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. 6h ago

    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

  2. 5d ago

    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

  3. 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

  4. Aug 30

    Nicholas Janni & Amy Elizabeth Fox: What Comes After Human-Centric Leadership

    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 and teaching at top business schools, including IMD. His book Leader as Healer won UK Business Book of the Year. Amy Elizabeth Fox is Co-founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, and has spent two decades running trauma-informed, transformational leadership programs for Fortune 500 executives and professional services firms. Together they wrote Leading in Chaos, their account of what leadership requires in a world stuck in permanent crisis. 📖 About the book Leading in Chaos: Portals to a New Future argues that today's polycrisis, institutional fragility, and sustained uncertainty demand more than better tools or best practice. Janni and Fox call it next practice: a shift from control to coherence, from speed to presence, and from purely cognitive leadership to a wider, embodied intelligence. Drawing on decades of work with senior teams, the book blends vertical development and trauma-informed practice into a practical case for how leaders can regulate themselves well enough to lead clearly through chaos. In this conversation, Ivan Palomino asks them to define what actually comes after human-centric leadership: a deeper form of consciousness built on vertical development, trauma-informed leadership, and nervous system regulation, not just more empathy training. In this episode: Why fifteen years of emotional intelligence training plateaued, and what CHROs got wrong measuring its impact The real difference between a leader who is calm because they are regulated, and one who is only suppressing panic Why the average person spends just 5 percent of their day in a state of flow, and what that reveals about modern workplace culture What vertical development and trauma-informed leadership actually look like in practice, without a single hour on a therapist's couch How hyperarousal and hypoarousal quietly hijack a team's best decisions under pressure Why boards are no longer willing to tolerate high-performing but harmful leaders, and what replaces that old model A simple two-minute practice that changes the quality of every meeting a leader runs This one is for the CHRO who invested heavily in emotional intelligence training and still isn't seeing the culture shift they were promised, and for any leader who suspects the old playbook has quietly stopped working. 🔗 Connect with Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox 📘 Book and Course, Leading in Chaos: https://leadinginchaosbook.com/ 🌐 Nicholas Janni: https://www.nicholasjanni.com/  | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-janni/ 🌐 Amy Elizabeth Fox / Mobius Executive Leadership: https://www.mobiusleadership.com/  | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyelizabethfox/  🎙️ More from Growth Hacking Culture Podcast home: https://podcast.ivanpalomino.net  Newsletter: https://simplyhuman.substack.com    📘 If this episode resonated, you might enjoy Ivan's own book, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, on why experience is still your biggest asset in a workplace obsessed with novelty: https://www.ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino  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.

    Nicholas Janni & Amy Elizabeth Fox: What Comes After Human-Centric Leadership

  5. Aug 23

    Why Hiring A-Players Doesn't Build Winning Teams with André Martin

    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 the ones with the most talent. They are the ones that believe they can figure it out together. Ivan and André dig into why collective confidence outpredicts individual performance, what six principles every unbeatable team shares, and how the way we hire, onboard, and develop people is built around a model that stopped working years ago. In this episode: Why collective confidence is a stronger predictor of team performance than individual talent, backed by decades of research The three types of confidence (individual, contributory, collective) and why organizations invest in the wrong one Six principles shared by every unbeatable team André studied, from Navy crews to gymnasts to startup founders How a Burning Man camp leader's philosophy of "make everyone the boss of something" reveals what corporate hiring misses Why teams that learn together retain nearly 100% while solo learners lose 70% in three days (the Ebbinghaus curve hack) The trust formula with four variables where self-interest is the denominator that can destroy everything else What André would fix first as CHRO: not culture programs, but onboarding and the leadership team This one is for the leader who looks at a talented team and thinks: we should be performing better than this. For the HR professional who suspects that stacking resumes is not the same as building a real team. And for anyone who has been on a scrappy squad that somehow outperformed everyone's expectations and wondered why it worked. 🔗 Connect with André Martin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/docmartinpdx Book: Collective Confidence (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Collective-Confidence-Winning-Formula-Worlds/dp/1966280084 First book: Wrong Fit, Right Fit Newsletter: More Than the Sum (on LinkedIn) ----  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   Ivan Palomino's new book Expired?: The Science of Staying Indispensable When Your Company Bets on Youth is now availble https://a.co/d/036NVnVe

