Business of Story

Park Howell, Brand Story Strategist
  • 5.0 (11)
  • Marketing
  • Updated weekly

The Business of Story helps sales and marketing leaders excel through the stories they tell. Hosted by Park Howell, known as The World's Most Industrious Storyteller, this popular weekly show is ranked among the top 10% of downloaded podcasts internationally and is the #1 Business Storytelling Podcast according to Feedspot. #StoryOn!

  1. 1 day ago

    #590: Shift Left: Jason Stolarczyk on Governing Your Brand Story Before AI Amplifies the Chaos

    Most organizations let product, sales, and marketing each tell their own version of the brand story. In the AI era, that fragmentation doesn't stay quiet — it gets amplified at machine speed before anyone in leadership notices the drift. Jason Stolarczyk spent more than 20 years building the narrative infrastructure behind some of the biggest stories in enterprise technology. From Microsoft and IBM to VMware, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto Networks, his integrated programs have generated millions in market reach and billions in pipeline — and inspired him to create Interpretation Friction™, a framework for fixing the gap where what a company believes, sells, and publishes stop matching. In this conversation with Business of Story host Park Howell, Jason reveals why shifting left — stepping back before a single piece of content goes to market — is the most important discipline communications leaders can build in the AI era. He shares how ServiceNow proved that every $1 in upper funnel storytelling returned $90 in brand value, how Palo Alto Networks was positioned as the confidence infrastructure of the AI era, and why the VMware/Onion campaign — brilliant creative, no governing alignment — became the definition of empty calorie work. What you'll discover in this episode: • What shifting left means in communications strategy — and why one step back is worth two steps forward • How Jason's Interpretation Friction™ framework diagnoses the gap between what your company believes, sells, and publishes • Why narrative entropy is the default state — not the exception — and what WeWork's collapse proves about story governance • The $1-to-$90 brand value formula from ServiceNow and the operational system that made it possible • Why AI is not an architect — and what "slop" costs your brand when no governing story is in place • The three questions every brand must answer before any story goes to market • What the narrative qualified lead is and why it shortens sales cycles Connect with Jason Stolarczyk on LinkedIn. Read his article: "The Executive the Interpretation Era Was Always Going to Need." Grade your brand story free at storycyclegenie.ai/brand-story-grader. Find full show notes, transcript, and resources at businessofstory.com/podcast/brand-story-governance-ai-narrative-entropy. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

    #590: Shift Left: Jason Stolarczyk on Governing Your Brand Story Before AI Amplifies the Chaos

  2. 12 Oct

    #589. Tara Shuler Reveals How Speaking in Questions Slays the Invisible Monster Killing Your Sales

    Tara Shuler Reveals How Speaking in Questions Slays the Invisible Monster Killing Your Sales Most salespeople believe objections are the problem. Sales trainer and convo control expert Tara Shuler says they are wrong. In this episode of the Business of Story podcast, host Park Howell sits down with Tara Shuler — high-ticket closer, corporate sales trainer, and author of Questions Close Deals — to reveal why your objections are a symptom of poor discovery, and how speaking entirely in questions transforms every sales conversation, difficult family negotiation, and leadership challenge you face. What is speaking in questions in sales? Speaking in questions is a trained sales methodology in which every response — including objections — is met with a redirecting question rather than a statement or pitch. Tara Shuler has practiced and drilled this technique for 15 years across high-ticket software sales, corporate training, and one-on-one coaching. The result: salespeople who guide buyers to their own decisions rather than pushing them toward a close. What you will learn in this episode: Why your sales objections are almost always a symptom of skipping proper discovery — and how to fix the beginning of your conversation, not the end How speaking in questions eliminates the need for objection handling by uncovering the emotional why behind every buyer decision before the pitch ever starts How to practice the question-first method starting tonight — with your spouse, your kids, and your colleagues — without telling them you are practicing Why sales pressure causes trained salespeople to abandon every technique they know — and how Tara's gymnastics muscle memory framework builds the instinct to ask under fire How Tara used sales questioning skills to convince her reluctant mother to move from Pennsylvania to Florida — and what that story teaches every leader about emotional discovery Why generic AI will flatten your brand story — and why purpose-built tools like the StoryCycle Genie® deliver the narrative clarity no general platform can match The episode's core insight: "You're trying to figure out what their why is, and that's where the questions come into play. And then the arguments don't happen later because now you understand what you're fighting against. Because it's an invisible monster until you understand it." — Tara Shuler (00:12:28) About Tara Shuler: Tara Shuler is the founder of Convo Control, a sales training and coaching practice built on one foundational skill: speaking in questions. A competitive Level 9 gymnast turned high-ticket closer, Tara has spent 15 years closing large-ticket corporate software contracts, training sales teams, and coaching individuals to get out of their own way through disciplined question-based discovery. She is the author of three books — Questions Close Deals, Parenting a Parent, and Everything Is Sales — and the creator of the Convo Dojo, a live training format that puts salespeople under pressure so their muscle memory can do what their nervous brain cannot. Find Tara at convocontrol.com. Resources mentioned in this episode: Questions Close Deals by Tara Shuler — available on Amazon and in audiobook at convocontrol.com Parenting a Parent by Tara Shuler — available on Amazon Everything Is Sales by Tara Shuler — available on Amazon The StoryCycle Genie® Brand Story Grader — free brand assessment at storycycle.ai About the Business of Story: The Business of Story is hosted by Park Howell, founder of Business of Story and creator of the Story Cycle System™ — the narrative infrastructure framework used by leaders, agencies, and brands to instill their conviction in their people and install it in their organization. New episodes publish weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Connect with Park Howell: Website: businessofstory.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/parkhowell StoryCycle Genie®: storycycle.ai

