『Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney』のカバーアート

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

著者： Phil McKinney
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概要

 Why do smart leaders make terrible choices about breakthrough ideas? Phil McKinney spent 40 years making high-stakes innovation decisions — as HP's CTO and now CEO of CableLabs. Each week, he shares the thinking frameworks and decision patterns that separate breakthroughs from expensive mistakes. No theory. No hype. Just what actually works. Running weekly since 2005. Full archive at KillerInnovations.comSee http://philmckinney.com マネジメント・リーダーシップ リーダーシップ 個人的成功 経済学 自己啓発
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  • How to Beat Decision Fatigue

    How to Beat Decision Fatigue
    2026/02/10
    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 knowledge didn't fail. Her energy failed, and her judgment went with it. That's the trap. We assume our thinking stays constant, that the brain in hour fourteen is the same brain that showed up in hour one. It's not. Last episode, we tackled deciding under uncertainty. But fatigue does something different. Uncertainty makes you hesitate. Fatigue makes you stop caring. Why Your Brain Makes Worse Decisions by Evening You've probably heard the popular saying: "Making too many decisions wears you out, so by evening your judgment is shot." That idea dominated psychology for twenty years. Researchers believed decision-making drained from a limited mental reserve, like a battery running down. Then, independent labs tried to reproduce those results at scale, and the effect vanished. One study, 23 labs, over 2,000 people, found nothing. A second, 36 labs, 3,500 people, same result. The experience is real, though. People do make worse decisions after a long day of mental effort. What was wrong was the explanation. Your brain doesn't drain like a battery. After sustained effort, it shifts priorities. It starts favoring speed and ease over accuracy. Not because it can't think carefully, but because it decides careful thinking isn't worth the effort. Decision fatigue isn't your brain shutting down. It's your brain quietly lowering its standards without telling you. Decision Fatigue in the Real World That science isn't abstract. It plays out every day. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital tracked over 21,000 patient visits. Doctors prescribed unnecessary antibiotics more frequently as the day went on. Not because afternoon patients were sicker. Because saying "here's a prescription" is easier than explaining why you don't need one. Five percent more patients received antibiotics they didn't need, purely because of timing. The same pattern shows up everywhere. Surgeons make more conservative calls later in the day. Hand hygiene compliance drops across a twelve-hour shift. Financial analysts grow less accurate with each additional stock prediction they make in a single day. The drift always goes in the same direction: toward whatever requires the least effort. That drift explains something we've been exploring across this series. When you're exhausted, someone else's conclusion isn't just tempting, it's a relief. The algorithm's recommendation saves you from having to evaluate. The expert's opinion saves you from forming your own. That's mindjacking, finding the open door. Fatigue doesn't just degrade your thinking. It makes you grateful to hand it over. Your Four Warning Signals Knowing the science is useful. But what matters more is catching fatigue in yourself before it costs you. Here are four signals that your judgment is compromised. Signal 1: The Default Drift. Someone proposes a plan that sounds... fine. Not great, not terrible. Two hours ago, you'd have pushed back, asked harder questions. Now you just nod. You're not agreeing because you're convinced. You're agreeing because disagreeing takes energy you no longer have. Signal 2: The Irritability Spike. A colleague asks a reasonable question, and it feels like an interruption. When your emotional response is out of proportion to the situation, it's not the situation. Your reserves are low. Signal 3: The Shortcut Reflex. A decision that should take twenty minutes takes thirty seconds. You skip the analysis, go with your gut. There's a version of this that sounds like confidence. "I trust my instincts." But late in the day, that phrase is often code for "I'm too tired to think this through." Signal 4: The Surrender. You stop forming conclusions and start borrowing them. Someone says, "I think we should go with Option B" and you feel a wave of relief. Not because Option B is right, but because you no longer have to figure it out. That relief is the signal. When outsourcing, your judgment feels like a gift instead of a loss, you're running on empty. If two or more of these show up at the same time, stop. Your judgment isn't reliable right now. Don't trust it with anything that matters. Four Moves to Protect Your Judgment Those signals tell you something's wrong. Here's what to do about it. Move 1: Postpone it. Move the decision to a high-energy window. For most people, that's morning. Think of those hours like premium real estate. Stop filling them with trivial meetings. ...
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    16 分
  • How to Stop Overthinking Your Decisions

