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
Host Justin McMenany welcomes back sales leader and coach Drew Norton to discuss Norton’s personal health journey, including losing about 100 pounds from a high of roughly 265 through cutting soda, increasing activity, and later hiring a fitness coach to reach about 165 pounds and 5% body fat. Norton describes how responsibility, enlisting allies (brother, gym friend, coaches), and making goals public helped him change habits around eating and working out. He emphasizes the power of affirmations, especially “I’m healthy, fit, active, and strong”, and addressing limiting beliefs by writing…
Host Justin McMenamy welcomes sales leader and coach Drew Norton to discuss sales and leadership. Norton explains that salesmanship often comes with a negative stigma (e.g., “used car salesman,” “sales is a four-letter word”) driven by bad actors and buyer’s remorse; however good salesmanship is rooted in honesty, integrity, and trust, including being willing to recommend against a purchase. They discuss why sales skills matter beyond commission roles because “sales is life,” affecting communication, influence, and decision-making in family, social settings and career. Norton contrasts…
Host Justin McMenamy and guest Jim Weber continue discussing how to lead and sustain innovative organizations, including leadership styles, developing people, and rewarding performance. 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 tech giants, like Xerox PARC and Kodak, who were unwilling to self-disrupt. Justin frames corporate IT, HR, legal, and safety as the “four horsemen of the innovation apocalypse” that often…
Host Justin McMenamy interviews Michael Kainatsky, a former corporate leader and recruiter, about leadership lessons, the broken hiring ecosystem, and the proper role of LinkedIn within a healthy professional network. 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 complicit. He says mass AI-driven applying and AI resume screening create a feedback loop that rewards bots, while many recruiters overcharge for their low-quality advice and…
Host Justin McMenamy interviews Dale Koch, a longtime product developer/manager at Precision Planting, about creating products within new product categories versus iterative “bigger, faster, cheaper” product development projects. Koch recounts being a third-generation Caterpillar engineer, leaving Caterpillar after five years to join the then-small Precision Planting, while being recruited via a road trip to see an innovative planter and early LEGO-based concepting. They define category creation as starting from a broader, hard-to-spec problem statement where customers often can’t articulate…
Justin McMenamy continues his multi-episode conversation with Jim Weber. In this portion of the conversation, they tackle topics like leadership, innovation, and hiring in organizations built to create the future rather than optimize the past. They discuss how innovation is fragile as companies scale, drawing on ideas from Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Lawrence Miller’s “From Barbarians to Bureaucrat’s”, Ben Rich’s “Skunkworks”, and Simon Sinek’s “Infinite Game,” arguing bureaucracy is a logical outcome and innovation can’t last forever when pitted against principled…
Host Justin McMenamy continues his conversation with Brent Adamson, co-author of “The Challenger Sale” and “The Framemaking Sale”. 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 profile am I?” to “What do Challenger reps do and how can I model those behaviors?” In discussing hiring, Adamson emphasizes distinguishing fully realized Challenger skills from Challenger potential, often found…
This is the first of two episodes in which Justin McMenamy interviews Brent Adamson, acclaimed author of The Challenger Sale. 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. Adamson goes on to describe his career transition from Michigan State German professor to sales researcher at CEB, framing his throughline as researching and teaching. They discuss…
Host Justin McMenamy and guest Jim Weber discuss techniques by which innovative teams can survive inside large bureaucracies. They discuss the need for the innovative leader to set a different “cultural thermostat,” from the broader organization; allowing for some of the organization to be in a flexible gaseous state while the rest of the company remains a solid structure focused on optimizing the present. McMenamy credits the book Loonshots by Safi Bahcall and Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works rules of management, emphasizing the need for executive protection, boundary-layer leaders who can…
Host Justin McMenamy interviews Steve “Roach” Roehrich, a veteran naval aviator, former Fortune 50 Chief Business Improvement Officer, and aerospace manufacturing CEO, about leadership lessons acquired and deployed in military and corporate theatres. Across the wide-ranging conversation, Roehrich recounts growing up poor in rural Minnesota, joining the Navy as an aviator, traveling the world, studying finance, and navigating the corporate world. Roehrich argues that the military is a leadership crucible and defines key attributes of leadership: integrity/authenticity, vision, resilience and…
