What We’re Listening To: ‘Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney’
CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney and his bus were stationed in Atlanta for the recent SCTE TechExpo 24, so it’s fitting his recent “Killer Innovations” podcast episode was centered on the idea of how to navigate new waves of innovation. It’s also apt he had longtime colleague Harry Beane join him on the bus—which serves as McKinney’s podcast studio—as a guest considering the two have embarked on a few technological endeavors like launching the first GSM mobile carrier in the U.S. Omnipoint (now T-Mobile) as well as the first point-to-multipoint carrier Teligent, which was expanded to 12 countries.
While McKinney and Beane open the episode by discussing the trials and tribulations of being grandparents, they tie the sentiment into how the current younger generations are set up to use their imaginations. McKinney sees an ongoing battle to have kids avoid simply consuming technology or various forms of content and instead choose to be creative themselves. He also expressed worry about shortening attention spans and how that could limit the amount of knowledge one can consume.
“I jokingly tell my team I work with as the CEO of CableLabs that senior leaders inside of the organizations tend to have the attention span of a gnat—me included,” McKinney said. “You got so much stuff going on, but you see it all the way down through kids these days. Deep thinking is just not a skill set for a lot of people. And how do you teach that? How do you reveal to people the value of truly understanding [something]?”
McKinney has been pondering the topic of creativity among kids for quite some time. He even addressed that very subject 13 years ago in a series of videos. Nowadays, his analysis is it’s primarily up to the parents rather than the school system to influence and encourage creativity.
On the other side of the innovation equation is problem-solving. Beane recounted watching his granddaughter attempt to climb up a tree, but after struggling and asking for help, Beane suggested stepping back and taking a “big picture” look at the task at hand.
“You know you’re going to fail,” Beane said about approaching innovation. “The problem with today’s businesses, if you fail at something that is treated as sometimes an extreme negative, [that] will then mean ‘I’m not going to try again.’”
That room to fail opens the door for innovators to continue trying to find the next breakthrough. McKinney said he learned how to fail—and subsequently learn from failures—from his time as a Boy Scout. “Every 14, 15-year-old kid planning a campout menu is going to screw up. But let me tell you, ask them when they’re 40 what happened at Boy Scouts, they’ll remember that screw-up and what they learned from it,” McKinney joked. – Noah Ziegler