Growth Hacking Culture

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...

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'...

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 br...

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...

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...

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 intelligen...

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...

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 the...

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 professiona...

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...

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-dr...

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 b...

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 som...

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 Orga...

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...

Most organizations are investing billions in leadership development, resilience training, and mindfulness programs — and burnout rates keep climbing. The problem isn't the intervention. It's that they're treating symptoms while the culture keeps producing the damage. In this episode of the Growth Hacking Culture Podcast, Ivan Palomino speaks with Dr. Irena O'Brien — cognitive neuroscientist and fo...

Most leaders are wired to push harder when things get tough. Evan Marks spent 25 years on Wall Street doing exactly that — until a panic attack stopped him cold at 46. What he built after that experience became M1 Performance Group, and a coaching philosophy that's now used by top executives, athletes, and traders around the world. His core argument: talent is table stakes. What actually separates...

Have you ever felt like your brain is on "auto-pilot"? You sit in the same chair, stare at the same screen, and follow the same routines until your office feels like a "sensory desert". Biologically, we are wired for discovery, yet the modern workplace often trades that natural curiosity for pure efficiency. In this episode, I’m joined by the "Creativity Explorer" himself, Fredrik Haren. Fredrik h...

In this episode of Growth Hacking Culture, we dive deep into The Habit Factor—the scientific bridge between stated company values and actual employee behavior. Our guest, Christoph Merrill (The Habit Freak), argues that most culture initiatives fail because they rely on inspiration rather than habit formation. When the pressure of the corporate world hits, people don't fall back on mission stateme...

How do we lead with soul in a world run by code? In this episode, we explore the concept of Human-Centric AI Leadership with renowned strategist Paul Gibbons. We dive deep into his framework of the "Great Collisions"—the friction points where human agency, empathy, and algorithmic decision-making meet in the modern workplace. Paul discusses why the rise of AI doesn't mean the end of human influenc...

The world is full of exhausted leaders who have been conditioned to believe that leadership is a performance—a set of KPIs to hit and a professional mask to wear. But what if the very act of trying to lead is what is stopping you from being effective? In this episode of the Growth Hacking Culture podcast, we sit down with Will Steel, a former RAF pilot and executive coach who argues that your lead...

Stop using AI just to move faster—start using it to think bigger. In this episode, we sit down with Andy Sitison, CTO of Share More Stories, to explore the shift from AI as a productivity tool to AI as a cognitive catalyst. Most companies use AI to automate tedious tasks, but the real competitive advantage lies in using it to break through human cognitive biases like functional fixedness. We dive...

Is "Culture Fit" actually sabotaging your bottom line? In this episode, Ivan sits down with neuroscience-based researcher Andrea Carter, founder of the Belonging First methodology. We dive into the biological reality of high-performing teams and why traditional EDI metrics often miss the mark. Learn why "masking" at work causes the prefrontal cortex to shut down and how shifting your focus from "f...

In this episode of Growth Hacking Culture, host Ivan Palomino sits down with Linda M. Perry, a renowned leadership and execution strategist, to explore why high-performing teams suddenly lose momentum. If you are seeing a drop in productivity or a rise in "quiet quitting," the problem likely isn't your software or your systems—it's a Meaning Gap. Linda uses her unique background as a former federa...

Are your employees truly engaged, or are they part of the 70% just "plotting along" until the end of the day? In this episode of the Growth Hacking Culture Podcast, we dive into a "five-alarm fire" for business leaders: the massive disconnect in the modern hybrid workplace. Joining us is Dr. Jonathan Thorp, researcher and founder of Quantum Connections, to discuss why the fundamental supervisor-em...