Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL

By Justin McMenamyBusiness Management

Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL episodes

October 15 Name It & Claim It Innovation w. Jim Weber
Host Justin McMenamy continues the multi-episode conversation with Jim Weber about leadership lessons and innovation, revisiting Jim’s advice that companies should declare themselves innovative even if they aren’t.

The conversation centers on how widespread “innovation” claims make the term vague, drawing a parallel to corporate “greenwashing,” and debate whether innovation is a thing, a feeling, or simply “greater than or equal to zero.”

Jim jokes about how C-suite executives settled on spending 3.5% of sales on innovation, while Justin warns that declarations can cause organizations to mistake optimization, stage-gate processes, and metrics for true creativity, especially when factory-minded leaders run innovation.

Jim argues for the "name it and claim it" innovation techniques saying it leaves the door open for ideas and pressure to act, sharing examples of using the label to push small cultural changes. They also discuss pushing back tactfully, credit-sharing, and the need to encourage people fighting to implement ideas.
47 min
October 01 Is Leadership Worth the Weight? w. Drew Norton
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 and saying them aloud.

Norton shares practical guidance: prioritize protein, cut processed foods, aim for 10,000 steps, and lift weights with compound movements.
36 min
September 17 Sales is Life w. Drew Norton
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 ethical selling with manipulation, referencing the 1961 Milgram experiment, and says leaders have a moral obligation to clearly communicate value.

He defines strong sales culture as shared vision, language, and demonstrated behaviors, and describes balancing commissions with teamwork through alignment and engagement. They close by outlining traits for future sales leaders beyond performance, including cultural fit, competence, team-first mindset, credibility, and communication.
35 min
September 03 Blackbelt Math w. Jim Weber
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 smother innovation. A companies’ otherwise inevitable march toward risk aversion, led by these disciplines, can only be mitigated by placing cultural gatekeepers in these roles.

People’s development relied on mentorship, flexible one-on-ones, and heavy customer proximity. Reward structures emphasized “win/lose as a team,” minimal titles, profit-based shared bonuses, and a behind-the-scenes “buoyancy model” aligning pay with impact while keeping compensation criteria intentionally vague.
53 min
August 20 The Dumbest Guy in All the Right Rooms w. Michael Kainatsky
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 placement techniques; he advises using one specialized recruiter with proven outcomes.

On LinkedIn, he argues the platform isn’t the problem... people are. He goes on to criticize unverified “experts,” fake content, and engagement obsession, and recommends authenticity, relevancy, and moving conversations off platform. They also discuss quit-vs-grit approaches to difficult decisions, negotiating an honest exit, and concern that AI will displace roles while eroding trust and human connection.
57 min
August 06 The Art of Category Creation w. Dale Koch
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 needs, requiring deeper listening (e.g., “five whys”), understanding the value network, and parallel discovery of commercial message, pricing, and engineering feasibility—often needing combined product/engineering roles.

They emphasize high-fidelity prototypes, in-context customer visits, managing hype with transparent roadmaps, using MVPs, budgeting for post-launch adaptation, choosing the right team, and building a culture that can pivot or kill projects based on ongoing learning.
57 min
July 23 Stars & Sneetches w. Jim Weber
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 business logic.

Justin describes his role at Precision Planting as scaling structure while protecting creativity and culture, not being the “spark plug” but the shepherd who gets ideas from whiteboard to reality. They explore how “fix-it” leaders get constrained to solve problems “the company’s way,” and why engineering leaders must learn the skill of selling ideas to the broader organization.

Justin shares the lenses through which he hired for innovation, focusing on the “black sheep of the blue chips,” seeking flexible candidates, hobbies showing action/curiosity, and Patrick Lencioni’s “Humble, Hungry, and Smart”.
51 min
July 09 Are Leaders Born or Taught? w. Brent Adamson
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 outside traditional sales roles, and prioritizing harder-to-train skills like empathy and logical argumentation over industry experience.

On COVID, Adamson describes how issues escalated from behavior changes to identity conflicts, amplified by social media, and suggests leaders should deescalate change by focusing on behavior.

He then explains his more recent work on “FrameMaking”: in a content-saturated, AI-accelerated market, sellers should reduce customer overwhelm by building decision confidence—helping buyers ask the right questions and connecting them to peer experiences—rather than providing more insights or claiming expert authority.
44 min
June 25 Be A Challenger, Not A Jerk w. Brent Adamson
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 wrestling through career identity uncertainty, relational and professional experimentation as a means of discovering one’s talents, and the mental-health benefits of exercise.

Adamson explains Challenger as selling “change,” using an A-to-B model where influence requires breaking down the costly “A” (status quo) before building “B,” including spending the time and energy to empathize with others’ perspectives and long held beliefs.

They define Challenger sellers vs. other seller types, stress adaptability across corporate cultures while also noting that cultural fit issues do exist and can require proactive changes. The conversation closes by teasing the topics of the second episode of the conversation including Adamson’s more recent work, The Framemaking Sale.
47 min
June 11 The Velvet Hammer w. Jim Weber
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 translate between rigid and creative worlds, and small policy differences in HR, IT, legal, and compensation required to enable a phase shift.

Weber describes “talent tapping” by finding underused internal talent and relying on a protective boss who deflected steering committees, while both note the “career poker” strategy of staying at the table versus climbing.

They also cover empathy, leaders acting as organizational psychiatrists, and when it can be compassionate to help misfit employees transition out, including the one positive lesson McMenamy cites from Jack Welch: people want to be good at their jobs.
57 min

About Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL

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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…