    How to Stop Overthinking Your Decisions
    2026/01/28
    You've got a decision you've been putting off. Maybe it's a career move. An investment. A difficult conversation you keep rehearsing in your head but never starting. You tell yourself you need more information. More data. More time to think. But you're not gathering information. You're hiding behind it. What looks like due diligence is actually overthinking in disguise. The certainty you're waiting for doesn't exist. It won't exist until after you decide and see what happens. I call this mindjacking: when something hijacks your ability to think for yourself. Sometimes it's external. Algorithms, experts, crowds thinking for you. But sometimes you're the one doing it. That endless research? It feels like diligence. It functions as delay. You're not being thorough. You're mindjacking yourself. Today, you'll learn a framework for knowing when you have enough information, even when it doesn't feel like enough. Because deciding before you're ready isn't recklessness. It's a skill. And for most people, that skill has completely atrophied. The Real Cost of Waiting At a California supermarket, researchers set up a tasting booth for gourmet jams. Some days, the display showed 24 varieties. Other days, just six. The bigger display attracted more attention. Sixty percent of people stopped to look. But only three percent actually bought jam. When shoppers saw just six options? Thirty percent purchased. Ten times the conversion rate. More options didn't help people choose. More options paralyzed them. The jam study has been replicated across dozens of categories since then. The pattern holds. More choices, more overthinking, fewer decisions. Think about your postponed decision. How many options are you juggling? How many articles have you read? Every expert you consult, every scenario you play out in your head... you're not getting closer to certainty. You're adding jams to the display. And while you're researching, the world keeps moving. Opportunities close. Competitors act. Your own situation shifts. The decision you're avoiding today won't even be the same decision six months from now. Waiting has a cost. Most people dramatically underestimate it. The Two-Door Framework So how do you know when you have enough information? Jeff Bezos uses a mental model that's useful here. Picture every decision as a door you're about to walk through. Some doors are one-way: once you're through, you can't come back. Selling your company. Getting married. Signing a ten-year lease. These deserve serious deliberation. Most decisions, though, are two-way doors. You walk through, look around, and if you don't like what you see, you walk back out. Starting a side project. Trying a new marketing strategy. Having that difficult conversation. The consequences are real, but they're not permanent. The mistake most people make is treating two-way doors like one-way doors. They apply the same level of analysis to choosing project management software as acquiring a company. They're not being thorough. They're overthinking reversible choices. That's how organizations grind to a halt. That's how careers stall. That's how opportunities evaporate while you're still "thinking about it." Before you gather more information, ask yourself: Can I reverse this? If yes, even if reversing would be annoying, you're probably overthinking it. The 40-70 Rule General Colin Powell used a decision framework he called the 40-70 rule. Military leaders and executives have adopted it for decades. The Floor: 40% Never decide with less than forty percent of the information you'd want. Below that threshold, you're not being decisive. You're gambling. The Ceiling: 70% Don't wait for more than seventy percent. By the time you've gathered that much data, the window has usually closed. Someone else acted. The situation changed. The decision got made for you, by default. The Sweet Spot That range between forty and seventy percent is where good decisions actually happen. It feels uncomfortable because you're not certain. That discomfort isn't a warning sign, though. It's the signal that you're doing it right. Most overthinking happens above seventy percent. You already have what you need. You're just not ready to commit. If deciding feels completely comfortable, you've probably waited too long. The Productive Discomfort Test "I genuinely need more information" and "I'm using research as a hiding place" feel identical from the inside. Both feel responsible. Both feel like due diligence. I once watched a friend spend eleven months researching a career change. She read books. Took assessments. Talked to people in the field. Built spreadsheets comparing options. She knew more about the industry than people working in it. And at month eleven, she was no closer to a decision than at month one. The research had become the activity. The feeling of progress without the risk of commitment. She wasn't preparing. She was hiding. And she couldn't tell the difference. So how do you tell ...
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    14 分
  • Mindjacking - When your Opinions are Not Yours

