Growth Hacking Culture

Ivan Palomino
  • 5.0 (10)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

Most workplace advice treats people as the problem. Growth Hacking Culture starts from the opposite premise: if your best people are disengaged, burned out, or leaving, the system is broken, not them. Hosted by Ivan Palomino, this top 5% global podcast brings you unfiltered conversations with the people rewriting the rules of work: executives from Apple, Goldman Sachs, and Zappos, organizational psychologists, neuroscientists, and founders who've built cultures that perform without burning people down. No corporate wellness fluff. No recycled leadership clichés. Just the behavioral science, psychology, and uncomfortable truths behind workplace culture, employee engagement, and leadership that actually works. For HR leaders, CHROs, founders, and executives who suspect the standard playbook is the problem.

  1. 1d ago

    Above the Line Leaders Use AI for Flow, Not Busywork | Focus, Deep Work & The Flow Multiplier ft. Jared Quoyeser

    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 author of The Flow Multiplier: Building Peak Performance Systems with AI. He has spent thirty years chasing flow state, and he now teaches high-performing executives how to reach it on command. In this conversation, Ivan and Jared unpack why the same AI that can sharpen strategy can also bury a leader in noise, and why the line between above the line and below the line leaders is the system they build before they add the tools. In this episode: Why AI can turn into a second, third, and fourth inbox, and what 14 open screens did to Jared's focus The difference between above the line and below the line leaders, and why a "second brain" either amplifies one or floods the other How AI meeting transcripts and note takers are quietly making leaders absent from the meetings they attend Why the system comes first and AI comes last, starting with the 1A, 1B, and 1C priorities Jared writes down before he opens email Practical ways to protect deep work: the phone out of arm's reach, the Brick, the basket exercise, and a one-hour block as a starting point Why recovery is a performance strategy, and how Jared plans rest across the week, the quarter, and the year like an athlete's season How to define productivity on your own terms, and how cutting research from 40 hours to 4 hours (his example) frees time for judgment This one is for the executive or people leader who keeps adding AI tools to a full calendar and wonders why the days feel busier while the thinking feels shallower. Connect with Jared Quoyeser: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jared-quoyeser Book: The Flow Multiplier: Building Peak Performance Systems with AI ---- If Jared's point about defining productivity on your own terms struck a chord, and you are an experienced professional aged 45 or older wondering whether building something of your own is your next chapter, take a look at my Prefounders Bootcamp Silver Edition. It is a four-week live cohort on founder psychology and decision-making that ends with a readiness verdict, a financial runway analysis, and a personalized action plan. The next cohort starts Monday, November 16, 2026. Details at https://silver-bootcamp.ivanpalomino.net/ Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino

    Above the Line Leaders Use AI for Flow, Not Busywork | Focus, Deep Work & The Flow Multiplier ft. Jared Quoyeser

  2. 6d ago

    Capability Debt: The Hidden Cost of AI Shortcuts with Rahim Hirji

    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 Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI (Kogan Page, 2026) to map the capabilities that become more valuable, not less, as AI takes over the process work. In this conversation, Ivan and Rahim unpack how capability debt builds silently inside teams, why curiosity is the first skill AI quietly kills, and what separates organizations that design for AI from those that drift into it. In this episode: What capability debt is, why it's invisible, and how it mirrors technical debt in its ability to quietly bankrupt a team's decision-making capacity How synthetic seniority lets junior employees produce senior-looking output while skipping the judgment reps that make seniority real The drift vs. design framework for spotting whether your organization is making AI decisions deliberately or just accepting algorithmic defaults Why curiosity is the first human skill AI outsources, and what happens when people stop formulating their own questions before going to the machine The HATS/HATE model (Humans At The Start, Humans At The End) as a practical alternative to the vague "human in the loop" standard How to tell, five years from now, whether an organization designed well: people will be asking "who decided this, and why?" as a reflex, not a compliance exercise Why super skills are capabilities you practice, not competencies you learn in a training session This one is for the HR leader, L&D director, or senior executive who has already rolled out AI tools and is starting to wonder whether the team is getting faster or just getting thinner. 🔗 Connect with Rahim Hirji Book: SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI (Kogan Page), available on Amazon and at all good bookshops Website: https://www.thesuperskills.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahimhirji   📘 Rahim's book SuperSkills is not another "soft skills matter" argument. It is a research-backed framework built on 200+ organizations, giving you the specific human capabilities that become more valuable as AI takes over the process work. 🔔 If this episode was useful, a quick rating or review helps more people find these conversations. Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino

    Capability Debt: The Hidden Cost of AI Shortcuts with Rahim Hirji

  3. Sep 27

    Shadow AI: How to Use ChatGPT and Agents at Work Without Waiting for IT | Anna Berkman

