Growth Hacking Culture

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 env...

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 Your Potential as a Chief Peo...

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, eli...

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...

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 what you do. Because the contract r...

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 them.

Lucy Standing has spent years st...

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 th...

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 help them find their own reasons t...

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-driven teams across some of the...

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 before anyone names the cause.

Lee C...

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 something far more accessible: t...

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 Organize 365 and author of Escapi...

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 a decade working with hundred...

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.

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 the best from the rest is wh...

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 has traveled to over 75 countr...

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 statements; they fall back on their ...

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 influence, but rather a call to stren...

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 leadership genius is already with...