Host Justin McMenamy welcomes Leo Salotti, co-founder of Terranova, to discuss leadership lessons learned from cross-cultural management and career transitions. 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 conditions rather than copying Argentina’s model. They explore moving from engineering to people leadership, emphasizing trust, avoiding micromanagement, and “test-driving” leadership…
Host Justin McMenamy and Jim Weber continue their conversation on fostering a culture of innovation including methods of preventing it from being killed by pessimism and process. 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 and Vine” analogy: provide enough structure to support creativity without choking it; warning that well intended leaders can smother innovation through noble pursuits of synergy, globalization, metrics…
Host Justin McMenamy interviews entrepreneur and marketer Danny Kirk. The conversation spans topics like defining failure and success, the place for pessimism in business, and leadership lessons drawn from the great philosopher Shaquille O’Neal. Kirk shares his unconventional background, raised by academics and musicians, a high-achieving classical trumpet player who dropped out of high school, and his entry into entrepreneurship through a scholarship and a startup weekend that led to his first company. Over the last 15 years, Danny has started 5 revenue-generating businesses, pursues…
Host Justin McMenamy interviews Andy Pearson, creative director at Liquid Death. 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 “a bone to pick.” Pearson describes Liquid Death’s ethos as making entertainment not marketing, critiquing ads as unwanted interruptions, and questioning industry assumptions both in product and…
Host Justin McMenamy and guest Jim Weber continue their multi-episode discussion around the many ingredients which comprise a successful culture of innovation. 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 break ideas and improve them over time. He then emphasizes the need to ask everyone, from executives to technicians, “what would you do?” to learn technical and organizational…
Host Justin McMenamy welcomes Kristen Patty to discuss leadership and HR lessons from their time at Precision Planting during a decade of growth from under 100 employees to over 500, including global expansion across more than 15 countries and the acquisition by AGCO. 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 seeking actionable feedback. They cover her transition from Sales Operations to head of HR and her focus on mission-driven recruiting. They discuss balancing HR process with…
In this episode host Justin McMenamy welcomes fellow leadership podcaster Erin Thorpe. 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, emphasizing that not every bad day warrants resignation and that staying in discomfort can build tenacity. They explore differences between technical and people skills, contrasting engineering’s…
In the first episode of the mini-series entitled “ Innovation: Is It More Than a Feeling? ” host Justin McMenamy and Jim Weber explore the concept of innovation. The episode delves into defining the necessary components of innovation, contrasting it with being merely clever or even foolish. Jim shares his career experiences as an innovator within a Dow 30 organization and discusses his personal take on innovation, including the idea that there are various levels of innovation. The discussion also touches on the reality that innovation can be seen beyond technology and product development.…
This episode features host Justin McMenamy and guest Caleb Schleder discussing the Situational Leadership model. They delve into the four leadership styles (L1 through L4) and their applications based on employee competence and confidence. The conversation emphasizes the importance of recognizing and adapting to these styles to enhance team performance. They also explore challenges like managing 'comfortable L1s,' handling team dynamics with varying competence levels, and maintaining effective leadership during organizational changes. The episode concludes with a unique twist, examining how…
In this episode, host Justin McMenemy is joined by Caleb Schleder to discuss the framework of Situational Leadership. They delve into the importance of tailoring leadership styles to specific situations and the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all approach. Justin emphasizes the significance of avoiding the 'because I said so' attitude and introduces Situational Leadership as his go-to advice for new leaders. Caleb shares personal experiences with different leadership styles and highlights the value of empowering employees while avoiding micromanagement. The discussion covers various leadership…
In this episode, host Justin McMenamy interviews John Seabrook, an author and journalist, about his recent book 'The Spinach King.' The discussion centers on the dual legacies of John’s grandfather, Charles F. Seabrook, a pioneering yet controversial figure in agriculture. Known for his innovative work in industrializing vegetable farming and his collaboration with Clarence Birdseye, Charles is described as both a visionary and a ruthless leader. The interview delves into the complex family dynamics, including the strained and ultimately destructive relationship between Charles and his sons,…
