Today we’d like to introduce you to Greg Stone.
Greg, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I began my career as a writer at Time Inc. in New York, then moved onto the airwaves as a TV reporter in Minneapolis, Boston and on PBS. Always taking the path of greatest resistance (a formula for success, if ever there were one), I turned down job offers to report and anchor at CNN and the Nightly Business Report because I wanted to launch my own venture. At the time, I wasn’t sure if this was a brave or foolish move!
Thus Stone Communications was born, with ample ambition and few customers. In the beginning, I was just doing commercial video production for hire, then clients started asking me to help executives hone their skills in media interviews. Demand for those services grew as more and more companies sought advice in other areas as well such as presentation skills and message development. Today I offer a broad spectrum of strategic counseling, with a focus on storytelling and marketing.
Has it been a smooth road?
Business is always full of surprises. After all, one of the most fascinating eras in history was the Renaissance, right? Why? Because it literally means rebirth.
For instance, video has become a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) medium with companies shooting “homespun” (read “amateurish”) stuff with iPhones and crackly audio. Meanwhile, budgets have shrunk. So be it. I believe it’s rarely feasible these days to be a commercial producer so I have largely moved away from that area.
Media consulting has also changed since there are fewer and fewer reporters due to the shrinkage in the journalism business. As a result my consulting practice has broadened to include more presentation training, message development and strategic marketing advice.
I welcome change! It keeps me fresh and agile. Fighting market trends is about as futile as swimming against a riptide. The trick is to move sideways.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Stone Communications story. Tell us more about the business.
I am a “creative” who’s not afraid of numbers — an “artist” who happens to have a business degree from Columbia. I have an extensive background as a journalist and filmmaker, and I wrote the book Artful Business: 50 Lessons from Creative Geniuses. It offers a toolkit of tips for thinking managers seeking to spark new ideas. The format features thought prompts and sumptuous pictures on facing pages.
My new book, Branding with Powerful Stories: The Villains, Victims, Heroes Model, will be published in early 2019 by Praeger. It is built on the foundation of a seminal article I wrote for Harvard Business Review on the essential role that villains play in stories. As Alfred Hitchcock said, great scoundrels make great movies. In business, however, the “bad guys” are not necessarily animate. The customers are essentially the “victims,” and the “villains” are any obstacles that cause pain, frustration or expense in their lives. The products and services that combat or neutralize these problems become “heroes.” The book explores this model in great detail and shows executives how to tell compelling and colorful stories.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I wish I knew what the “next big thing” was going to be in media and technology. I suspect that there will be growing consolidation in journalism and that entertainment will be increasingly available in the home due to the “convergence” of various media and the vast improvements in television and audio equipment. Given the plethora of communication venues and the explosion in publishing (with at least 340,000 new books appearing a year in the US alone), however, it is harder and harder to cut through this clutter.
Even so, good stories resonate. Incisive analysis captivates. I’d like to believe that each person in this world has ideas and experiences that the rest of us would value. The challenge is learning how to tap into that expertise.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.gregstone.com
- Phone: 617-489-5400
- Email: greg@gregstone.com
- Twitter: @stoneidea
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stonegreg/
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