Podcast
Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL
Hosted by Justin McMenamy · EN
Hello and welcome to Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL, my name is Justin McMenamy, and my mission is to share both profitable and painful leadership lessons I have acquired over a twenty-year career as a misfit in corporate America.
Like everyone, I have worked with and for hundreds of leaders across my career. While some leaders are great, and many are good, the vast majority find themselves tossed into leadership and left to figure it out on their own. Grody & Unprofessional seeks to share leadership stories harvested from my own experiences and from the experiences of others through approachable and candid conversations with the aim of educating and shaping your leadership journey.
Grody & Unprofessional episodes will toggle between focused monologue on specific lessons or mindsets I have acquired from my experiences and conversations with other leaders seeking to understand their convictions and strategies for inspiring, motivating, and maybe sometimes cajoling a group into action.
Grody & Unprofessional is not a memoir, it’s not a forum to gripe or complain about the past or present. The rules are simple, I aim to convey leadership lessons through storytelling. If a given story has a hero, we will use proper names, if the story has a villain, a dolt, or if there is the potential for embarrassment, proper names will be removed. While we do NOT aim to embarrass people or organizations, we do intend to embarrass poor leadership behaviors and mindsets common to many leaders and organizations.
My experience has been that demand for talented leaders outstrips supply by at least tenfold, Grody & Unprofessional is my feeble attempt to improve supply.
I hope you will join me as we seek to uncover people, product, and organizational leadership lessons through the musings of a corporate misfit and his friends.
Like everyone, I have worked with and for hundreds of leaders across my career. While some leaders are great, and many are good, the vast majority find themselves tossed into leadership and left to figure it out on their own. Grody & Unprofessional seeks to share leadership stories harvested from my own experiences and from the experiences of others through approachable and candid conversations with the aim of educating and shaping your leadership journey.
Grody & Unprofessional episodes will toggle between focused monologue on specific lessons or mindsets I have acquired from my experiences and conversations with other leaders seeking to understand their convictions and strategies for inspiring, motivating, and maybe sometimes cajoling a group into action.
Grody & Unprofessional is not a memoir, it’s not a forum to gripe or complain about the past or present. The rules are simple, I aim to convey leadership lessons through storytelling. If a given story has a hero, we will use proper names, if the story has a villain, a dolt, or if there is the potential for embarrassment, proper names will be removed. While we do NOT aim to embarrass people or organizations, we do intend to embarrass poor leadership behaviors and mindsets common to many leaders and organizations.
My experience has been that demand for talented leaders outstrips supply by at least tenfold, Grody & Unprofessional is my feeble attempt to improve supply.
I hope you will join me as we seek to uncover people, product, and organizational leadership lessons through the musings of a corporate misfit and his friends.
29episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Are Leaders Born or Taught? w. Brent Adamson
2w ago00:43:36Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy continues his conversation with Brent Adamson, co-author of “The Challenger Sale” and “The Framemaking Sale”. When asked if Challengers are born or taught, Adamson argues Challengers are made, not born, noting their research focused on trainable skills, knowledge, and behaviors rather than traits like charisma. Adamson reframes the key question from “Which profile am I?” to “What do Challenger reps do and how can I model those behaviors?” In discussing hiring, Adamson emphasizes distinguishing fully realized Challenger skills from Challenger potential, often found outside traditional sales roles, and prioritizing harder-to-train skills like empathy and logical argumentation over industry experience. On COVID, Adamson describes how issues escalated from behavior changes to identity conflicts, amplified by social media, and suggests leaders should deescalate change by focusing on behavior. He then explains his more recent work on “FrameMaking”: in a content-saturated, AI-accelerated market, sellers should reduce customer overwhelm by building decision confidence—helping buyers ask the right questions and connecting them to peer experiences—rather than providing more insights or claiming expert authority.
