Grody & UnPrOfEsSiOnAL Podcast By Justin McMenamy cover art

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
  • When You're Another Brick in the Wall w. Leo Salotti

    When You're Another Brick in the Wall w. Leo Salotti
    May 14 2026
    Host Justin McMenamy welcomes Leo Salotti, co-founder of Terranova, to discuss leadership lessons learned from cross-cultural management and career transitions.

    Across the episode, Leo describes lessons learned after being promoted to leading a team which spanned Argentina and Brazil, including choosing humility by delivering a full leadership presentation in Portuguese and tailoring solutions to Brazilian conditions rather than copying Argentina’s model. They explore moving from engineering to people leadership, emphasizing trust, avoiding micromanagement, and “test-driving” leadership through cross-functional projects.

    Leo recounts starting his career at a large multi-national equipment manufacturer as a formative “school,” then leaving the structure for Precision Planting, driven by a desire for external customer exposure and avoiding the feelings of being “another brick in the wall.”

    They discuss balancing structure vs creativity, decentralized vs centralized decision-making, meeting avoidance, financial realities, and how to discern when it’s time to move on using reflection, a “seven hats” framework, and signals like bitterness or health impacts.

    Leo closes with a “La Petit Hotel” story involving storms, a stranded truck, and late night dismantling a gas boiler.
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    54 mins
  • Don't Burn the Boats w. Jim Weber

    Don't Burn the Boats w. Jim Weber
    Apr 30 2026
    Host Justin McMenamy and Jim Weber continue their conversation on fostering a culture of innovation including methods of preventing it from being killed by pessimism and process.

    This episode covers innovation’s overlap with creativity and art, and how nearly every company markets themselves as innovative, sometimes despite objective evidence to the contrary.

    Justin introduces the “Trellis and Vine” analogy: provide enough structure to support creativity without choking it; warning that well intended leaders can smother innovation through noble pursuits of synergy, globalization, metrics culture, governance, and project rationalization.

    They emphasize a willingness to self-disruption, R&D to customer proximity, market competitors managed as “worthy rivals”, project pipeline prioritization, and competitive prototyping as key ingredients to a company hoping to curate a culture of innovation.
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    54 mins
  • Serial Entreprenourship w. Danny Kirk

    Serial Entreprenourship w. Danny Kirk
    Apr 16 2026
    Host Justin McMenamy interviews entrepreneur and marketer Danny Kirk. The conversation spans topics like defining failure and success, the place for pessimism in business, and leadership lessons drawn from the great philosopher Shaquille O’Neal.

    Kirk shares his unconventional background, raised by academics and musicians, a high-achieving classical trumpet player who dropped out of high school, and his entry into entrepreneurship through a scholarship and a startup weekend that led to his first company.

    Over the last 15 years, Danny has started 5 revenue-generating businesses, pursues 100–200 ideas annually quickly invalidating most of them, and discusses his latest business in GEO (generative engine optimization) for AI.

    Kirk recounts being forced out of a gym business, selling a SaaS venture for scraps due to technical debt and infighting, discusses quit-vs-grit, and the needed priority which should be placed on unit economics within any startup. He explains his marketing approach for small businesses, focus where the “tribe” is, avoid vanity metrics, prioritize revenue, and build trust by disqualifying prospects.

    The conversation also covers Kirk’s recent battle with anxiety following a login prompt attack on his business along with the need for routine to keep him grounded. Justin reflects on experiences navigating stressful times of life, redefining security and success, and protecting health and relationships as life complexity grows.
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    1 hr
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