How I Mindjacked Boards for a Living

I watched their faces change as I delivered the verdict.

A dozen executives from one of the world's largest telecommunications carriers sat around a conference table. My team had been hired because we'd helped launch nearly every major mobile operator in the United States, the first market to deploy cellular services at scale. Our expertise commanded a premium. Our confidence was absolute.

Thirty slides behind me. Benchmarks. Frameworks. Case studies from Bell South, Bell Atlantic, the carriers whose names meant something in the 1990s. I walked them through their strategy, point by point, and told them where it aligned with US best practices.

Then I told them where they fell short.

The shift happened fast. The executive who'd been leaning back, arms crossed, skeptical of the American consultants: he uncrossed his arms. The head of strategy who'd defended their approach in earlier meetings started taking notes. The CEO, who'd been quiet, nodded slowly.

Within weeks, they'd adjusted. Aligned their strategy with our recommendations. Done what we told them to do.

And I felt the power of it. The borrowed credibility of all those US carrier logos. The confidence that came from saying "this is what the market leaders do." The way a room full of smart people deferred to our conclusions because we'd wrapped them in the authority of best practices.

Here's what I didn't tell them: the US mobile market was nothing like theirs. Different regulatory environment. Different consumer behavior. Different competitive dynamics. Different geography, population density, spectrum allocation. The practices that worked in America had emerged from American conditions, conditions that didn't exist in their country.

But I didn't understand that. Not really. I believed what I was selling. Best practices meant best to me, not "most common" or "worked somewhere else once." Expertise was transferable. Context was a detail.

It took them years to learn what I should have known. Years of adjustments, pivots, failures that traced back to that room where I'd stood with absolute confidence and told them what to do.

That's mindjacking. And I was good at it.

The Word I Didn't Have Then

Mindjacking is the systematic capture of your ability to think for yourself. Not through force, but through convenience. Not by overriding your judgment, but by making judgment feel unnecessary.

It happens at a specific moment. The moment you reach for someone else's conclusion instead of forming your own. You're busy. You're under pressure. The expert already weighed in. Why duplicate the effort?

That moment is the surrender.

Standing in front of those telecom executives, I wasn't forcing anyone to do anything. I was offering permission to stop thinking. Permission wrapped in data and frameworks and prestigious client logos. Permission that felt like rigor.

Those executives were smart. They'd built careers making difficult decisions. But when American consultants showed up with benchmarks from the world's most advanced mobile market, they did what most smart people do: they deferred.

Not because they were weak. Because deference to expertise feels rational. Because checking your judgment against best practices feels like due diligence. Because the surrender is invisible when it's dressed as prudence.

The consulting industry exists because this surrender is so common, so comfortable, and so well-disguised as wisdom.

The Machine I Operated

At the time of that engagement, I was a director at CSC, one of the Big Six consulting firms. Our telecom practice served carriers across three continents.

Here's how the machine actually worked.

Win a major engagement with a prestigious client. Spend months observing, interviewing, analyzing. Develop recommendations. Some worked. Some didn't. The engagement would end. Move on.

Then package what we'd learned. Strip out the context. Remove the failures. Keep the parts that sounded impressive. Discard everything that complicated the narrative.

Walk into the next client. Present borrowed conclusions as "best practices."

The bible for this approach was "Reengineering the Corporation" by James Champy and Michael Hammer, the book that launched the Business Process Reengineering movement and created an entire consulting industry methodology. Study successful companies. Extract patterns. Apply them elsewhere.

Here's what didn't make the bestseller list: in that same book, Champy and Hammer admitted that fifty to seventy percent of reengineering efforts failed to achieve the dramatic results they intended. They called it an "unscientific estimate." The business press called it a revolution. ¹

The methodology that made consulting firms rich succeeded less than half the time. By its own authors' admission.

Best practices assume context doesn't matter. That what worked at Dell will work at your company. That Apple's success is transferable. That IBM's transformation can be replicated.

Strip away the context and you're not borrowing success. You're borrowing behaviors without understanding what made them work.

I didn't see this clearly when I was inside the machine. I saw it when I stepped outside.

The Other Side of the Table

After CSC, I co-founded Teligent. We raised hundreds of millions and took the company public. As SVP and CIO, the technology and infrastructure strategy was mine to build.

Then the board told us to bring in McKinsey.

Not "consider" bringing them in. Not "evaluate whether" their perspective might add value. Our investors wanted validation. Borrowed confidence from a prestigious name.

So I sat in a boardroom watching consultants evaluate the technology strategy. Familiar frameworks. Familiar methodology. Familiar comparisons to what they'd seen at other companies. I'd used these same techniques when I was on their side of the table.

One minute I'd been the consultant standing in front of boards, selling borrowed thinking.