    Why Hiring A-Players Doesn't Build Winning Teams with André Martin

  6. Aug 16

    Dr. Audrey Tang: Detours, Dopamine, and the Science of a Life Not Scripted

    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 The Leader's Guide to Resilience and The Leader's Guide to Wellbeing (winner, Business Book Awards 2024). For years she has worked with leaders and organisations on the psychology behind performance, confidence, and behaviour change. Her own life, which has crossed teaching, performing, writing, broadcasting, and building a charity, is anything but linear. Ivan and Audrey explore the neuroscience behind why we default to linear thinking, why the corporate habit of setting fixed goals makes us worse at life, and what it actually takes to build confidence in the face of the unexpected. In this episode: Why the brain fills in narrative gaps automatically, and how Gestalt psychology explains our obsession with sequences and conclusions The difference between happiness and relief, and why "I'll be happy when I achieve X" is one of the most common traps we fall into How parental scripts get installed early and how to start asking whose critical voice you are actually hearing The skills vs. strengths distinction: why getting promoted on things you are good at but that drain you is one of the quietest career crises there is How dopamine reinforces the wrong behaviours, keeping people climbing ladders that lead somewhere they never wanted to go Why "follow your passion" can tip into obsession, and the better question to ask: what problems do you want to solve? The stretch zone framework: how small daily discomforts build the resilience to handle real uncertainty without panic What to do when you are stuck in the mess right now, cannot see the point, and do not know where to start This one is for the experienced professional who suspects the path they are on was never quite theirs, and is ready to ask what comes next. 🔗 Connect with Dr. Audrey Tang Website: https://www.draudreyt.com/ Book - The Leader's Guide to Resilience: https://a.co/d/064klLMC  📘 Ivan's new book Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable When Your Company Bets on Youth — for the 50+ professional navigating relevance, visibility, and what experience is actually worth. Launching September 2026: https://www.ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino  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. Audrey Tang: Detours, Dopamine, and the Science of a Life Not Scripted

  7. Aug 12

    John Nieuwenburg on Building Systems That Don't Need You in the Room

    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 answers. In this conversation, Ivan and John unpack what actually separates leaders who scale their impact from those who just scale their hours, and why the answer has almost nothing to do with working harder. In this episode: Why the captain of a rowboat, a yacht, and an aircraft carrier all need a completely different definition of "work" The difference between personal trust and structural trust, and why only one of them scales past ten people What "delegation debt" costs you when you keep saying "it's just faster if I do it myself" Why Jeff Bezos treats 5 good decisions a year as a successful year, and what that means for how you spend your time The real difference between being available and being accessible, and how to protect blocks of real, focused work How to run an executive update using BLUF (bottom line up front) instead of a 50-slide deck nobody reads Why culture is defined by what a leader tolerates, not what's written on a wall, and how to build one worth keeping This one is for the leader who's proud of how busy they are, and quietly wondering if that busyness is actually working against them. Connect with John Nieuwenburg Website: w5coaching.com   Coming Soon: The Culture Signal: a free online session for senior HR leaders on what your people actually fear about AI, and what to do about it Register on 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

    John Nieuwenburg on Building Systems That Don't Need You in the Room

  8. Aug 9

    Julian Reeve: Unmistakable Identity, Burnout, and Why AI Recovery Is the Same Skill

    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 him do exactly that. In this conversation, Ivan and Julian reframe AI not as a threat but as a mirror, and unpack why burnout, perfectionism, and the fear of being replaced all trace back to the same root cause: confusing skill with identity. In this episode: Why Dr. Christina Maslach's six drivers of burnout reveal that overload was never the real problem for most people The difference between skill (what AI already does well) and capability (what only humans can do), explained through a plumber standing in your kitchen Julian's three pillars of "unmistakable identity," identity, creativity, and judgment, and why none of them can be trained the way skills are Why 95% of people believe they're self-aware while the real number is closer to 12%, according to Dr. Tasha Eurich's research Martin Covington's self-worth theory and why perfectionists are structurally the most vulnerable to burnout What "acceptance and permission" mean in practice, and why recovery is about doing less, not more Why Gen Z may need to know themselves at 20 the way Julian needed to know himself at 40, and what that means for the future of entry-level work This one is for anyone who has built two decades of career on being reliable, consistent, and hard to fault, and is now watching a machine do that part faster than they ever could. 🔗 Connect with Julian Reeve: julianreeve.com | Human Capability Indicator: free download Book: Captain Perfection and the Secret of Self Compassion https://amzn.eu/d/03J6jm4x TEDx: Julian Reeve perfectionism  https://youtu.be/mi-kD8_dyKw?si=HV6GbumnEKrHpS5B  --- 📘 Ivan Palomino's book Expired? is available now in English. The science of staying indispensable when the world keeps moving the goalposts. → ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino   Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast hosted by Ivan Palomino, exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace performance.

    Julian Reeve: Unmistakable Identity, Burnout, and Why AI Recovery Is the Same Skill
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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