In this episode host Justin McMenamy and guest Bryce Baker discuss the evolution of sales strategies, homing in on the Challenger Sale method. With nearly 15 years of experience in sales at Precision Planting, Bryce shares the transition from Solutions-based selling to the more effective Challenger approach. They outline how this method disrupts traditional practices by emphasizing commercial teaching, tailoring, and taking control of conversations. The discussion includes real-world examples, customer loyalty insights, and the role of cross-departmental integration in effective sales…
In this episode Justin and guest Jeff Snowden discuss a variety of topics ranging from leadership lessons, marketing strategies, and personal struggles, both personal and professional. They delve into Jeff’s background, his career transitions from photography to marketing, and his foundational marketing philosophies. Jeff emphasizes the importance of making differentiated and believable promises to build trust in marketing. They also discuss the inherent challenges of managing corporate roles and maintaining personal integrity and family priorities. Jeff shares his experience of having a…
In this episode, Justin McMenamy converses with Jason Stoller about their joint experiences at Precision Planting. The discussion focuses on the distinguishing factors between large corporations and smaller startups in terms of product development processes vs. recipes. They delve into the importance of proximity to customers, iterative development, and the freedom to take risks and even fail with the product development environment. By highlighting the benefits of rapid iteration, intrinsic motivation of engineers, and the elimination of bureaucratic handoffs, they underscore the vital role…
In this episode, Justin McMenamy concludes his examination of Kelly Johnson's 14 Rules of Management with a focus on Johnson's unwritten 15th rule. He explains the intricacies of creating and maintaining a 'Skunk Works' organization within a larger corporate entity, noting the challenges that come with resource and business model acquisitions. He highlights the importance of aligning with like-minded customers and suppliers and shares anecdotes from his time at Precision Planting, emphasizing an approach that prioritized autonomy and direct customer engagement. Justin's insights reveal the…
In this episode, host Justin McMenamy interviews Steve Pierz, a friend and fellow corporate misfit, who shares his unconventional strategies and experiences from a long, innovative career. Steve recounts his daring approach in large meetings, his early passion for mechanical engineering inspired by his creative upbringing, and his impactful yet rebellious career at Caterpillar where he frequently clashed with rigid corporate processes. Both Justin and Steve delve into the importance of mindset in leadership and innovation, emphasizing that success in business relies heavily on the creative,…
In this episode of Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL, host Justin McMenamy & Brad Stoller explore the concepts of asymmetric warfare and the infinite games, focusing on how small organizations like Precision Planting can compete against much larger competitors. The conversation delves into the importance of selecting the right leaders with characteristics such as mission-driven mindset, independence of thought, and adaptability. They discuss how speed and agility are crucial for smaller organizations to succeed, contrasting their approach with larger entities that often rely on rigid processes and…
In this episode, host Justin McMenamy and guest Brad Stoller delve into the history and strategic growth of Precision Planting, an innovative agricultural company from Central Illinois. Founded by a resourceful farmer in 1993, the company prioritized improving planting equipment through unique solutions, fostering a loyal customer base and rapid technological advancements. The episode highlights key influences like Simon Sinek's 'Infinite Game' and Malcolm Gladwell's 'David and Goliath' as part of their strategic thinking to combat much larger competitors. The conversation transitions to the…
In this episode, host Justin McMenamy and guest Caleb Schleder share critical insights into team building and leadership, drawing from their extensive corporate experience. They discuss the importance of trust, psychological safety, and culture curation in building effective teams. Strategies for hiring, including prioritizing the right fit over filling positions quickly, and innovative approaches to onboarding and development programs are explored. They also cover the importance of managing team dynamics, including handling underperforming members to maintain a healthy organizational…
In this episode, host Justin McMenamy interviews Billy Samoa Saleebey, a former Tesla and SolarCity employee, about his experiences working in Elon Musk's companies. The discussion delves into Saleebey's roles in Global Sales and Product Training, and Leadership Development. The episode explores Elon Musk's leadership style, the rigorous work culture at Tesla, and the unique onboarding and interview processes. Saleebey reflects on memorable experiences, such as factory tours and collaborative efforts, and discusses the potential future of Musk's companies post-Elon. The episode also examines…
About 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
Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL is a English business podcast from Justin McMenamy. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.
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