Phil McKinney

Phil McKinney has spent four decades doing what most innovation consultants only write about: making the actual call. As CTO of HP, he led the teams FastCompany and BusinessWeek named among the "50 Most Innovative" three consecutive years.

Before that, he co-founded and took a company public. After the book, he served as President and CEO of CableLabs, the R&D lab that creates the technology behind the global broadband industry.

Beyond The Obvious is where he first shared the system behind those decisions: the FIRE method and the 48 Killer Questions he developed and tested across two decades of innovation leadership before the book was ever written.

He has hosted a podcast on innovation since 2005, longer than most in the field have existed. Now called The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney, it has accumulated tens of millions of downloads across more than twenty years. Vanity Fair named him "The Innovation Guru." The San Jose Mercury News called him "chief seer."

He lives in Colorado.