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Be A Challeger, Not A Jerk w. Brent Adamson
4w ago00:46:13Tap to summarizeThis is the first of two episodes in which Justin McMenamy interviews Brent Adamson, acclaimed author of The Challenger Sale. Justin leads off the conversation by sharing how The Challenger Sale helped codify Precision Planting’s customer-education approach to sales and marketing, highlighting that concepts of the book permeated both the global growth strategy as well as employee recruiting and onboarding. Adamson goes on to describe his career transition from Michigan State German professor to sales researcher at CEB, framing his throughline as researching and teaching. They discuss wrestling through career identity uncertainty, relational and professional experimentation as a means of discovering one’s talents, and the mental-health benefits of exercise. Adamson explains Challenger as selling “change,” using an A-to-B model where influence requires breaking down the costly “A” (status quo) before building “B,” including spending the time and energy to empathize with others’ perspectives and long held beliefs. They define Challenger sellers vs. other seller types, stress adaptability across corporate cultures while also noting that cultural fit issues do exist and can require proactive changes. The conversation closes by teasing the topics of the second episode of the conversation including Adamson’s more recent work, The Framemaking Sale.
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The Velvet Hammer w. Jim Weber
Jun 1100:56:05Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy and guest Jim Weber discuss techniques by which innovative teams can survive inside large bureaucracies. They discuss the need for the innovative leader to set a different “cultural thermostat,” from the broader organization; allowing for some of the organization to be in a flexible gaseous state while the rest of the company remains a solid structure focused on optimizing the present. McMenamy credits the book Loonshots by Safi Bahcall and Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works rules of management, emphasizing the need for executive protection, boundary-layer leaders who can translate between rigid and creative worlds, and small policy differences in HR, IT, legal, and compensation required to enable a phase shift. Weber describes “talent tapping” by finding underused internal talent and relying on a protective boss who deflected steering committees, while both note the “career poker” strategy of staying at the table versus climbing. They also cover empathy, leaders acting as organizational psychiatrists, and when it can be compassionate to help misfit employees transition out, including the one positive lesson McMenamy cites from Jack Welch: people want to be good at their jobs.
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From the Flight Deck to the Factory Floor w. Steve Roehrich
May 2800:48:58Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy interviews Steve “Roach” Roehrich, a veteran naval aviator, former Fortune 50 Chief Business Improvement Officer, and aerospace manufacturing CEO, about leadership lessons acquired and deployed in military and corporate theatres. Across the wide-ranging conversation, Roehrich recounts growing up poor in rural Minnesota, joining the Navy as an aviator, traveling the world, studying finance, and navigating the corporate world. Roehrich argues that the military is a leadership crucible and defines key attributes of leadership: integrity/authenticity, vision, resilience and adaptability, emotional intelligence, decisiveness, humility, and continuous learning.He describes the tools by which one can lead organizational changes as influence, trust-building, and giving teams agency rather than using authoritarian control, he then attributes similar principles as keys to his 48-year marriage to Susan.
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When You're Another Brick in the Wall w. Leo Salotti
May 1400:54:12Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy welcomes Leo Salotti, co-founder of Terranova, to discuss leadership lessons learned from cross-cultural management and career transitions. Across the episode, Leo describes lessons learned after being promoted to leading a team which spanned Argentina and Brazil, including choosing humility by delivering a full leadership presentation in Portuguese and tailoring solutions to Brazilian conditions rather than copying Argentina’s model. They explore moving from engineering to people leadership, emphasizing trust, avoiding micromanagement, and “test-driving” leadership through cross-functional projects. Leo recounts starting his career at a large multi-national equipment manufacturer as a formative “school,” then leaving the structure for Precision Planting, driven by a desire for external customer exposure and avoiding the feelings of being “another brick in the wall.”They discuss balancing structure vs creativity, decentralized vs centralized decision-making, meeting avoidance, financial realities, and how to discern when it’s time to move on using reflection, a “seven hats” framework, and signals like bitterness or health impacts. Leo closes with a “La Petit Hotel” story involving storms, a stranded truck, and late night dismantling a gas boiler.
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Don't Burn the Boats w. Jim Weber
Apr 3000:53:34Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy and Jim Weber continue their conversation on fostering a culture of innovation including methods of preventing it from being killed by pessimism and process. This episode covers innovation’s overlap with creativity and art, and how nearly every company markets themselves as innovative, sometimes despite objective evidence to the contrary. Justin introduces the “Trellis and Vine” analogy: provide enough structure to support creativity without choking it; warning that well intended leaders can smother innovation through noble pursuits of synergy, globalization, metrics culture, governance, and project rationalization. They emphasize a willingness to self-disruption, R&D to customer proximity, market competitors managed as “worthy rivals”, project pipeline prioritization, and competitive prototyping as key ingredients to a company hoping to curate a culture of innovation.
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Serial Entreprenourship w. Danny Kirk
Apr 1600:59:45Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy interviews entrepreneur and marketer Danny Kirk. The conversation spans topics like defining failure and success, the place for pessimism in business, and leadership lessons drawn from the great philosopher Shaquille O’Neal. Kirk shares his unconventional background, raised by academics and musicians, a high-achieving classical trumpet player who dropped out of high school, and his entry into entrepreneurship through a scholarship and a startup weekend that led to his first company. Over the last 15 years, Danny has started 5 revenue-generating businesses, pursues 100–200 ideas annually quickly invalidating most of them, and discusses his latest business in GEO (generative engine optimization) for AI. Kirk recounts being forced out of a gym business, selling a SaaS venture for scraps due to technical debt and infighting, discusses quit-vs-grit, and the needed priority which should be placed on unit economics within any startup. He explains his marketing approach for small businesses, focus where the “tribe” is, avoid vanity metrics, prioritize revenue, and build trust by disqualifying prospects. The conversation also covers Kirk’s recent battle with anxiety following a login prompt attack on his business along with the need for routine to keep him grounded. Justin reflects on experiences navigating stressful times of life, redefining security and success, and protecting health and relationships as life complexity grows.
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A Race to the (Liquid) Death w. Andy Pearson
Apr 200:56:12Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy interviews Andy Pearson, creative director at Liquid Death. Through the conversation, Pearson recounts stories, from early in his career, of buying taxidermy squirrels and navigating eBay’s ban on selling human body parts. Andy then contrasts the philosophies of various ad agencies and stresses the importance of a shared creative vision and engaged leadership, ideally with “a bone to pick.” Pearson describes Liquid Death’s ethos as making entertainment not marketing, critiquing ads as unwanted interruptions, and questioning industry assumptions both in product and marketing. He then describes Liquid Death as a high ownership, iterative, fast-paced culture that starts with the question “what is the dumbest thing we could do?”. Finally, Andy shares how his passion for ultra running began amid grueling agency hours and tells of a Strava user who challenged him to a “race to the Death”.
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Tapping Organizational Creativity w. Jim Weber
Mar 1900:50:35Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy and guest Jim Weber continue their multi-episode discussion around the many ingredients which comprise a successful culture of innovation. On the topic of brainstorming both Justin and Jim agree that scheduled brainstorming sessions with idea voting and ranking are mostly unproductive. Jim argues effective brainstorming consists of informal, rapid idea vetting with colleagues who try to break ideas and improve them over time. He then emphasizes the need to ask everyone, from executives to technicians, “what would you do?” to learn technical and organizational constraints, even at the risk of embarrassment. Justin highlights the need to reduce hierarchy, otherwise creativity is often outsourced to an “innovation manager,” as well as the need to separate idea collection events from idea selection so contributors stay encouraged while a smaller group prioritizes. They discuss creativity as an underused organizational asset, and debate when simulation-first approaches are essential versus an “Edisonian” fast iteration methodology enabled by low-cost prototyping.
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Hungry, Humble & Smart: A Culture Without Silos w. Kristen Patty
Mar 500:51:51Tap to summarizeHost Justin McMenamy welcomes Kristen Patty to discuss leadership and HR lessons from their time at Precision Planting during a decade of growth from under 100 employees to over 500, including global expansion across more than 15 countries and the acquisition by AGCO.Kristen shares why she left a large multinational retailer early in her career for a startup, emphasizing self-discovery, taking the next right step, and seeking actionable feedback. They cover her transition from Sales Operations to head of HR and her focus on mission-driven recruiting. They discuss balancing HR process with situational care, how policy application affects company-wide trust, and practical ways to protect culture while scaling. The episode ends with Kristen’s advice for leaders entering new roles, stressing humility, clarity of expectations, honesty about gaps, and building relationships through one-on-one conversations.
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