Work With Me
For leaders facing the kind of decision that keeps you up at night.
Private Advisory
The rarest thing in business is not the idea. It is the judgment to make the call, and someone willing to tell you the truth.
Phil McKinney. Innovation Decision Expert. Forty years of high-stakes innovation decisions across industries, boardrooms, and crises.
A boutique advisory practice with a thirty-year history.
Techtrend works with executives and boards on their hardest decisions about innovation, strategy, and leadership. The work is substantive, direct, and candid, grounded in operating experience rather than theory.
At a certain level, the advice you get is shaped by what people need from you.
The board has its concerns. The leadership team has already read the room. The result is a particular kind of isolation. Surrounded by input, short on thinking you fully trust.
Techtrend exists for that gap.
Truth on the decisions that are hardest to test from inside your own building.
Phil works privately with a small number of senior leaders on their hardest calls. You work with him directly, not an account team. Engagements are retained relationships, not project work, and the relationship stays close enough to your business to be useful when the moment requires it.
The work shows up across executive and C-suite decisions, corporate strategy and business model, innovation leadership, technology and digital strategy, board-level perspective and leadership transitions, and selective introductions across his network. These are not a service menu. They are facets of one thing. Truth, not validation.
The roster stays small by choice. The problem has to be real, the leader has to want honest counsel rather than reassurance, and Phil has to be confident he has something to contribute that matters. He does not take work to fill a pipeline. When the practice is full, new relationships wait until a seat opens. If the fit is not there, he says so.
Someone who has held the seat, on both sides of the table.
Phil McKinney has spent four decades at the most senior levels of technology and innovation. CTO of Hewlett-Packard during the years Fast Company named it one of the most innovative companies in the world. President and CEO of CableLabs. He co-founded a company and took it public. He is the author of Beyond The Obvious. His perspective is that of someone who has made these calls and lived with them, not someone who has studied them.
A partial list of past engagements.
Named where the relationship is already public or the client has approved being mentioned. Engagement work itself stays confidential.
Carrying a decision that is hard to test inside your own building?
If you want the truth on it rather than another round of validation, write to Phil directly. If there is something he can contribute, he will say so. If there is not, he will say that too.
Write to PhilTechtrend Group is the parent. Two entities operate under it.
The public teaching practice and the workshop it comes from. Where four decades of innovation decisions get shared in the open.
An independent innovation newsroom. Solution-based journalism on innovation and the people behind it.
Techtrend is the house. The Studio and the Network are rooms inside it. Phil is the constant across all three.
The idea was never the hard part. It never is. The call is.