How to Overcome Confirmation Bias
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
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 decisions has taught me. Let's get into it. What Is Confirmation Bias? Confirmation bias is your brain's tendency to seek out, favor, and remember information that confirms what you already...
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Why Most Organizations Aren't Funding Innovation
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
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 them. Governments subsidize them. Analysts benchmark them. And the term at the center of all of it has no settled definition. A company can gut its research investment without triggering a single alarm on...
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R&D Spending Is the Most Misleading Number in Business
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
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 strange. The real number exists. The government has been collecting it from every major US company for decades. It would answer the question every innovation leader...
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The Innovation Metric Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard Used
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
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. Something the rest of the industry has been ignoring for seventy years. And the proof was sitting in a paper that Chuck House pulled out and sent to me after a conversation at a Computer History Museum board meeting. By...
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The R&D Metric Mark Hurd and HP Got Wrong
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
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 right. What went wrong. My objective is to expose you to the patterns in innovation decisions so that you can recognize them. Recognize them in yourself, in the people you need to influence,...
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How to Build a Decision System that Protects Your Thinking
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
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 you left unguarded. The answer isn't trying harder. It's building systems that protect your thinking before the pressure hits. By the end of this episode, you'll have four concrete strategies for doing exactly that, and a one-page...
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How to Quit Defending Decisions You Know are Wrong
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
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 the new pricing strategy in a few locations first, Johnson said five words that explain everything that happened next: "We didn't test at Apple." Within seventeen months, sales dropped twenty-five percent. He was fired. And here's the...
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How to Think For Yourself When Everyone Disagrees With You
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
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 first, I want you to remember the last time you were in a meeting, and you knew something was wrong. The numbers didn't add up. The risk was being underestimated. And someone needed to say it. Then the most senior person in the room spoke first: "I think this is exactly what we need." Heads nodded. Finance agreed....
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Better Decisions Under Pressure
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
"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? Most of the urgency you feel every day is fake. Manufactured by someone who benefits from you deciding fast instead of deciding well. Most people can't tell a real deadline from a manufactured one. By the end of this, you will. Let's get into it. What Time Pressure Actually Does to Your Brain Last episode,...
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How to Beat Decision Fatigue
The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney
A nurse in Pennsylvania had been on her feet for twelve hours. She was supposed to go home, but the unit was short-staffed, so she stayed. During that overtime, a patient was diagnosed with cancer and needed two chemotherapy doses. She administered the first, placed the second in a drawer, and headed home. She forgot about the second dose. It wasn't discovered until the next day. The patient was fine; they got the treatment in time. But think about what happened. This wasn't a careless nurse. This was a dedicated professional who stayed late to help her team. Her skills didn't fail. Her...
info_outlineI stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open.
Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it.
My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with her parents’ estate. Both had just died. So my daughter drove me to the ER instead.
That was surgery number one.
By Thanksgiving this year, I’d had five cardiac surgeries. Six hospitalizations. All in twelve months.
And somewhere between surgery three and four, everything I thought I knew about gratitude… broke.
When the Comfortable List Stopped Working
Five surgeries. Three cardiac devices. My body kept rejecting the thing meant to save my life.
Lying there before surgery number five, waiting for the anesthesia, one question kept circling: What if I don’t make it this time?
And that’s when the comfortable list stopped working.
You know the one. Health. Family. Career. The things we say around the table because they sound right.
But when you’re not sure you’ll wake up from surgery… when your wife is burying both her parents while managing your near-death… when the calendar is filled with hospital dates instead of holidays…
You can’t perform gratitude anymore. You have to find out what it actually means.
The clock isn’t just ticking anymore. It’s screaming.
What Survives
And that’s when I saw it clearly. Not in a hospital room—at a lunch table with my grandson.
Last month, Liam sat next to me after church. He’s twelve. Runs his own business designing 3D models. And he’d been listening to my podcast episode about breakthrough innovations.
He had an idea. A big one.
“It would need way better batteries than we have now, Papa.”
So we went deep—the kind of conversation where you forget a twelve-year-old is asking questions most engineers won’t touch. He’s already thinking about making the impossible possible.
And sitting there, watching him work through the problem, I realized something: This is what survives when I’m gone.
My grandfather would take me to my Uncle Bishop’s tobacco farm in rural Kentucky. When we’d do something wrong—cut a corner, rush through it—we’d hear it: “A job worth doing is worth doing right.”
Almost like a family mantra.
I heard it on that farm. My kids heard it from me. Liam hears it now.
And that line will keep moving forward long after I’m gone. Not because of the accolades. Because of the people.
It’s Not Just Liam
But here’s what hit me sitting there with Liam: It’s not just him.
It’s you.
Every week for more than twenty years, I’ve been putting out content. Podcasts. Videos. Articles. Not for the downloads. Not for the metrics.
For this exact moment—where something I share gets passed forward. Where you have a conversation with someone younger who needs to hear it. Where you take what works and make it your own.
That’s what legacy actually is. Not the content I create. Not what’s on a shelf. The people we invest time in. The effort we put into helping them become who the future needs.
My legacy is Liam, yes. But it’s also every person who’s taken something from these conversations and shared it forward. That’s you.
That’s the reason the clock screaming doesn’t make me stop. It makes me keep going.
Because you’re going to pass this forward. And that’s what survives.
The Math
I turned sixty-five in September. Both my parents died at sixty-eight. The math isn’t encouraging.
So when people ask me why I keep pushing—why I’m still creating content when I can barely type, when I’ve had five surgeries in twelve months—
It’s because I finally understand what I’m grateful for.
Not my health. That’s been failing spectacularly. Not comfort. That ended in March.
I’m grateful I get to see what happens when you invest in people. I’m grateful Liam asks me about batteries over lunch. I’m grateful you’re watching this and thinking about who you’re investing in.
I’m grateful for what the breaking revealed.
What I’m Actually Grateful For
That morning when my chest split open? I was terrified. Thinking about everything that could go wrong.
Now? I’m grateful for what it forced me to see. Who shows up. What survives. Why it matters to keep going even when it would be easier to stop.
This week on Studio Notes, I’m telling the full story. The medical mystery that took five surgeries to solve. The conversation with Liam that changed everything. What my wife actually thinks about me writing a second book while recovering from all this. And what gratitude looks like when the comfortable list stops working.
Read the full story on Studio Notes: https://philmckinney.substack.com/p/what-im-actually-thankful-for-after
Your Turn
But here’s what I really want to know: When was the last time you were grateful for something that hurt you?
Not the easy stuff. Not the list you perform around the table. The thing that broke you open. The thing that forced you to see differently.
Drop it in the comments. Tell me what you found inside the breaking.
Because maybe that’s what Thanksgiving is actually for. Learning what gratitude looks like when everything breaks. And discovering that what survives isn’t what we thought.
Happy Thanksgiving.