    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 looks like for one employee with no budget, no mandate and no one telling them what to do. Anna is a former architect and chief marketing officer who moved into AI strategy and speaking after watching the same pattern everywhere: most people treat AI as a smarter Google, ask it a question, take the answer, move on. That ceiling is exactly what closes the gap between someone getting marginal value from AI and someone using it to save hours a week, before their company has even written a policy. Ivan and Anna get into where the real line is between what employees can do with AI without asking IT, and where that stops being okay. They cover the settings most people never touch that quietly train an AI model on your private conversations, how to build a personal AI curriculum instead of waiting for corporate training, and the specific tools and workarounds Anna uses to save herself 35+ hours a month. In this episode: How to figure out your personal AI Advantage Gap using Anna's five-part framework (fluency, strategy, operations, governance, culture) The ChatGPT data setting almost everyone leaves switched on that trains the model on your private conversations, and how to turn it off How to use interview style prompting to build yourself a custom learning curriculum for any skill, in any AI tool What an AI agent actually is versus a chatbot, and a real example of one building a working tool from scratch in under seven minutes The "Gamma workaround" for generating full presentations without ever touching private company data How Anna cut her own content workflow from 40 hours a month to 5 using a simple AI pipeline The one AI habit Anna wants banned immediately, and why "AI isn't a mind reader" is the most useful thing you can remember when a response comes back generic This one is for the employee who's been told to wait for a training budget or an IT approval that may never come, and who wants a real head start starting today. Connect with Anna Berkman: Website: https://markitect.co/  Podcast: The Impossible Entrepreneur (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/@ArchitectAnna/  If this episode gave you a real place to start, Anna's approach in this one is simple: close one gap at a time. On a related note, my own book, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, digs into exactly this, how to keep closing your own gaps before someone else closes them for you. It's live now: https://a.co/d/007vIzVE  If this episode was useful, a quick rating or review helps more people find these conversations. Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino

    Shadow AI: How to Use ChatGPT and Agents at Work Without Waiting for IT | Anna Berkman

  4. Sep 21

    Dr. Melisa Buie on the FREE Method for Turning Failure Into Growth

    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 human problems there is. In this conversation, Ivan and Melisa dig into the actual mechanics of fear, why some failures turn into life sentences and others turn into lessons, and how the FREE Method, Focus, Reflect, Explore, Engage, helps rewrite that story. In this episode: Why your brain treats a bad presentation like a physical threat, and what your amygdala actually does in that half second The three types of fear a single failure can trigger at once: identity, safety, and belonging How the FREE Method works step by step, and how to apply it the next time you mess up Why toddlers fail constantly and never quit, and what changes between childhood and adulthood The difference between a failure and a life sentence, and how one bad moment becomes a permanent story Why leaders need to stop collapsing failure and fault, and what to ask instead of "what happened" How showing your own real faceplant, not the sanitized version, changes how safe your team feels to fail This one is for anyone still replaying an old mistake in their head, and for any manager who wants a team that tells them the truth before it becomes a bigger problem. Connect with Melisa and get her book, Faceplant: FREE Yourself from Failure's Funk: https://a.co/d/0gDVPsSD  Reach out to her directly: https://melisabuie.com/    If turning a setback into your next chapter is a topic you can't get enough of, Ivan's own audiobook, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, is streaming now: https://open.spotify.com/show/4nLTkV3iX6RBAJ2CwCcXdf?si=eff0b23e223e44f3  Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino

    Dr. Melisa Buie on the FREE Method for Turning Failure Into Growth

  5. Sep 17

    Consciousness Over IQ: What Actually Wins in an AI Workplace with Bruce D. Randall

    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 functional AI apps with zero coding background, written white papers breaking down quantum computing for non-technical audiences, and spent twenty years developing a meditation practice that shapes his view on consciousness as a workplace skill. In this conversation, Ivan and Bruce explore why corporate hierarchies built on "hire smart, reward smart, promote smart" are breaking, and what replaces intelligence as the thing organizations should actually be developing in their people. In this episode: Why AI replaces high performers before it replaces underperformers, and what makes top talent so exposed The real story of an analyst report recreated by AI in two days that nobody could distinguish from the original How middle management is being hollowed out as AI automates reporting, compliance, and data aggregation What consciousness over intelligence means in practice, and how intuition becomes a learnable competitive skill Why the bottom rung of the corporate ladder is disappearing and what that means for new graduates How quantum computing and AI combine into hybrid systems, and why leaders need a basic grasp of both The critical thinking gap: why universities still produce knowledge storage and not the judgment skills the market demands This one is for the senior leader or HR professional who senses the rules are changing but hasn't found a framework for what replaces intelligence as the thing you hire, train, and promote for.   🔗 Connect with Bruce D. Randall Website: BruceDRandall.AI Book: The End of Smart 📘 Ivan's book Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New is live now. More at https://a.co/d/06jcYtVV  🔔 If this episode resonated, a quick rating or review helps more people find these conversations. Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino

    Consciousness Over IQ: What Actually Wins in an AI Workplace with Bruce D. Randall

