Growth Hacking Culture

Six extra hours a week. That's what AI has reportedly handed back to people using it well. The real question isn't the time, it's what they do with it. Chartered psychologist Sarah Rozenthuler has spent nearly two decades studying how humans talk to each other about what actually matters, and she's noticed something: more people are turning to AI to think out loud about their purpose, their leadership, their next move.

Sarah is a leadership coach and the author of three books on purpose and dialogue, including Now We're Talking, shortlisted for the Business Book Awards, and Powered by Purpose, with a foreword by former Unilever CEO Paul Polman. Her clients include Standard Chartered Bank, BP, and Saïd Business School at Oxford.

In this conversation, Ivan and Sarah test whether talking to a machine can genuinely help someone get clearer on their purpose, or whether it just becomes a comfortable way to avoid the real conversation.

In this episode:

This one is for the leader who's already talked to AI about a hard decision and isn't sure if that counts as cheating or just good preparation.

Connect with Sarah Rozenthuler:

Website: https://sarahrozenthuler.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-rozenthuler/

Books: Now We're Talking and Powered by Purpose

📅 Join Ivan on 10th September: a free live session, The 7 Fears: What Employees Actually Think About AI, decoding what 36,165 employees actually said about AI at work, across 5,000 companies. Limited to 40 senior HR leaders, recording sent to all registrants.

Register: https://luma.com/x10qnpqq

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

Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox, authors of Leading in Chaos, explain why human-centric leadership has hit its ceiling, and what comes next.

For fifteen years, leadership development meant one thing: build emotional intelligence, train empathy, create psychological safety. It worked, until it didn't. Some of the most self-aware, emotionally intelligent leaders on the planet are still freezing under pressure, still overcorrecting in a crisis, still making the wrong call. Not because they lack empathy. Because empathy was never the missing piece.

Nicholas Janni has spent over 25 years advising CEOs and senior leadership teams worldwide and teaching at top business schools, including IMD. His book Leader as Healer won UK Business Book of the Year. Amy Elizabeth Fox is Co-founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, and has spent two decades running trauma-informed, transformational leadership programs for Fortune 500 executives and professional services firms. Together they wrote Leading in Chaos, their account of what leadership requires in a world stuck in permanent crisis.

Portals to a New Future argues that today's polycrisis, institutional fragility, and sustained uncertainty demand more than better tools or best practice. Janni and Fox call it next practice: a shift from control to coherence, from speed to presence, and from purely cognitive leadership to a wider, embodied intelligence. Drawing on decades of work with senior teams, the book blends vertical development and trauma-informed practice into a practical case for how leaders can regulate themselves well enough to lead clearly through chaos.

In this conversation, Ivan Palomino asks them to define what actually comes after human-centric leadership: a deeper form of consciousness built on vertical development, trauma-informed leadership, and nervous system regulation, not just more empathy training.

In this episode:

This one is for the CHRO who invested heavily in emotional intelligence training and still isn't seeing the culture shift they were promised, and for any leader who suspects the old playbook has quietly stopped working.

🔗 Connect with Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox

📘 Book and Course, Leading in Chaos: https://leadinginchaosbook.com/

🌐 Nicholas Janni: https://www.nicholasjanni.com/  | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-janni/

🌐 Amy Elizabeth Fox / Mobius Executive Leadership: https://www.mobiusleadership.com/  | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyelizabethfox/ 

🎙️ More from Growth Hacking Culture Podcast home: https://podcast.ivanpalomino.net 

Newsletter: https://simplyhuman.substack.com 

📘 If this episode resonated, you might enjoy Ivan's own book, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, on why experience is still your biggest asset in a workplace obsessed with novelty: https://www.ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino 

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.

Every organization wants to hire the best. Stack the roster with top performers, invest in individual excellence, let talent density do the work. It sounds like a winning strategy. The research says otherwise.

Dr. André Martin is an organizational psychologist, former Chief Talent Officer at Mars, and author of Collective Confidence: The Winning Formula Behind the World's Most Unbeatable Teams. He has spent decades studying hundreds of teams across radically different environments, from submarine crews to Olympic gymnasts to Silicon Valley startups, and his findings keep pointing to the same place: the teams that win are not the ones with the most talent. They are the ones that believe they can figure it out together.