    #589. Tara Shuler Reveals How Speaking in Questions Slays the Invisible Monster Killing Your Sales

  3. 5 Oct

    #588. Sean Schroeder: The False Summit Every Brand Builder Climbs

    You want your brand story to drive real business results — define it, refine it, get every soul behind it — and you will create a competitive advantage nobody can take from you. But getting to your brand story is not the victory. It's the false summit. Host Park Howell sits down with Sean Schroeder — co-creator of the StoryCycle Genie® and architect of the Cognitive Mesh Architecture — to tell the origin story of a platform built to solve the real Everest of brand storytelling: operationalizing your brand story across every department, channel, and team member before narrative entropy destroys it. What is narrative entropy? It's what happens when every SDR, salesperson, and department head starts writing from their own lived experience — telling their version of the brand story rather than what it actually is at the nexus. Without disciplined governance, your story doesn't hold. It decays. What is StoryOps™? It's brand story governance applied everywhere — HR onboarding, customer service, DevOps, FinOps, project management — not just marketing. Brand strategy is a business communications discipline, and it needs to show up in every single slice of the organization. What is Cognitive Mesh Architecture? It's the system that captures professional intelligence, decision-making lineage, and human judgment as content is created — giving every AI-generated brand asset full provenance so your brand voice compounds instead of drifts. Combined with Brightsy's MCP server, it delivers your brand narrative to every team member through the tools they already use. What is the StoryCycle Genie®? It's the AI platform that compresses months of brand story creation and operationalization into weeks — for a fraction of the cost of traditional brand agencies. Ready to see where your brand story stands? Go to storycyclegenie.ai, enter your URL, and get a free 14-point Brand Story Assessment in under a minute.

    #588. Sean Schroeder: The False Summit Every Brand Builder Climbs

  4. 28 Sept

    #587. Parker Howell: How to Use AI as Your Slop-Free Creative Amplifier

    Most creatives are terrified of AI. And honestly? That terror makes sense. Sameness. Replacement. Theft. Those three fears have colonized the creative internet. And they're not entirely wrong. Bad AI use produces a gray paste of mediocrity. It steamrolls voice. It scrapes without permission. But here's what I've come to believe after years of building the Story Cycle System™ and developing what I call Artful Intelligence™: The fear isn't about AI itself. It's about how most people are using it. Like a vending machine. Like a ghostwriter. Like a replacement for thinking. That's not intelligence. Artificial or otherwise. The creatives who are thriving right now aren't using AI instead of their genius. They're encoding their genius into AI and firing it at scale. There's a difference so profound it changes everything. You've spent years building deep expertise. You have frameworks. Hard-won instincts. A distinctive voice that took real living to develop. You want to scale your creative output without losing what makes it yours. But AI feels like a trap. The outputs look generic. You're afraid that leaning in means becoming a content machine producing work even you won't recognize as your own. There's a third path. One that treats AI not as a replacement or a crutch — but as your 100x creative amplifier. I know this because our son Parker Howell has been living it. Parker is the founder of Howell XR — XR filmmaker, VR game developer, fire dancer, jiu-jitsu practitioner, Reiki healer, hospice volunteer. In the last 18 months he: → Built Monkey Tower VR in 9 months with 2 people → Won $50,000 in a Meta hackathon in 30 days → Built the Tunorama AI photo booth in 48 hours for $40 → Took SkateBoss from concept to prototype in 24 hours That's not hype. That's what happens when someone stops treating AI as a productivity hack and starts treating it as an extension of their own creative intelligence. Parker said something I keep coming back to: "It's your editor, packed with all of your genius, that can fire a billion times a second." Not a generic editor. Not someone else's genius. Yours. Your patterns. Your frameworks. Your voice. Your decade of taste — baked into a system that never sleeps and never runs out of bandwidth. That's not sameness. That's a creative superpower only you can build. He also said something that stopped me cold: "I feel like I unwittingly have designed my entire career for this moment in time." A filmmaker who moved between disciplines without apology. A developer who didn't wait for permission to start building in VR. A creative who treated every seemingly unrelated skill as preparation for a future nobody had mapped yet. That's the Artful Intelligence mindset. And to anyone still sitting on the sidelines? Parker was direct: "Just go make some slop. Don't show it to anyone. But just play with it." No judgment. No stakes. Just play. Because the fear of producing slop is keeping more talented people from their own creative abundance than any shortcoming in the technology. The question isn't "will AI replace me?" It's "how do I encode what I know into something that compounds?" The creatives who answer that question — who train AI on their irreplaceable expertise — are building something that genuinely can't be commoditized. Because it's them. If you're a creative who wants to think bigger than you've ever thought, this episode is for you. If you're an expert who wants to encode your genius into something scalable, this episode is for you. If you've been afraid that embracing AI means losing yourself — this one is especially for you. 🎧 Listen and watch — link in the first comment. #ArtfulIntelligence #BusinessOfStory #100xCreator #AICreativeAmplifier #StoryCycleSystem