  6. Sep 14

    How to Respond When You Get Interrupted in a Meeting | Andrea Wojnicki

    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 men and women get judged for the same behavior, and the specific phrases and body language that shut an interruption down without sounding defensive. In this episode: How to respond when someone interrupts you in a meeting, the exact words and body language, without pausing or sounding defensive Why interrupting is about power, not manners, and who gets interrupted most as a result Assertive or aggressive: why the same behavior gets judged differently for men and women, and how to navigate it The impossible tightrope women face in leadership, with two real examples of controlling the narrative instead of fighting it Internal versus external self-awareness, the communication skill that separates average leaders from exceptional ones When to let an interruption go, and when it's actually a power play worth confronting How meeting leaders and allies can build a culture where interrupting isn't tolerated This one is for the woman who's tired of being talked over in meetings and wants a response that actually works, and for any leader who wants to fix this dynamic on their own team. Connect with Dr. Andrea Wojnicki: Website: talkabouttalk.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki Her book, Let Me Introduce Myself, on building your professional identity and personal brand, is out in 2027. If you've ever felt like your ideas get overlooked until someone else says them louder, that's the same territory I explore in my book, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, out now at ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino. If this episode was useful, a quick rating or review helps more people find these conversations. Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino.

    How to Respond When You Get Interrupted in a Meeting | Andrea Wojnicki

  7. Sep 9

    Why 40% of Company Failures Are a Leadership Problem, Not a Product Problem | Dane Hudson

    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 author of Discipline Beats Vision a hands-on playbook for CEOs who need to grow as fast as their companies do. In this episode, Ivan and Dane unpack why leadership is the hidden variable behind most startup failures — and what disciplined leadership actually looks like in practice. In this episode: Why 40 to 55% of companies fail and Dane's hypothesis that 40% of those failures trace back to the leader, not the product The moment a CEO becomes the biggest risk to their own company Why the Optimism Trap is more dangerous than pessimism and how to catch yourself in it What "Monday ready" leadership looks like: meeting discipline as a signal of accountability culture The four people every CEO needs in their corner — and why the one they always forget matters most Why leaders who stop being relentless students fail before they realize it Newton's Third Law applied to leadership: every behavior produces a response — are you choosing yours? This one is for the CEO or senior leader who knows their company is growing but quietly suspects their leadership hasn't kept up. 🔗 Connect with Dane Hudson https://danehudson.com/  | https://impactfulleadership.com/ Book Discipline Beats Vision: https://amzn.asia/d/0aVgtDWY   📖 Ivan Palomino's book on staying indispensable in a world obsessed with new: Expired? is now available in English and French edition   Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino

    Why 40% of Company Failures Are a Leadership Problem, Not a Product Problem | Dane Hudson

  8. Sep 6

    Sarah Rozenthuler: The Psychology of Purpose in the Age of AI

    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 Powered by Purpose, with a foreword by former Unilever CEO Paul Polman. Her clients include Standard Chartered Bank, BP, and Saïd Business School at Oxford. In this conversation, Ivan and Sarah test whether talking to a machine can genuinely help someone get clearer on their purpose, or whether it just becomes a comfortable way to avoid the real conversation. In this episode: Why AI can be a legitimate rehearsal room for a hard conversation, and the exact moment it turns into a hiding place instead The difference between AI as a clean reflective mirror and an echo chamber that just agrees with you Why 70% of managers avoid the difficult conversation, according to Sarah's own research, and whether AI makes that better or worse What "crucible moments" are, and why the clearest sense of purpose usually comes out of the hardest experiences, not a chatbot Why some leaders say AI is freeing up hours while others feel like they've lost time policing AI's mistakes This one is for the leader who's already talked to AI about a hard decision and isn't sure if that counts as cheating or just good preparation. Connect with Sarah Rozenthuler: Website: https://sarahrozenthuler.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-rozenthuler/ Books: Now We're Talking and Powered by Purpose   📅 Join Ivan on 10th September: a free live session, The 7 Fears: What Employees Actually Think About AI, decoding what 36,165 employees actually said about AI at work, across 5,000 companies. Limited to 40 senior HR leaders, recording sent to all registrants. Register: https://luma.com/x10qnpqq Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino

    Sarah Rozenthuler: The Psychology of Purpose in the Age of AI
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About

Most workplace advice treats people as the problem. Growth Hacking Culture starts from the opposite premise: if your best people are disengaged, burned out, or leaving, the system is broken, not them. Hosted by Ivan Palomino, this top 5% global podcast brings you unfiltered conversations with the people rewriting the rules of work: executives from Apple, Goldman Sachs, and Zappos, organizational psychologists, neuroscientists, and founders who've built cultures that perform without burning people down. No corporate wellness fluff. No recycled leadership clichés. Just the behavioral science, psychology, and uncomfortable truths behind workplace culture, employee engagement, and leadership that actually works. For HR leaders, CHROs, founders, and executives who suspect the standard playbook is the problem.

Information

  • Creator
    Ivan Palomino
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved Ivan Palomino.
  • Show Website
    Growth Hacking Culture