Ivan and André dig into why collective confidence outpredicts individual performance, what six principles every unbeatable team shares, and how the way we hire, onboard, and develop people is built around a model that stopped working years ago.

In this episode:

This one is for the leader who looks at a talented team and thinks: we should be performing better than this. For the HR professional who suspects that stacking resumes is not the same as building a real team. And for anyone who has been on a scrappy squad that somehow outperformed everyone's expectations and wondered why it worked.

🔗 Connect with André Martin

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

Book: Collective Confidence (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Collective-Confidence-Winning-Formula-Worlds/dp/1966280084

First book: Wrong Fit, Right Fit Newsletter: More Than the Sum (on LinkedIn)

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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

Ivan Palomino's new book Expired?: The Science of Staying Indispensable When Your Company Bets on Youth is now availble https://a.co/d/036NVnVe

Most of us were handed a script before we were old enough to question it. A school told us what to study. A parent told us what success looks like. A career ladder told us which rung comes next. And somewhere along the way, we confused following the script with actually living.

This conversation with Dr. Audrey Tang starts with a simple but unsettling question: what if the detour was never the problem? What if the belief in a straight line was?

Dr. Audrey Tang is a Chartered Psychologist, leadership trainer, and award-winning author of The Leader's Guide to Resilience and The Leader's Guide to Wellbeing (winner, Business Book Awards 2024). For years she has worked with leaders and organisations on the psychology behind performance, confidence, and behaviour change. Her own life, which has crossed teaching, performing, writing, broadcasting, and building a charity, is anything but linear.

Ivan and Audrey explore the neuroscience behind why we default to linear thinking, why the corporate habit of setting fixed goals makes us worse at life, and what it actually takes to build confidence in the face of the unexpected.

In this episode:

This one is for the experienced professional who suspects the path they are on was never quite theirs, and is ready to ask what comes next.

🔗 Connect with Dr. Audrey Tang

Website: https://www.draudreyt.com/

Book - The Leader's Guide to Resilience: https://a.co/d/064klLMC 

📘 Ivan's new book Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable When Your Company Bets on Youth — for the 50+ professional navigating relevance, visibility, and what experience is actually worth. Launching September 2026: https://www.ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino 

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

Picture the busiest person you know. First to answer email, last to leave a meeting, always available. Now ask yourself: are they actually the best decision maker in the room? John Nieuwenburg has coached hundreds of leaders through exactly this contradiction, and his answer might surprise you.

John spent decades working his way up in retail, eventually running a $3 billion operation as company president. That experience taught him the busiest executives are rarely the most effective ones. He's now spent 20+ years coaching leaders using the Socratic method, helping them ask themselves better questions instead of handing them answers.

In this conversation, Ivan and John unpack what actually separates leaders who scale their impact from those who just scale their hours, and why the answer has almost nothing to do with working harder.

In this episode:

This one is for the leader who's proud of how busy they are, and quietly wondering if that busyness is actually working against them.

Connect with John Nieuwenburg

Website: w5coaching.com

Coming Soon: The Culture Signal: a free online session for senior HR leaders on what your people actually fear about AI, and what to do about it

Register on https://luma.com/x10qnpqq 

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

At 43, at the peak of his career as music director of Broadway's Hamilton, Julian Reeve had a stress related heart attack. The two things driving it, workaholism and perfectionism, are the same two things now deciding who thrives with AI and who burns out trying to outrun it.

Julian Reeve is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and founder of Perfect Equilibrium. He spent years helping high achievers reclaim their health and their sense of self after getting trapped in what he calls the achievement machine, and he built his own AI assistant three years ago to help him do exactly that.

In this conversation, Ivan and Julian reframe AI not as a threat but as a mirror, and unpack why burnout, perfectionism, and the fear of being replaced all trace back to the same root cause: confusing skill with identity.

In this episode:

This one is for anyone who has built two decades of career on being reliable, consistent, and hard to fault, and is now watching a machine do that part faster than they ever could.

julianreeve.com | Human Capability Indicator: free download Book: Captain Perfection and the Secret of Self Compassion https://amzn.eu/d/03J6jm4x

TEDx: Julian Reeve perfectionism  https://youtu.be/mi-kD8_dyKw?si=HV6GbumnEKrHpS5B 

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📘 Ivan Palomino's book Expired? is available now in English. The science of staying indispensable when the world keeps moving the goalposts. → ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino

Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast hosted by Ivan Palomino, exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace performance.

