they wished existed. Hold that in your mind—we're going to transform how you process that kind of information. Credibility and Results But first, let me establish why this matters. That airport conversation led to HP's acquisition of VooDoo PC, the creation of HP's gaming business unit, and HP's rise to number one gaming PC market share—a position we held for years. The HP Blackbird that resulted earned PC Gamer's highest score ever awarded and a 9.3 from CNET. More importantly, I've used this same methodology to identify breakthrough opportunities across multiple Fortune 100 companies over the past two decades. The framework is repeatable, teachable, and it works. The difference between breakthrough innovators and everyone else isn't intelligence or access to information. It's thinking resolution—the cognitive ability to process multiple layers of information simultaneously while others get stuck examining only the surface. The Problem But before we dive into the framework, let me show you why this has become absolutely critical. We're living through what I call a "thinking recession." Despite having access to more information than ever before, our cognitive resolution is actually decreasing. Here's a startling statistic: the average executive processes over 34 GB of information daily, but misses 73% of the strategic signals embedded in that data. We're drowning in information while starving for insight. Watch any leadership meeting and you'll see the symptoms: binary thinking applied to complex situations, focus on symptoms instead of root causes, poor synthesis of multiple data streams, and over-reliance on frameworks that miss critical edge cases. Pause here and ask yourself: How many potential opportunities did you miss last week simply because you processed them as routine information instead of strategic signals? Consider Kodak—a company that literally invented the first digital camera, owned the patents, and dominated the market. They processed digital photography in low resolution, seeing it as a threat to film rather than recognizing how convenience, quality improvements, and social sharing behaviors would converge to create an entirely new market. Meanwhile, Instagram—a company that didn't even exist yet—was destined to process the same signals with enhanced clarity. They understood that digital photography wasn't about replacing film. It was about transforming social connection through visual storytelling. This pattern repeats constantly, and the stakes keep getting higher. The HP Story Let me show you exactly how high-resolution thinking worked in that airport conversation. I was traveling to San Diego with three other HP executives to visit a defense contractor. Standard business trip. But instead of small talk, I asked the HP engineer traveling with us about his side project. After some prodding, he described a PC he'd built with "off the charts performance." He'd been sneaking parts from the parts bin, sneaking motherboard customizations into production runs, conducting unauthorized R&D on his own time. Here's where thinking resolution made the difference: Standard Resolution Capture: "HP engineer built fast PC" High-Resolution Capture: Internal stealth project + upcoming defense contractor insights + performance optimization + unauthorized innovation driven by market demand Standard Resolution Processing: "Fast PC = gaming opportunity" High-Resolution Processing: Multiple pattern vectors converging—computing power trajectory hitting gaming demand trajectory, defense-grade performance concepts moving toward consumer markets, enthusiast communities forming through internet connections Standard Resolution Compression: "Let's build gaming PCs" High-Resolution Compression: Acquire existing excellence rather than build from scratch, preserve innovation culture while scaling distribution, ...
    Show More Show Less
    39 mins
  • 5 Questions That Can Spot Breakthrough Innovations Before They Happen

    5 Questions That Can Spot Breakthrough Innovations Before They Happen
    Sep 2 2025
    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 brothers achieved the first powered, controlled flight over the beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, proving the skeptics wrong. The smartest people in the world got this catastrophically wrong. What does that tell us about impossibility itself? Every industry has billion-dollar opportunities hiding behind a single word: impossible. And most executives never see them coming because they've been trained to accept limitations that don't actually exist. The Innovation Reality Check If the smartest experts can be so wrong about something as fundamental as human flight, then we need to completely rethink how we evaluate impossibility. The problem isn't that impossible things become possible. The problem is that we're terrible at recognizing what's actually impossible versus what just looks impossible. What Innovation Actually Means Innovation is simply an idea made real. Not brilliant concepts sitting in notebooks. Actual stuff you can touch. Use. Buy. Experience. Leonardo da Vinci invented flying machines in the 15th century. The Wright brothers innovated flight in 1903. What's the difference? Da Vinci had amazing ideas that stayed ideas. The Wright brothers made the idea real. This distinction changes everything about impossible innovation. Has someone successfully transformed an "impossible" idea into a tangible reality? Then logically, it was never truly impossible. We just lacked the knowledge, tools, or perspective to make it happen. Those dismissed breakthroughs floating around your industry right now? They aren't abstract fantasies. They're concrete challenges waiting for someone to develop the right knowledge, tools, and perspective. The Three Types of Impossibility Not all impossibilities are created equal. Three distinct categories: Logical Impossibility: Things that contradict themselves by definition. Married bachelors. Square circles. But even these sometimes dissolve when we reframe the question. Negative numbers? Logically impossible for centuries. Until merchants needed to describe debt, scientists needed to measure temperatures below freezing. Suddenly, those "impossible" numbers became essential tools. Physical Impossibility: Things that appear to violate natural laws. Quantum mechanics would've been physically impossible under 19th-century physics. Today, we're building quantum computers using those "impossible" principles. Practical Impossibility: Ideas that don't violate logic or physics—they're just beyond our current capabilities. Commercial fusion power. Artificial general intelligence. Reversing human aging. Most breakthrough innovations emerge from this third category. They represent temporary constraints. Not permanent barriers. Here's what nobody talks about: the companies that get blindsided by "impossible" innovations aren't stupid. They're victims of expertise. The more you know about an industry, the harder it becomes to see past its false limitations. Everyone says innovation requires thinking outside the box. That's backwards. The biggest breakthroughs come from questioning the box itself. Not thinking outside your industry's limitations—questioning whether those limitations are real. When I took over as CTO at HP, our PC division was hemorrhaging money. Three to five billion dollars a year in losses. Dead last in market share. Everyone inside the company believed there was no room to innovate in PCs. Too commoditized. Too mature. Impossible to differentiate. That belief? Complete nonsense. We took that division from massive losses to five billion in profits. From last place to number one global market share. How? By introducing innovations that everyone else in the industry said were impossible. Missing these patterns doesn't just cost market share. It costs entire business models. I've watched billion-dollar companies become footnotes because they couldn't see past their own expertise. The tools I'm sharing today came from that experience. And dozens of others like it. But what if I told you there's a way to cut through all this industry BS in less than five minutes? What if claims about what can't be done could be systematically dismantled with just the right questions? The Five-Question Reality Check These questions cut through industry BS faster than anything else I've seen. They force you to get specific about dismissive claims instead of accepting them at face value. They separate real barriers from fake ones. The Framework That Changes Everything When the industry consensus calls something a fantasy, don't dismiss it automatically. Run it through the Reality Check. Question 1: What makes this seem undoable specifically? Don't accept vague claims. Push for precise ...
    Show More Show Less
    30 mins
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.