Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL
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.
Episodes
Weber describes an over-enthusiastic “Woody Woodpecker” management style that pecks people into working quickly but can ultimately lead to high turnover. They discuss instances where innovation tsunamis ultimately took down...
Kainatsky recounts an accidental, fast-rising career from sales to C-level roles, then into recruiting, arguing the hiring ecosystem is broken and candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, and HR are all ...
They discuss how innovation is fragile as companies scale, drawing on ideas from Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Lawrence Miller&r...
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 profi...
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....
Across the wide-ranging conversation, Roehrich recounts growing up poor in rural Minnesota, joining the Navy as an aviator, traveling the world, studying fina...
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 condi...
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 an...
Kirk shares his unconventional background, raised by academics and musicians, a high-achieving classical trumpet player who dropped out of high school, and his ent...
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 &ldq...
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 brea...
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 seeki...
Across the conversation each discusses formative early-career experiences and how they shaped their mid-career focus on leadership. Both reflect on how not fitting within organizational norms can bleed into lowered self-worth, and they discuss a framework of being “refined” versus “consumed” by adversity, emph...
They also explore challenges like managing 'comfortable L1s,' handling t...
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