Power changes everyone, especially leaders, whether they realize it or not. Discover the hidden neuroscience behind how authority rewires your brain, alters your behavior, and can transform you in ways you never expected.

In this episode, Ivan Palomino speaks with leadership expert Nick Kinley, a former forensic psychotherapist whose work spans prisons, boardrooms, and decades of research into power. Together, they unpack what really happens in the brain when people gain authority: why power can boost confidence while also reducing empathy, distorting decision-making, and making even strong leaders more vulnerable to blind spots.

You’ll learn:

This conversation is especially relevant for founders, executives, managers, HR leaders, and anyone interested in leadership, psychology, and workplace culture. If you want to understand how power shapes behavior and how to lead without losing your values, this episode is for you.

Nick Kinley is the author of The Power Trap, an evidence-based look at how leadership changes people and what to do about it.

Listen now to explore the neuropsychology of power and what it means for the way you lead.

The latest book of Ivan Palomino on the psychology of the midlife is now available: Expired? https://a.co/d/0hV4tNnu

There is a version of you that walks into a job feeling capable, energized, and sure of who you are. And there is a version, months or years later, who can't remember when that confidence left. Nobody names the moment. There usually isn't one. Just a slow accumulation of small cuts that eventually add up to a person who doubts themselves.

Jeff Davis has spent years collecting these stories. He's an award-winning author, TEDx speaker, and mental health advocate whose latest book, The Courage to Leave: Breaking Free from Toxic Workplaces, pulls back the curtain on toxic work cultures through raw storytelling and research-backed insight, including his own experience surviving and eventually transforming a toxic company from the inside.

In this conversation, Ivan and Jeff go deep on why toxic workplaces are built to look normal, why smart people stay far longer than they should, and what it actually takes to get out without losing yourself in the process.

In this episode:

This one is for the professional who has already asked themselves "is it me, or is this place actually toxic" more than once, and hasn't found a safe way to say it out loud.

Website: jeffdspeaks.com

Book: The Courage to Leave: Breaking Free from Toxic Workplaces

Email: [email protected]

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

If this conversation resonates, Ivan's own book, Expired?: The Science of Staying Indispensable When Your Company Bets on Youth, digs into why we're wired to undervalue what's already proven, ourselves included. The English edition is coming September 2026: https://www.ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino 

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.

If you think in systems, empathy probably never made sense as a soft skill. It felt vague, unquantifiable, impossible to debug. But what if it is not a personality trait at all, just a system you have not built yet.

Colette Molteni spent 20 years working inside data analytics, sales operations, and engineering teams before founding Empathy Elevated. She does not ask technical people to become someone they are not. She gives them a framework: a repeatable, practiceable system for reading a room, managing a hard conversation, and building trust, the same way you would approach any other technical skill.

In this episode, Ivan and Colette get into why brilliance alone stalls careers, why most corporate EQ training is forgotten by the following Monday, and the 4-step system she uses to turn empathy into something you can actually practice and measure.

In this episode:

This one is for the engineer, data scientist, or product manager who has been told they are hard to work with and wants an actual system for fixing it, not another personality assessment.

Connect with Colette Molteni

Substack: https://empathyelevated.substack.com/

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

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 

There is a version of you that works harder, thinks faster, and still ends up in the same place. Not because you lacked the ability — but because the process producing your decisions had a flaw you never examined. And the smarter you are, the longer it takes to notice.

This conversation is about that flaw, and what it actually takes to correct it.

Andres Kuusk is a seven-time World Pentamind Champion, the most successful all-around mental strategist in recorded history, a PhD economist, and C-suite executive. His book, Unlocking the Success Puzzle, draws on decades of high-stakes competition and corporate advisory work to map the hidden thinking errors that undermine even the most talented professionals.

Ivan and Andres explore what separates people who keep improving from those who keep repeating — from the role of curiosity in sustained success, to the untested assumptions quietly sitting at the center of most corporate failures, to what it actually means to judge a decision well.

In this episode:

This one is for the senior leader or high achiever who has the track record, the credentials, the capability — and still senses that something in how they think and decide could be fundamentally better.

🔗 Connect with Andres Kuusk

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