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Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL

Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL

By: Justin McMenamy
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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 misfit in corporate America.

Like everyone, I have worked with and for hundreds of leaders across my career. While some leaders are great, and many are good, the vast majority find themselves tossed into leadership and left to figure it out on their own. Grody & Unprofessional seeks to share leadership stories harvested from my own experiences and from the experiences of others through approachable and candid conversations with the aim of educating and shaping your leadership journey.

Grody & Unprofessional episodes will toggle between focused monologue on specific lessons or mindsets I have acquired from my experiences and conversations with other leaders seeking to understand their convictions and strategies for inspiring, motivating, and maybe sometimes cajoling a group into action.

Grody & Unprofessional is not a memoir, it’s not a forum to gripe or complain about the past or present. The rules are simple, I aim to convey leadership lessons through storytelling. If a given story has a hero, we will use proper names, if the story has a villain, a dolt, or if there is the potential for embarrassment, proper names will be removed. While we do NOT aim to embarrass people or organizations, we do intend to embarrass poor leadership behaviors and mindsets common to many leaders and organizations.

My experience has been that demand for talented leaders outstrips supply by at least tenfold, Grody & Unprofessional is my feeble attempt to improve supply.

I hope you will join me as we seek to uncover people, product, and organizational leadership lessons through the musings of a corporate misfit and his friends.Copyright Justin McMenamy Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Stars & Sneetches w. Jim Weber

    Stars & Sneetches w. Jim Weber
    Jul 23 2026
    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”.
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    50 mins
  • Are Leaders Born or Taught? w. Brent Adamson

    Are Leaders Born or Taught? w. Brent Adamson
    Jul 9 2026
    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.
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    44 mins
  • Be A Challeger, Not A Jerk w. Brent Adamson

    Be A Challeger, Not A Jerk w. Brent Adamson
    Jun 25 2026
    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.
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    46 mins
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