In 1727, Benjamin Franklin was 21 years old and already looking for a specific kind of conversation. He gathered a small group of tradesmen, merchants, and civic thinkers in Philadelphia and called it the Junto. The rules were explicit. Members were expected to bring genuine questions, offer honest observations, and engage with each other’s problems without ego or agenda. The group met weekly for nearly four decades.
Franklin himself credited the Junto with accelerating almost every significant development in his professional and civic life.
That is the original model. What passes for a mastermind group today bears almost no resemblance to it.
What Franklin Actually Built
The Junto was not a networking event with a structured agenda. It was not a room full of people paying to be around someone successful in the hope that proximity would transfer. It was a working group, built around a shared commitment to honest inquiry and mutual accountability.
Franklin’s rules required members to declare, on their honor, that they would engage with every question sincerely. Members were expected to produce questions for group discussion and to respond to the questions of others with genuine reflection rather than performance. Criticism was not only permitted – it was the mechanism.
The group’s value came precisely from its willingness to say things that were difficult to say and useful to hear.
The size was small by design. Franklin understood that the depth of engagement he was after was incompatible with a large room. You cannot have a serious conversation with 40 people. You can have one with a dozen, if those dozen are the right people and the structure supports it.
Carnegie, Hill, and the Tradition That Followed
Nearly two centuries later, Napoleon Hill reportedly spent years studying the habits of the most effective industrialists and thinkers of his era. What he observed in figures like Andrew Carnegie – who reportedly attributed much of his success to the counsel of a small, trusted circle of advisors – became the conceptual foundation for what Hill called the mastermind principle in his 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich.”
Hill’s formulation was straightforward: a coordinated group of people, aligned around a common purpose, produces a quality of thinking that no individual member could generate alone. The group creates something – a collective intelligence, a willingness to challenge assumptions, an accountability that self-directed effort cannot replicate – that is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts.
Whether or not Hill’s framing was precisely accurate to what Carnegie practiced, the underlying observation has held up. Small groups of committed, capable people, operating under clear rules of engagement, reliably produce better outcomes for their members than those members produce working alone. And they do it faster.
What the Word Has Come to Mean
Somewhere in the decades between Hill’s writing and the current proliferation of online group programs, the word mastermind lost most of its meaning. It became a marketing label applied to almost any paid group format – cohorts of strangers assembled around a course, one time motivational seminars, networking groups, every except a stable group of successful people solving real problems.
The defining features of Franklin’s original model – the vetting, the rules of honest engagement, the expectation of difficult feedback, the small and stable membership – were largely abandoned because they are difficult to scale and impossible to franchise.
Most people who have participated in a modern mastermind group recognize the pattern. The conversations stay at the surface. The experience is social. It is not particularly useful. You leave enthusiastic but forget the event a couple weeks later.
The Standard That Still Applies
The Independent Expert Advisory Council is built around the original model, not the modern one.
It has:
- Only ten seats.
- A stable membership that develops shared context and trust over time.
- A structured session format designed to move through problems with rigor rather than to fill time pleasantly.
- An expectation that members will give honest feedback and receive it without defensiveness.
The most common failure mode in peer advisory groups – including well-run ones – is the drift toward encouragement over truth. It is socially easier to affirm than to challenge. It is more comfortable to validate a plan than to identify the flaw in it. A room that has drifted in that direction is a room that has stopped being useful, regardless of the quality of the people in it.
Franklin’s Junto worked because the members held each other to a standard of honesty that most social environments do not support. That standard is not a feature that can be added later. It has to be established at the outset and maintained deliberately. It is the difference between a group that produces genuine value and one that produces a pleasant way to spend a morning once a month.