    Mindjacking - When your Opinions are Not Yours
    2026/01/20
    You've built a toolkit over the last several episodes. Logical reasoning. Causal thinking. Mental models. Serious intellectual firepower. Now the uncomfortable question: When's the last time you actually used it to make a decision? Not a decision you think you made. One where you evaluated the options yourself. Weighed the evidence. Formed your own conclusion. Here's what most of us do instead: we Google it, ask ChatGPT, go with whatever has the most stars. We feel like we're deciding, but we're not. We're just choosing which borrowed answer to accept. That gap between thinking you're deciding and actually deciding is where everything falls apart. And there's a name for it. What Mindjacking Actually Is Mindjacking. Not the sci-fi version where hackers seize your brain through neural implants. The real version. Where you voluntarily hand over your thinking because someone else already did the work. It's not dramatic. It's convenient. The algorithm ranked the results. The expert weighed in. The crowd already decided. Why duplicate the effort? Mindjacking is different from ordinary influence. You choose it. Every single time. Nobody forces you to stop evaluating. You volunteer, because forming your own conclusion is harder than borrowing someone else's. What exactly are you losing when this happens? The Two Skills Under Attack Mindjacking destroys two distinct capabilities. They're different, and you need both. Evaluation independence is the ability to assess whether a claim is valid. Not whether the source has credentials. Not whether experts agree. Whether the evidence actually supports the conclusion. Decision independence is the ability to commit to a path based on your own judgment, without needing someone else to validate it first. Both skills need each other. Watch what happens when one erodes faster than the other. A woman researches her medical condition for hours. Journal articles. Treatment comparisons. She understands her options better than most medical students would. She walks into the doctor's office, lays out her analysis. It's thorough. Sophisticated, even. The doctor reviews it and says, "This is impressive. You've really done your homework." She nods. Then looks up and asks: "So what should I do?" She can evaluate. She can't decide. Now flip it. Think about someone who decides fast. Trusts their gut. Never waits for permission. How often does that person get burned by bad information they never verified? They can decide. They can't evaluate. Lose either ability and you're trapped. Lose both and you're not thinking at all. The Four Surrender Signals How do you know when mindjacking is happening? It has a signature. Four internal signals that reveal the handoff in progress, if you know how to read them. Signal one: Relief. The moment you find "the answer," you notice a weight lifting. Pay attention to that. Relief isn't insight. It's the burden of thinking being removed. When you actually work through a problem yourself, the result isn't relief. It's clarity. And clarity usually comes with new questions, not a sense of "done." Signal two: Speed. Uncertainty to certainty in seconds? That's not evaluation. You found someone else's answer and adopted it. There's a difference between "I figured it out" and "I found someone who figured it out." One took effort. The other took a search bar. Signal three: Echo. Listen to your own conclusions. Do they sound like something you read, heard, or scrolled past recently? If your "own opinion" matches a headline almost word-for-word, it probably isn't yours. You're not thinking. You're repeating. Signal four: Unearned confidence. You're certain about a conclusion, but ask yourself: could you explain the reasoning behind it? Not where you heard it. The actual reasoning. If you can't, that confidence isn't yours. It came attached to someone else's answer, and you absorbed both their conclusion and their certainty without doing any analysis yourself. Once you notice these signals firing, you need a way to stop the pattern before it completes. The Interrupt The interrupt is a single question: "Did I reach this conclusion, or just find it?" Six words. That's the whole thing. It works because it forces a distinction your brain normally blurs. "I decided" and "I adopted someone's decision" are identical from the inside, until you ask the question. Test it now. Think about the last opinion you formed. The last purchase you made. The last recommendation you accepted. Did you reach that conclusion, or just find it? The interrupt doesn't tell you what to think. It tells you whether you're thinking at all. Finding an answer isn't the same as reaching one. This matters more than you might realize, because the pattern is bigger than any single decision you make. The Aha Moment: The Illusion of Expertise Researchers at Penn State looked at 35 million Facebook posts and found something remarkable: seventy-five percent of shared links were never clicked. ...
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    14 分
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