Growth Hacking Culture

Ambition is not a goal. It is an independent drive with no off switch, and most leaders never separate the force from the direction. Hugo Brooks on redirecting ambition before it redirects your life.

Hugo spent 35 years building and selling businesses, advising organizations like Coca-Cola, Unilever and Nestle. Then his wife asked a five-word question that stopped him cold: "Are you sure you want to do this again?" He had no answer. That pause forced him to see that the drive and the destination are two separate things, and that ambition itself is neutral until you point...

Most CEOs say people are their greatest asset. Alain Bejjani actually measured how much time they spend on them: less than 5%. The rest goes to balance sheets, asset returns, quarterly reporting. Then they wonder why culture falls apart when the market shifts.

Bejjani knows something about market shifts. He took over as CEO of Majid Al Futtaim in 2015, a brick-and-mortar retail giant spanning 17 countries and serving 560 million customers a year. He spent five years rewiring the business for digital while colleagues questioned the urgency. When COVID hit, they were ready. Most competitors were not.

His...

Return to office debates miss the point. Dr. Agustin Chevez explains why hybrid is the wrong word and how to design a full spectrum workplace that works.

In 2018, architect and workplace researcher Agustin Chevez walked 900 kilometers alone from Melbourne to Sydney. 42 days, no team, one question: what is actually broken about the way we work? His answer challenges office mandates, cost per visit metrics and the belief that more collaboration always means more innovation.

Dr. Agustin Chevez is an architect with a PhD in workplace architecture, an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne, and...

Creativity at work is a process you design, not an event. Coral McConnon on the neuroscience of creativity, why brainstorming fails, and AI for innovation.

Most companies still run innovation workshops the same way: six hours in a room, "no idea is a bad idea", and a wall of ideas that end up safe, boring or off strategy. The right brain creativity myth is still shaping behavior, even in teams that say they know better. Meanwhile, AI generates ideas faster than ever and can quietly narrow our thinking.

Coral McConnon has more than 20 years of...

Quiet contributors deliver results. But corporate recognition programs, performance reviews, and promotion criteria were built around visibility, not value. The recognition gap between introverts and extroverts in the workplace is costing companies their best talent, and most HR leaders cannot even see it happening.

Greg Roche is a total rewards and compensation expert with 20+ years at Fortune 500 scale, former VP of Compensation at UnitedHealth Group, and founder of Retention and Rewards Partners. He is also a self-described introverted networker who built his entire consulting practice on the introvert-friendly career strategies he teaches.

In this conversation...

Good AI delegators were good human delegators first. Sean Campbell on why fluid intelligence, not technical skill, predicts who thrives with AI at work.

Sean spent 25 years running Cascade Insights, advising companies from startups to Fortune 500s on market research and competitive intelligence. When AI hit, he noticed a pattern: the leaders who struggled to delegate to people struggled even more to delegate to machines. The ones who already trusted others with important work picked up AI tools faster than anyone expected.

Sean is CEO of Cascade Insights and an AI professor at George Fox...

Grit turns self-destructive when you can’t put it down. Pauline Nguyen on grit vs grip, body signs of leadership burnout, and rest that restores performance.

Pauline ran Red Lantern, the most awarded Vietnamese restaurant in the world, for 25 years. She also worked 80 to 100 hour weeks until stress made her hair fall out. Her way out was not to try less. It was to learn the difference between grit, a fire you choose, and grip, a fear that has you and never switches off.

Pauline escaped Vietnam by boat at three years old. Today she co...

AI brain fry drains focus, flow state, and deep work, and it starts when every tool meant to save you time becomes another inbox. Jared Quoyeser lived it, with 14 Slack messages, WhatsApp, Teams, and three AI assistants all competing for his attention. He knew the answer was a system, not another tool.

Jared Quoyeser spent more than two decades at Intel, where he led teams and managed billions in revenue, while competing as a professional endurance athlete in cycling and triathlons. Today he is co-founder and managing partner of the Louisiana Impact Fund, a speaker, and the...

Every AI shortcut your team takes is borrowing against skills they no longer build. Rahim Hirji calls it capability debt: the accumulated cost of decisions not made, learning not done, and judgment not exercised because the machine got there first. Like technical debt, it's invisible until the system breaks and nobody knows how to fix it.

Rahim spent seven years researching over 200 organizations across 30 countries and came back with a warning: AI is not coming for your job, it is coming for your judgment. A former edtech executive who scaled Quizlet to 60+ countries, he wrote SuperSkills: The...

Shadow AI is what happens when employees stop waiting for IT and start using ChatGPT and AI agents on their own to get real work done. Most advice about AI at work still comes from IT: what's banned, what's risky, what needs sign-off.

