A Conversation with Michael Rennie
(The complete Flip interview, with only minor edits, not found in the book)

I wouldn’t have described myself as a spiritual person at all through my early twenties.  I went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.  When I was there things started to happen that didn’t fit my nice non-spiritual picture of reality.  So I threw my worldview up in the air and said there’s something else’s going on here.

One of my girlfriends came from a family that were quite new-age spiritual and I went out to Arizona with her and I went to this hall and there was a woman there who took people’s watches or jewelry and would talk about them by holding it.  I put up my hand she chose me she took my watch and went very quiet for awhile and then said, in a nutshell, “You’ve come with a mission.  It’s a spiritual mission.  It’s the farthest thing from your mind at the moment.  And it’s to touch those the others can’t touch.”  As she said it, it was like this bolt through my heart I knew that it was true.  Something started to shift after that I kept seeking to understand this bigger picture, but also knowing that I had had it since I was a child, that I would come to be of service, knowing that that service was going to be about touching those the others can’t touch, and that it was increasingly about what I’d now call consciousness and spirit, understanding the connectedness of life and the sense of how things fit together.  Then I started to read the ancient texts, Bagavaghita, the various Sufi writings, all sorts of Christian things.  I was getting very interested in how that works in an applied way in everyday life. 

I worked as a lawyer.  There are these two parts of me.  And I thought at sometime I would have to make a choice.  And I came to realize that it wasn’t about choice.  It was about integration.  Getting business to serve spirit was required to balance the society.  Today, the imbalance is that everything serves economics.  If Christ was here today, he’d be in business and economics, getting it to serve spirit.  Then I started to realize that my touching those the others can’t touch was really about business leaders and business and bringing it into balance and integration.

I’d been at McKinsey five years and was coming up for a partnership and I woke up with a very advanced form of Hodgkin’s Disease and twelve months to live.  I realized that I needed to do some mind/body things.  I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it, from my colleagues’ point of view, because they would’ve thought I was mad.  But I went off and did all this stuff.  Through a combination of mind practices, meditation, and both passive and active, and some other things, got to the point where I learned how to have no side effects of the treatment.  That gave me the courage to say, ‘Well, I can create white blood cells and get rid of the disease.’  I did and my white cell count went through the roof.

I had to do two things.  One was shift my fundamental mindset from ‘the disease has happened to me’ to ‘I have chosen and created this, and I could un-choose this.’  I had to know this in every cell of my body as a truth and that was the sort of thing I learned to do that actual cellular integration of a truth.

Then, with that new truth, actively meditation on the process of the white cells being created and getting all of the cancerous cells out of my body.  It was profoundly successful and within three months from being completely riddled with cancer they could find nothing.  It’s been fine ever since.  During that time I did a lot of reading, and I also did body therapy, that was a way of bringing out a lot of that pain and suffering of my childhood, which I had covered up, and run away from in a sense, or rationalized.

So I went on a sort of therapeutic journey as well.  I then went back to McKinsey, but having had that profound experience I was in a very different place.  It was a ‘knowingness’ of a couple of things.  One is the power of the human body/mind to create its own reality and the second thing was my connectedness to all life, a sense of my place in it. 

I had just gotten married.  The hardest part of the whole thing was not the cancer; it was my marriage, which never fully recovered.  It caused enormous problems for the two of us. 

At first it was a deeply personal journey that was quite separate from my work.  I started to do some experiments using some of these approaches, some of these more personal potential and group dynamic approaches and applying that with some of the more traditional, harder measures of how you organize.  And it had an incredibly dramatic effect.  Then we entered a McKinsey competition.  I called it ‘Head and Heart.’  It was the first time the word ‘heart’ had ever appeared in a McKinsey document. That won the global prize out of about 1800 entries for the best new business idea in the world.  And the firm said, “We don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re onto something.”

I started to get to a point where I understood on the human potential and group dynamic side how all this worked and what the core of it was.  I pulled a lot of that stuff together which had never been pulled together as fully in McKinsey before, and I don’t think anywhere else.

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The Flip, by Jared Rosen and David Rippe, illuminates a clear path to a vibrant enlightened world where millions of people already live and thrive. It describes in vivid detail and real examples evidence of an upside down world in decay and a Right Side Up world of authentic beings bright with possibility.
The Flip is an owner’s manual for the twenty-first century full of insights, conversations with recognized experts, thought leaders, and visionaries, and actionable exercises and tips you can use to begin your own personal flip.

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