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The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

Di: Phil McKinney
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Forty years of billion-dollar innovation decisions. The real stories, the hard calls, and the patterns that repeat across every organization that's ever tried to build something new. Phil McKinney shares what those decisions actually look like. Phil was HP's CTO when Fast Company named it one of the most innovative companies in the world three years running. He co-founded a company and took it public. Now he runs CableLabs, the R&D engine behind the global broadband industry. This isn't theory. It's what happened. And what you can see coming if you know what to look for. Running since 2005, originally as The Killer Innovations Show, now The Innovators Studio. Tens of millions of downloads. Full archive at killerinnovations.com. New episodes at philmckinney.com.Copyright 2005-2026 Techtrend Group LLC. See philmckinney.com Economia Gestione e leadership Leadership Successo personale Sviluppo personale
Episodi
  • Why I Cried on Stage as a CEO

    Why I Cried on Stage as a CEO
    Oct 14 2026
    I cried on stage this week, in front of thousands of people. In front of the entire industry. The press in the room wrote about it. I couldn't believe it. Some people will tell you it isn't becoming for a CEO to cry in public, much less in front of the entire industry. They'll tell you it isn't good executive presence. So let me explain what happened in Atlanta last week. Let's get into it. On the Main Stage in Atlanta Last Tuesday I was in Atlanta for SCTE TechExpo, on the main stage for the opening session. Three of us were on stage: Chris Winfrey, chairman of the CableLabs board and chairman and CEO of Charter Spectrum; Mark Bridges, who takes over as CEO of CableLabs in January; and me. Let me give you a little context on how I got here. I was previously the CTO at HP, and I left at the end of 2011 thinking I was retiring. A week later, CableLabs called. Over the next five months, retiring turned into moving to Colorado to run CableLabs. I didn't come from cable. That wasn't my background. I'm grateful the board took a chance on an outsider, and glad I said yes when I wasn't sure what I was jumping into. The last two times I retired, from Teligent after the IPO and from HP, the next role came looking for me. This time, if anyone comes looking, I'll tell you right now: the answer is no. Innovation Is a Team Sport I've said this many times, here on the show and in the innovation boot camp courses I teach. Innovation is a team sport. That means the CableLabs team, the operators who fund the research lab, and our vendor partners. We could not have achieved our success without that community and the effort of everybody in it. Some of the articles are highlighting things that happened over my fourteen years, but none of it happened because of one person. This is by far the best job I have ever had, bar none. That's also why it is so hard to step away. That's what hit me on stage. It felt like I was saying goodbye to an industry and a CableLabs team I've been part of for fourteen years. Then I looked over and saw my grandson in the front row. Good Succession Plans Take Time I never wanted to be the leader gripping the desk, where someone has to pry his fingers off and push him out the door. I wanted to make the transition when I felt my successor was ready. Good transitions are not single events. It isn't the press release where you announce the new person and ride off into the sunset. A good succession plan is deliberate, and it takes time. Ours started 18 months ago, with me talking to the board of directors about my personal intent and about who I felt was ready. At CableLabs, we run a world-class succession process. For the last eight years, we've met with the board once a year and reviewed successors for every executive function at CableLabs. So the board knew our bench, how deep it was, and our plan to prepare people to step up into the next role. Mark Bridges is my successor as CableLabs CEO, and he is absolutely the right guy. He's been with CableLabs longer than I have - 16 years - and we've worked as a team for a decade. He's been our CTO for the last three years, and on August 1, he became president. He knows the organization and the CEOs of all our member companies. The board is unanimously united behind him, and so am I. I'm handing off roles and functions as we go, so that on January 1 he takes over the CEO title. I've also committed to both the board and Mark that I'll stay available to advise them throughout 2027. Who Is Ready to Step In for You? Let me ask you a question. If you left your role in 90 days, who is ready to step in and take on your function? If you think holding on to information makes you harder to replace, you're thinking it wrong. Strong leaders plan for their succession. You may have to leave for a medical reason or a family reason. Either way, you do not want to leave your organization in the lurch. So, who is ready? If you don't have anybody, start working on it now. The other question: which relationships exist only in your head or on your phone? Are you hoarding them, or are you sharing them with the person you've identified as your successor? If you want to be remembered as a model leader long after your career, leave the organization stronger than you found it, and hand it to somebody ready to take it further. Why Now? The question everybody asks is, why now, Phil? Why retire now? Age is part of it. I'm 66. But the real reason is my grandkids. I have five, ages 10 to 14, and I want to go do things with them. The oldest leaves for college in a handful of years, and I know how fast that clock runs. My 14 years at CableLabs flew by, and the years are going even faster now. I want to spend the time I have left with them. What's Next What I'm committing myself to is building the next generation of innovators. The YouTube channel and the podcast are staying. That's my investment in innovators out in the world. I'm also making that investment at ...