This episode flips that. Anna Carina Berkman, known as Architect Anna, has trained over 5,000 professionals and built her work around what she calls the AI Advantage Gap, the space between people who've heard of AI and people who can actually use it to get ahead. In this conversation, we get specific about what that...

Somewhere in your past there's a failure you still carry, a moment that convinced you of something about yourself that was never actually true. Dr. Melisa Buie calls it a life sentence, and she built an entire framework, the FREE Method, to help people finally set it down and turn failure into growth instead of shame.

Melisa Buie is a physicist by training, with a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Plasma Physics from the University of Michigan. She's also the co-author of Faceplant: FREE Yourself from Failure's Funk, bringing a scientist's precision to one of the most...

AI replacing high performers is not the scenario most companies prepared for. They planned for entry-level jobs disappearing. But when a two-day AI output matches what your best analyst produces in four weeks, and nobody in the room can tell the difference, the people most exposed are the ones who never had to build resilience, because raw intelligence was always enough.

That's the argument Bruce D. Randall makes in his book The End of Smart. Bruce is an author and technology thought leader working at the intersection of AI, quantum computing, and human potential. He has built...

Getting interrupted in meetings, or talked over right before someone else repeats your idea and gets the credit, happens more than most people admit, and to some people a lot more than others.

Dr. Andrea Wojnicki is a Harvard-trained executive communication and personal branding coach, host of the Talk About Talk podcast, and a Harvard Business Review contributor who has spent her career studying exactly why this happens in meetings, and what to say the moment it does.

In this conversation, Ivan and Andrea break down the psychology of interruptions, the double standard between how...

Most leaders assume when a company stalls, the problem is the product, the market, or the team. It rarely is.

After 25 years as a global CEO and mentoring over 150 of them, Dane Hudson keeps arriving at the same uncomfortable answer: the ceiling is usually the person running the company. Not their strategy. Not their product. Their leadership — and the gap between how fast it's growing and how fast the business is.

The problem is that gap is invisible until the damage is already done.

Dane Hudson is the founder of Impactful Leadership and au...

Six extra hours a week. That's what AI has reportedly handed back to people using it well. The real question isn't the time, it's what they do with it. Chartered psychologist Sarah Rozenthuler has spent nearly two decades studying how humans talk to each other about what actually matters, and she's noticed something: more people are turning to AI to think out loud about their purpose, their leadership, their next move.

Sarah is a leadership coach and the author of three books on purpose and dialogue, including Now We're Talking, shortlisted for the Business Book Awards, and...

Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox, authors of Leading in Chaos, explain why human-centric leadership has hit its ceiling, and what comes next.

For fifteen years, leadership development meant one thing: build emotional intelligence, train empathy, create psychological safety. It worked, until it didn't. Some of the most self-aware, emotionally intelligent leaders on the planet are still freezing under pressure, still overcorrecting in a crisis, still making the wrong call. Not because they lack empathy. Because empathy was never the missing piece.

Nicholas Janni has spent over 25 years advising CEOs and senior leadership teams worldwide...

Every organization wants to hire the best. Stack the roster with top performers, invest in individual excellence, let talent density do the work. It sounds like a winning strategy. The research says otherwise.

Dr. André Martin is an organizational psychologist, former Chief Talent Officer at Mars, and author of Collective Confidence: The Winning Formula Behind the World's Most Unbeatable Teams. He has spent decades studying hundreds of teams across radically different environments, from submarine crews to Olympic gymnasts to Silicon Valley startups, and his findings keep pointing to the same place: the teams that win are not t...

Most of us were handed a script before we were old enough to question it. A school told us what to study. A parent told us what success looks like. A career ladder told us which rung comes next. And somewhere along the way, we confused following the script with actually living.

This conversation with Dr. Audrey Tang starts with a simple but unsettling question: what if the detour was never the problem? What if the belief in a straight line was?

Dr. Audrey Tang is a Chartered Psychologist, leadership trainer, and award-winning author of...

Picture the busiest person you know. First to answer email, last to leave a meeting, always available. Now ask yourself: are they actually the best decision maker in the room? John Nieuwenburg has coached hundreds of leaders through exactly this contradiction, and his answer might surprise you.

John spent decades working his way up in retail, eventually running a $3 billion operation as company president. That experience taught him the busiest executives are rarely the most effective ones. He's now spent 20+ years coaching leaders using the Socratic method, helping them ask themselves better questions instead of handing them...

At 43, at the peak of his career as music director of Broadway's Hamilton, Julian Reeve had a stress related heart attack. The two things driving it, workaholism and perfectionism, are the same two things now deciding who thrives with AI and who burns out trying to outrun it.

