Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL Podcast By Justin McMenamy cover art

Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL

Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL

By: Justin McMenamy
Listen for free

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
  • The Art of Category Creation w. Dale Koch

    The Art of Category Creation w. Dale Koch
    Aug 6 2026
    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.
    Show more Show less
    57 mins
  • 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”.
    Show more Show less
    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.
    Show more Show less
    44 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet