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...

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 c...

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...

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 tha...

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 50...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 Pl...

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...

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...

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 fas...

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 leader...

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...

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...

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 pro...

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 pr...

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 achieve...

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 pow...

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 a...

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 some...

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 Champ...

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...