Julian Reeve is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and founder of Perfect Equilibrium. He spent years helping high achievers reclaim their health and their sense of self after getting trapped in what he calls the achievement machine, and he built his own AI assistant three years ago to help...

Power changes everyone, especially leaders, whether they realize it or not. Discover the hidden neuroscience behind how authority rewires your brain, alters your behavior, and can transform you in ways you never expected.

In this episode, Ivan Palomino speaks with leadership expert Nick Kinley, a former forensic psychotherapist whose work spans prisons, boardrooms, and decades of research into power. Together, they unpack what really happens in the brain when people gain authority: why power can boost confidence while also reducing empathy, distorting decision-making, and making even strong leaders more vulnerable to blind spots.

You’ll le...

There is a version of you that walks into a job feeling capable, energized, and sure of who you are. And there is a version, months or years later, who can't remember when that confidence left. Nobody names the moment. There usually isn't one. Just a slow accumulation of small cuts that eventually add up to a person who doubts themselves.

Jeff Davis has spent years collecting these stories. He's an award-winning author, TEDx speaker, and mental health advocate whose latest book, The Courage to Leave: Breaking Free from Toxic Workplaces, pulls back the curtain on toxic...

If you think in systems, empathy probably never made sense as a soft skill. It felt vague, unquantifiable, impossible to debug. But what if it is not a personality trait at all, just a system you have not built yet.

Colette Molteni spent 20 years working inside data analytics, sales operations, and engineering teams before founding Empathy Elevated. She does not ask technical people to become someone they are not. She gives them a framework: a repeatable, practiceable system for reading a room, managing a hard conversation, and building trust, the same way you would approach any other...

There is a version of you that works harder, thinks faster, and still ends up in the same place. Not because you lacked the ability — but because the process producing your decisions had a flaw you never examined. And the smarter you are, the longer it takes to notice.

This conversation is about that flaw, and what it actually takes to correct it.

Andres Kuusk is a seven-time World Pentamind Champion, the most successful all-around mental strategist in recorded history, a PhD economist, and C-suite executive. His book, Unlocking the Success Puzzle, draws on decades of...

Most senior leaders do not know they are the bottleneck. They think they are the standard.

They are in every key decision, every escalation, every thread that matters. And they have quietly trained their teams to wait for them. It does not feel like a problem. It feels like leadership.

Brad Sugars is the founder of ActionCoach, the world's largest business coaching firm operating in 1,000+ offices across 80 countries, and author of 18 books on business, leadership, and organizational performance. For 30 years he has worked with executives across 80 countries who built high-performing reputations and high-dependency teams at...

Most organizations know something is wrong long before they run a survey. The sense that good people are pulling back, that processes are harder than they need to be, that the same conversations keep happening in the same conference rooms without anything changing. The survey confirms it. And then, usually, not much else happens.

The problem is not the data. The problem is that most organizational listening tools were built to measure sentiment, not to trace its origins. They tell you where it hurts. They have no mechanism for telling you why.

Dustin Snyder spent...

Your organization has a wellbeing program. Maybe a meditation app, some mental health days, a resilience workshop or a Friday yoga session nobody attends because everyone is still in back-to-back meetings.

And your people are still burning out.

Here's the question most leaders never ask: what if the problem was never your people? What if it was always the work itself, how it's structured, how it's led, how it distributes autonomy, meaning, and control? What if every wellbeing program you've ever launched was treating symptoms while the system kept producing the damage?

Dr...

Burnout isn't a motivation problem. It's not a willpower problem. And if you're one of the smartest people in the room — it might be happening to you precisely because of how good you are.

Executive coach Frankie Berkoben has spent years inside Google, Airbnb, and the most demanding startup environments in Silicon Valley. She works with engineers, founders, and product leaders who are genuinely brilliant — and burning out faster than anyone around them. In this episode of the Growth Hacking Culture Podcast, Frankie and host Ivan Palomino unpack the hidden loop that traps high performers: the shame cycl...

Most HR leaders never make it to Chief People Officer — and those who do often struggle to create real impact once they get there. The difference isn't technical expertise. It's mindset, habits, and knowing exactly which career moves accelerate your path to the top.

In this episode of Growth Hacking Culture, Ivan Palomino sits down with Tom Emery, founder of Hex and author of People People: Reach Your Potential as a Chief People Officer. Tom spent over 20 years in HR leadership across financial services and wealth management before building a coaching practice dedicated to helping HR leaders an...

AI use in HR climbed to 43% in 2026, yet most HR leaders still spend the majority of their day on spreadsheets, manual reconciliations, and transactional work that adds zero strategic value. In this episode of the Growth Hacking Culture Podcast, John Sansoucie, CEO of Cognet, shares a practical roadmap for HR leaders who want to implement AI in HR, eliminate admin overload, and finally operate as a strategic function inside their organization.