The next minute I was the executive whose thinking was being measured against borrowed benchmarks.

And I recognized the play. I'd run it myself.

Our board didn't want to evaluate the strategy on its merits. They wanted permission. McKinsey telling them our conclusions were safe to approve. If it failed, the failure would belong to McKinsey too.

I knew exactly what was happening because I'd done it to others. That telecom engagement years earlier. The executives who'd adjusted their strategy because I told them to. The consequences that followed.

Now I was on the receiving end of my own technique. Being mindjacked by the same methodology I'd used to mindjack others.

The Pattern I Couldn't Break

At HP, the scale was larger but the pattern was identical. I'd been the consultant running the play. I'd been the executive on the receiving end. I was certain I'd recognize it when I saw it again.

Then I watched it happen again. And I couldn't stop it.

The board brought in McKinsey to advise on organizational structure. The recommendation came back with the confidence I remembered from my own consulting days: reduce management layers. No more than thirteen levels in the organization. No manager with fewer than three direct reports. Wider spans of control. Fewer managers, more individual contributors.

Where did this come from? Best practices. McKinsey's analysis showed that top-performing organizations had flatter structures and wider spans of control. The data was compelling. The frameworks were rigorous. The logos of comparison companies were impressive.

What the analysis completely missed was HP's culture.

At HP, managers weren't just managers. They were technical experts who'd taken on leadership roles because they were the best in their field. They still contributed. They still designed. They still solved problems alongside their teams. The "management layer" McKinsey wanted to eliminate wasn't bureaucratic overhead. It was institutional expertise wearing a different title.

Mark Hurd and the board weren't embedded in HP's culture the way the engineers were. They saw the org chart. They saw the benchmarks. They saw McKinsey's data showing what "top performers" looked like.

What made HP actually work? That they couldn't see.

The recommendation was approved. Entire layers of experienced experts, people who happened to have "manager" in their title, were eliminated. Decades of institutional knowledge walked out the door because a best practice said the org chart should look different.

I watched it happen. I knew the play. I'd run it myself, years earlier, on the other side of the world.

And I couldn't stop the mindjacking. Not even when I saw it coming.

The Confession

I made good money helping people not think. I stood in front of boards and delivered borrowed conclusions with confidence I hadn't earned. Smart executives deferred to my frameworks because deferring felt safer than judging. I was part of a system that charges $1,200 an hour to provide cover for decisions people don't want to own. 

I believed what I was selling. That might be worse than cynicism. True believers don't question the product. They just sell harder.

That telecommunications carrier made decisions based on my recommendations. Real decisions with real consequences. Years of adjustments, pivots, and failures that traced back to my thirty slides and my absolute confidence about what best practices required.

HP made decisions based on McKinsey's recommendations. Experienced experts lost their jobs because a framework said the org chart was wrong.

I didn't know what I didn't know. Neither did McKinsey. But we all delivered our conclusions as if we did.

That's the confession. Not that consulting is corrupt, but that the corruption is invisible to the people inside it. I thought I was helping. McKinsey thought they were helping. We all thought expertise transferred. We all thought context was a detail.

I was mindjacking boards before I even had the word for what I was doing.

And I wish I could tell you that once you see the machine, you're free of it. That awareness creates immunity. That having been on three sides of this table — consultant, executive, witness — means I no longer reach for borrowed conclusions.

I still catch myself.

Someone asks what I think about a strategic question, and before I've finished my own analysis, I'm reaching for what others have said. What the research shows. What the experts recommend. The reflex is that deep.

There's a question that helps. When you feel the pull toward borrowed thinking, ask yourself: 

Am I thinking? Or am I borrowing someone else's thinking and calling it my own?

It's not a cure. It's an interrupt. A way to catch the surrender before it completes. You have to use it every time, because the pull never stops.

Forty years of practice built these neural pathways. They don't disappear because I've named them. Every time I want the comfort of borrowed confidence, I have to actively choose the harder path.

The consultants won't change. They're doing exactly what they're built to do.

The boards won't change. Cover matters more to them than clarity.

The only thing that changes is whether you catch yourself in the moment of surrender, before you get mindjacked.

I'm still practicing.

Watch the companion video: Mindjacking — When Your Opinions Aren't Yours - To be released next Wednesday.

Phil McKinney spent years in the consulting industrial complex before co-founding Teligent and later serving as CTO at HP, where his teams won "Most Innovative Company" three years running. He writes weekly at Studio Notes and explores thinking independence on YouTube.

Notes

¹ Hammer, M. and Champy, J. "Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution." HarperBusiness, 1993. The authors wrote: "Our unscientific estimate is that as many as 50 percent to 70 percent of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended."