Growth Hacking Culture

Quiet contributors deliver results. But corporate recognition programs, performance reviews, and promotion criteria were built around visibility, not value. The recognition gap between introverts and extroverts in the workplace is costing companies their best talent, and most HR leaders cannot even see it happening.

Greg Roche is a total rewards and compensation expert with 20+ years at Fortune 500 scale, former VP of Compensation at UnitedHealth Group, and founder of Retention and Rewards Partners. He is also a self-described introverted networker who built his entire consulting practice on the introvert-friendly career strategies he teaches.

In this conversation, Ivan and Greg break down how employee retention, engagement surveys, and reward systems consistently overlook quiet performers, and what leaders need to change to close the gap.

In this episode:

This one is for the quiet contributor who delivers results but feels invisible, and for the HR leader who suspects their best talent is slipping through a system that was never built for them.

Connect with Greg Roche

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregsroche/ 

Book: The Fast and Easy Guide to Networking for Introverts https://a.co/d/09epBrT2

----

Ivan's latest article: Am I Ready to Start a Business After 45? A Behavioral Scientist's Self-Test https://www.ivanpalomino.net/post/am-i-ready-to-start-a-business-after-45-a-behavioral-scientist-s-self-test 

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

Good AI delegators were good human delegators first. Sean Campbell on why fluid intelligence, not technical skill, predicts who thrives with AI at work.

Sean spent 25 years running Cascade Insights, advising companies from startups to Fortune 500s on market research and competitive intelligence. When AI hit, he noticed a pattern: the leaders who struggled to delegate to people struggled even more to delegate to machines. The ones who already trusted others with important work picked up AI tools faster than anyone expected.

Sean is CEO of Cascade Insights and an AI professor at George Fox University, where he teaches an MBA course blending AI, entrepreneurship, and critical thinking. He has consulted with organizations across industries on AI strategy and workforce transformation.

In this episode:

This one is for the leader who knows AI matters but cannot figure out who in the organization should own it.

Key moments:

02:30 Why IT should not lead your AI strategy

08:00 The fractional CAIO role explained

18:00 84% of organizations have not redesigned for AI

30:00 Fluid intelligence: good delegators become great AI users

36:00 Why Gen X might be the best AI generation

42:00 Judgment as the skill AI cannot replace

Connect with Sean Campbell:

Website: https://www.cascadeinsights.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seancampbell/ 

Experienced professional thinking about starting something of your own? The Pre-Founder Bootcamp, Silver Edition helps you decide before you commit: silver-bootcamp.ivanpalomino.net

If this episode was useful, a quick rating or review helps more people find these conversations.

Hosted by Ivan Palomino

Grit turns self-destructive when you can’t put it down. Pauline Nguyen on grit vs grip, body signs of leadership burnout, and rest that restores performance.

Pauline ran Red Lantern, the most awarded Vietnamese restaurant in the world, for 25 years. She also worked 80 to 100 hour weeks until stress made her hair fall out. Her way out was not to try less. It was to learn the difference between grit, a fire you choose, and grip, a fear that has you and never switches off.

Pauline escaped Vietnam by boat at three years old. Today she coaches CEOs and founders on conscious leadership and nervous system regulation, and is the author of The Way of the Spiritual Entrepreneur. In 2026 she was named Global Transformational Leader of the Year.

In this episode:

This one is for the high performer who cannot stop, and the HR leader watching their best people run on fumes.

Key moments:

🔗 Connect with Pauline Nguyen

Website: https://pauline-nguyen.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulinenspeaks/ (DM the word ACTION to get the Sovereign Leader System)

Book: The Way of the Spiritual Entrepreneur: https://pauline-nguyen.com/product/the-way-of-the-spiritual-entrepreneur/ 

Ivan’s book, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, is live now: https://a.co/d/0e29LDC9 

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

AI brain fry drains focus, flow state, and deep work, and it starts when every tool meant to save you time becomes another inbox. Jared Quoyeser lived it, with 14 Slack messages, WhatsApp, Teams, and three AI assistants all competing for his attention. He knew the answer was a system, not another tool.

Jared Quoyeser spent more than two decades at Intel, where he led teams and managed billions in revenue, while competing as a professional endurance athlete in cycling and triathlons. Today he is co-founder and managing partner of the Louisiana Impact Fund, a speaker, and the author of The Flow Multiplier: Building Peak Performance Systems with AI. He has spent thirty years chasing flow state, and he now teaches high-performing executives how to reach it on command.

In this conversation, Ivan and Jared unpack why the same AI that can sharpen strategy can also bury a leader in noise, and why the line between above the line and below the line leaders is the system they build before they add the tools.

In this episode:

This one is for the executive or people leader who keeps adding AI tools to a full calendar and wonders why the days feel busier while the thinking feels shallower.