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    13 min
  • How To Build Innovation Teams (My Playbook From HP and CableLabs)

    How To Build Innovation Teams (My Playbook From HP and CableLabs)
    Sep 23 2026
    Why do people believe you can build an innovation team by hiring a few smart people and giving them a creative space? In my experience, teams built on this false premise die within eighteen months. How do organizations get it so wrong? Innovation consultants have told them, or innovation books have taught them, that this is how you build an innovation team. Those experts have rarely built and led innovation teams that delivered. So why is this episode any different? I built and ran HP's Innovation Program Office (IPO), and the teams I led there were named to Fast Company's Most Innovative list three years running. For the last fourteen years, I've run CableLabs, the research and innovation lab for the global broadband industry, where our teams build technology that half a billion people use every day. This episode is about what it takes to build innovation teams, based on my experience doing it at scale—multiple times. By the end, you'll have the six steps I use, in the order they have to happen, what goes wrong when a team skips one, and a way to score your team today. I'll start with a decision I almost got wrong. In 2007, I was about to approve a 20 percent time policy at HP. Under what is called "20 percent time", employees spend about one day a week, a fifth of their working hours, on projects of their own choosing. Google had made it famous; everyone was talking about it, and it looked like the answer. Chuck House stopped me. Chuck had spent decades at HP working for Dave Packard, who founded the company with Bill Hewlett. "Before you do anything," he said, "you need to talk to Art." Art Fong was HP employee number nine. When I sat down with him, he told me something I didn't know. HP had already tried 20 percent time. In the 1950s. The company had watched Art work on his own ideas on Friday afternoons, so it gave everyone Friday afternoons. Most people sat around not knowing what to do with the time, and HP dropped it. "The ones who were going to innovate, like me, were already doing it," Art told me. "The mandate didn't change behavior." That was the lesson. You can't order people to innovate. The people who will innovate are already trying, and your job is to find them and clear the way. I never approved the policy. Google killed its "20% time" policy in 2013. What Art told me next shaped every innovation team I built after that, and we'll keep coming back to Art and his story. Let's get into it. The Innovation Team Fallacy The innovation team fallacy is the belief that if you hire smart people and give them a creative space, innovation will follow. It's easy to believe, because every successful innovation team you've read about had smart people and a place to work. That's the part you can see from the outside. What you can't see is what had to be in place before the work began. There's a second version of it, and it's the mistake I almost made with 20 percent time: copying what worked at another company and expecting it to work at yours. I'll come back to that later, with the story of a company that learned it the hard way. Teams also fail when you build the pieces in the wrong order. Get the order wrong, and it doesn't matter how talented the people are. Here are the six steps, in the order they have to happen: Build the culture before you hire anyone Recruit for specific roles, not just talent Adapt the process, don't adopt someone else's Fund it like innovation, not like operations Measure what keeps leadership bought in Lead it day to day Step 1: Build the Culture Before You Hire Anyone Culture is how people behave when nobody is telling them what to do, especially when something goes wrong. New hires don't learn it from what you say, or from the employee handbook. They learn it from what they see. Art Fong didn't describe HP's culture with a policy. He taught me through stories. One weekend, Bill Hewlett found a manager had locked the tool room with a padlock. Bill came back with bolt cutters, cut the lock off, and left a signed note on the door: "Never lock this again." He wanted his engineers to get to parts and equipment whenever an idea hit them. The note told every engineer at HP that the founders would remove anything that stood between them and their next idea. When Art tried to buy a house in Palo Alto, and discrimination stood in the way, Bill and Dave bought it from the seller themselves and sold it to him. No memo or values poster builds that kind of trust. It's built by what leaders do. Three things have to be in place before you hire your first person. Permission to fail without penalty. Innovation means working on ideas that are too early, too unusual, or too risky for the company's normal processes. Most of them won't work, and nobody brings you ideas like that if failure costs them. People watch what happens to the first person whose project gets stopped. If that person's next performance review takes a hit, your team stops proposing anything that might fail. ...