If you are searching for real HR technology strategy advice that goes beyond vendor demos and buzzwords, this conversation delivers exactly that. John has spent years...

The job description for HR leader just changed. Again.

Not the version that added culture after COVID. Not the version that added AI literacy after ChatGPT. The version that nobody has written yet — the one where you are responsible for a workforce that is part human, part agent, and entirely your problem to lead effectively.

Most HR leaders are not ready for this. Not because they lack intelligence or intention. Because the function has spent decades being handed other people's problems and called a support function for it. And you cannot build the commercial acumen, th...

Most HR leaders already know the survey isn't working.

They know because they've seen the same deck three years in a row. They know because the workshops got scheduled and nothing changed. They know because the employees who participated last year are participating again this year with slightly less enthusiasm and exactly the same frustrations.

And yet the survey gets launched again. Because it's what you do. Because the contract renews. Because nobody has been given a credible alternative.

Omar Shbaro has spent years building that alternative. As CTO of VAI Solutions and...

Most organizations lose their most experienced people without ever understanding why.

Not through dramatic exits or public conflicts. Through a quiet, cumulative process of being overlooked, underinvested in, and gradually made to feel that what they bring no longer fits. And by the time anyone notices, the knowledge, judgment, and institutional memory they carried has walked out the door with them.

Lucy Standing has spent years studying exactly this. As founder of Brave Starts — one of the UK's leading communities for over-50 professionals navigating career transitions — and author of The Age Against the Machine, she make...

Most organizations say they have a safe to fail culture.

Then someone actually fails. And you find out very quickly whether they meant it.

Megan Petrini spent years at Zappos — one of the boldest cultural experiments in corporate history — watching the difference between an organization that genuinely treats failure as data and one that just puts it on the values poster. As a certified professional in talent development, a trust at work practitioner, and author of Manage to Fail, she has spent 16 years studying the habits that quietly destroy team trust and the conditions that actu...

Seven out of eight organizational changes fail.

Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the timeline was unrealistic. Not because the employees were difficult.

Because nobody on the leadership team knew how to have the real conversation that change requires. Not the announcement. Not the update. The one where you sit with someone's ambivalence, listen to what's underneath the pushback, and help them find their own reasons to move forward.

Jeff Wetherhold has spent over 20 years studying exactly this gap. As a Harvard-trained behavioral science researcher, certified change practitioner, and founder of C...

Most leaders think they have a talent problem.

They don't. They have a clarity problem.

When winning isn't defined, performance becomes an opinion. And when performance becomes an opinion, the wrong people get rewarded — not because the system is broken, but because nobody built a scoreboard in the first place.

Jamison Carrier has spent decades doing the unglamorous work of building performance-driven teams across some of the most competitive environments in business. As founder of Team NavX and author of Building a Championship Team, he's seen every version of this problem play out — and...

There's a conversation happening in most organizations that nobody is having out loud.

Experienced professionals going quiet in meetings. Younger leaders assuming everyone speaks the same language. Messages that land perfectly with one part of the team and completely miss another. And somewhere in the middle, a slow leak of engagement, trust, and performance that shows up on the bottom line long before anyone names the cause.

Lee Caraher has spent decades at this exact intersection. As a CEO, author, and one of the clearest voices on multigenerational leadership, she's watched the same communication breakdowns...

You've done the work. Hit the targets. Delivered consistently. And yet somehow, when the promotion conversation happens, your name isn't the first one that comes up.

It's not about performance. It's about presence. And most of us were never taught the difference.

Amy Reczek has spent years helping professionals bridge that gap — not with grand gestures or personal branding frameworks, but with something far more accessible: the small moments most of us are sleepwalking through every day.

The elevator ride where your phone is out and the CEO steps in. The conference lobby wh...

In the modern corporate world, we have been sold a lie that if we just find the right app or work an hour longer, we will finally catch up. For many of us, work feels less like a ladder and more like quicksand—the more we struggle, the deeper we sink into a pile of invisible work that never makes it into the official job description.

In this episode, we sit down with Lisa Woodruff, founder of Organize 365 and author of Escaping Quicksand. Lisa has spent her career deconstructing the science of productivity and executive function to he...

Every HR leader knows the numbers. Absenteeism. Turnover. Declining performance. What most won't say out loud is who's driving them.

Working parents.

Not because they're less committed. Not because they can't handle pressure. But because we built the modern workplace for a reality that stopped existing decades ago — and nobody has had the courage to redesign it.

Dr. Rosina McAlpine has spent over a decade working with hundreds of organizations and hundreds of thousands of working parents on exactly this problem. As CEO of Win Win Parenting and a former university researcher in wo...