Connect with Jared Quoyeser:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jared-quoyeser

Book: The Flow Multiplier: Building Peak Performance Systems with AI

----

If Jared's point about defining productivity on your own terms struck a chord, and you are an experienced professional aged 45 or older wondering whether building something of your own is your next chapter, take a look at my Prefounders Bootcamp Silver Edition. It is a four-week live cohort on founder psychology and decision-making that ends with a readiness verdict, a financial runway analysis, and a personalized action plan. The next cohort starts Monday, November 16, 2026. Details at https://silver-bootcamp.ivanpalomino.net/

Every AI shortcut your team takes is borrowing against skills they no longer build. Rahim Hirji calls it capability debt: the accumulated cost of decisions not made, learning not done, and judgment not exercised because the machine got there first. Like technical debt, it's invisible until the system breaks and nobody knows how to fix it.

Rahim spent seven years researching over 200 organizations across 30 countries and came back with a warning: AI is not coming for your job, it is coming for your judgment. A former edtech executive who scaled Quizlet to 60+ countries, he wrote SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI (Kogan Page, 2026) to map the capabilities that become more valuable, not less, as AI takes over the process work.

In this conversation, Ivan and Rahim unpack how capability debt builds silently inside teams, why curiosity is the first skill AI quietly kills, and what separates organizations that design for AI from those that drift into it.

In this episode:

This one is for the HR leader, L&D director, or senior executive who has already rolled out AI tools and is starting to wonder whether the team is getting faster or just getting thinner.

🔗 Connect with Rahim Hirji

📘 Rahim's book SuperSkills is not another "soft skills matter" argument. It is a research-backed framework built on 200+ organizations, giving you the specific human capabilities that become more valuable as AI takes over the process work.

🔔 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 

Shadow AI is what happens when employees stop waiting for IT and start using ChatGPT and AI agents on their own to get real work done. Most advice about AI at work still comes from IT: what's banned, what's risky, what needs sign-off.

This episode flips that. Anna Carina Berkman, known as Architect Anna, has trained over 5,000 professionals and built her work around what she calls the AI Advantage Gap, the space between people who've heard of AI and people who can actually use it to get ahead. In this conversation, we get specific about what that looks like for one employee with no budget, no mandate and no one telling them what to do.

Anna is a former architect and chief marketing officer who moved into AI strategy and speaking after watching the same pattern everywhere: most people treat AI as a smarter Google, ask it a question, take the answer, move on. That ceiling is exactly what closes the gap between someone getting marginal value from AI and someone using it to save hours a week, before their company has even written a policy.

Ivan and Anna get into where the real line is between what employees can do with AI without asking IT, and where that stops being okay. They cover the settings most people never touch that quietly train an AI model on your private conversations, how to build a personal AI curriculum instead of waiting for corporate training, and the specific tools and workarounds Anna uses to save herself 35+ hours a month.

In this episode:

This one is for the employee who's been told to wait for a training budget or an IT approval that may never come, and who wants a real head start starting today.

Connect with Anna Berkman:

If this episode gave you a real place to start, Anna's approach in this one is simple: close one gap at a time. On a related note, my own book, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, digs into exactly this, how to keep closing your own gaps before someone else closes them for you. It's live now: https://a.co/d/007vIzVE 

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

Somewhere in your past there's a failure you still carry, a moment that convinced you of something about yourself that was never actually true. Dr. Melisa Buie calls it a life sentence, and she built an entire framework, the FREE Method, to help people finally set it down and turn failure into growth instead of shame.

Melisa Buie is a physicist by training, with a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Plasma Physics from the University of Michigan. She's also the co-author of Faceplant: FREE Yourself from Failure's Funk, bringing a scientist's precision to one of the most human problems there is.

In this conversation, Ivan and Melisa dig into the actual mechanics of fear, why some failures turn into life sentences and others turn into lessons, and how the FREE Method, Focus, Reflect, Explore, Engage, helps rewrite that story.

In this episode:

This one is for anyone still replaying an old mistake in their head, and for any manager who wants a team that tells them the truth before it becomes a bigger problem.

Connect with Melisa and get her book, Faceplant: FREE Yourself from Failure's Funk: https://a.co/d/0gDVPsSD 

If turning a setback into your next chapter is a topic you can't get enough of, Ivan's own audiobook, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, is streaming now: https://open.spotify.com/show/4nLTkV3iX6RBAJ2CwCcXdf?si=eff0b23e223e44f3 

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 

AI replacing high performers is not the scenario most companies prepared for. They planned for entry-level jobs disappearing. But when a two-day AI output matches what your best analyst produces in four weeks, and nobody in the room can tell the difference, the people most exposed are the ones who never had to build resilience, because raw intelligence was always enough.

That's the argument Bruce D. Randall makes in his book The End of Smart. Bruce is an author and technology thought leader working at the intersection of AI, quantum computing, and human potential. He has built functional AI apps with zero coding background, written white papers breaking down quantum computing for non-technical audiences, and spent twenty years developing a meditation practice that shapes his view on consciousness as a workplace skill.

In this conversation, Ivan and Bruce explore why corporate hierarchies built on "hire smart, reward smart, promote smart" are breaking, and what replaces intelligence as the thing organizations should actually be developing in their people.

In this episode:

This one is for the senior leader or HR professional who senses the rules are changing but hasn't found a framework for what replaces intelligence as the thing you hire, train, and promote for.

🔗 Connect with Bruce D. Randall

📘 Ivan's book Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New is live now. More at https://a.co/d/06jcYtVV 

🔔 If this episode resonated, 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

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:

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:

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.

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:

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