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    38 min
  • How to Improve Analytical Thinking Skills

    How to Improve Analytical Thinking Skills
    Sep 16 2026
    Any team can fill a whiteboard with ideas in an hour. What most teams skip is the analytical thinking that tells them if they're solving the right problem. An idea pointed at the wrong problem is wasted no matter how clever the idea is, and you usually don't discover this mistake for years. By the end of this episode, you'll have four steps you can run on a real problem this week, the three thinking traps that can derail you, and a practice drill to sharpen your analytical thinking. To help explain how and the power behind this skill, I will use a real-world example. In the summer of 1854, cholera hit one small corner of London's Soho area, and by the time it burned out, 616 people were dead, most of them within a few streets of each other. The experts had an explanation ready. Cholera came from bad air, a poisonous vapor rising off filth and rot, called miasma, and that was the official position of the men in charge of public health. A doctor named John Snow didn't argue with them. He walked to the General Register Office, asked for the list of the dead, took that list out into the streets, and knocked on doors until he found that nearly all of them had lived a short walk from one water pump on Broad Street. We'll follow what he did as he applied each of the four steps I'm about to share. Let's get into it. What Is Analytical Thinking? Analytical thinking gets confused with critical thinking all the time, and the difference decides which skill you reach for. Critical thinking judges a claim: someone tells you something, and you ask whether it's true, who is saying it, and what they left out. I covered that in the critical thinking episode, and it's worth watching if you haven't already seen it. Analytical thinking starts when there is no claim on the table yet, just a mess. Sales are down twelve percent. Your best people keep leaving. A project that looked healthy in March is three months late in September. Nobody has handed you an argument to evaluate, so there's nothing yet to be critical of. You have to work out what's going on. Snow's story shows the gap. Critical thinking, applied carefully in 1854, points you straight at the Board of Health, because they were the credible source making a claim, and the credible source was wrong. In the critical thinking episode, we briefly touched on breaking a problem into pieces. In today's episode, we focus on breaking the problem into pieces and then analyzing each one. Why Analytical Thinking Is Eroding Most people remember Snow for the famous cholera map, the one with little black bars stacked along the streets of Soho, piling up around the pump. That map didn't exist in September 1854. A mapmaker drew it for a book Snow published the following year. The real work involved a list of names and a lot of walking. Today, most of us only ever see the finished map. We rarely do the work that produces it. Think about the last dashboard you looked at. The numbers arrived already cut into pieces, by region, by quarter, by product line, and somebody chose those cuts, months ago, for a question they had then. When the slicing arrives pre-made, you've inherited someone else's answer and never noticed. AI summaries go one step further. You ask what's going on, and you get back a paragraph shaped exactly like a conclusion: confident, organized, finished. It never asks you to decide where to look, and that decision is the skill. Like any skill, it only improves when you make it yourself. Keep the dashboard. But you need to be able to do the same work yourself, by hand, when the dashboard doesn't answer your question. The Four Steps Snow's work, and the work of anyone good at analytical thinking, has four steps: Break the problem into pieces Find the pattern inside them Test whether your read is right Look out for the thinking traps Step 1: Break the Problem Into Pieces A problem that feels overwhelming is a problem you haven't cut into pieces yet. The skill is deciding how to split it. The steps to break a problem into pieces: Write the problem down as a fact. "Renewals dropped from eighty percent to sixty-eight percent this year." Not "customers hate the new pricing." That one assumes the answer before you've done the work. Split the problem into pieces that add up to the whole. New customers and existing ones. This region and that one. Online and in-store. If the pieces overlap or leave something out, you'll double-count or miss what matters. Follow the piece that moved, and keep splitting it. If the drop sits almost entirely in one region, split that region again. If it's spread evenly across everything, that's a clue too, and it points you toward something that touches everything. Stop when a piece is small enough to act on or to ask a person about, because past that point more analysis just delays the decision. Get the rows behind the chart. Snow didn't work from a death rate for the district. He worked from eighty-nine names and eighty-nine addresses, and ...
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    27 min
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