    #587. Parker Howell: How to Use AI as Your Slop-Free Creative Amplifier

  5. 21 Sept

    #586. Magda Adamska: Four Strategic Traps That Destroy Even Iconic Brands

    What kills iconic brands like MTV, Nike, Blockbuster, and GoPro? Not bad marketing. Not weak products. But four specific strategic traps that fragment brand story governance — and silently destroy enterprise value from the inside out. Brand strategist and BrandStruck founder Magda Adamska joins Park Howell on the Business of Story to reveal the four strategic traps that cause even the world's most powerful brands to collapse: the Comfort Trap, the Efficiency Trap, Over-Expansion, and Growth-at-All-Costs. Drawing from 250-plus brand strategy case studies spanning nearly 50 countries, Magda shows exactly how narrative entropy sets in when brand story loses its governance — and how AI accelerates the damage at light speed. In this episode you will learn: Why MTV had everything Spotify needed — and still failed to act How Nike's pandemic data trap triggered a brand crisis still unfolding today Why GoPro's move into media nearly destroyed the company How a governed brand story acts as the one strategic guardrail that protects against all four traps Magda Adamska is an independent brand consultant with over 20 years guiding C-suite executives through brand transformations and portfolio optimizations for MTV, Pearson, Nike, Nestlé, JP Morgan, Procter & Gamble, and Guinness World Records. If you lead a brand, market one, or build them for clients, this episode is essential listening. Visit brandstruck.co to explore 250-plus brand strategy case studies including free access to Nike, Lego, and IKEA.

    #586. Magda Adamska: Four Strategic Traps That Destroy Even Iconic Brands

  6. 14 Sept

    #585. Attia Qureshi: How to Negotiate Sales and Marketing Into Telling One Story

    Most organizations don't have a brand storytelling problem. They have a negotiation problem. When sales, marketing, and IT each champion their own version of the company story, the result is narrative entropy — the slow fragmentation of your brand message across every channel, every team, and every customer touchpoint. And in the age of AI-powered search, that fragmentation doesn't just confuse your audience. It gets scraped, amplified, and fed back into the market as your brand identity. Attia Qureshi knows how to stop it. A negotiation and influence expert with two decades of experience, Attia has brokered agreements in Fortune 500 boardrooms, university classrooms, and conflict zones around the world — including negotiating with cartel-controlled farmers on behalf of the U.S. State Department in Colombia. She is a former MIT faculty member, adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, founder of Attia Qureshi Consulting, and author of the national bestseller Never Settle: Persuasion and Negotiation Skills to Get What You Want, which Daniel Pink calls a book that will "train you how to move through the world." In this episode of the Business of Story, Park Howell and Attia explore how relational, interest-based negotiation is the missing discipline inside StoryOps — the practice of developing, operationalizing, and governing your brand narrative across every department in your organization. In this episode you will learn: Why sales and marketing fight over brand story — and the negotiation framework that ends it How to map the interests of every internal stakeholder so you can build genuine cross-departmental buy-in around one sovereign brand narrative Why narrative entropy accelerates in the age of AI — and how StoryOps, powered by negotiation, is your best defense Resources mentioned in this episode: Attia Qureshi Consulting: atiaqureshi.com Never Settle by Attia Qureshi and John Richardson — available at all major retailers Free internal influence guide: atiaqureshi.com/story Business of Story Brand Story Genie™: businessofstory.com

    #585. Attia Qureshi: How to Negotiate Sales and Marketing Into Telling One Story

  7. 7 Sept

    #584. Matt Beezley: AI Is Either Ignoring Your Brand or Reinventing it. Here's The Fix

    Your brand is being described right now on platforms you don't control — and AI is assembling those fragments into a story you'd never tell about yourself. Matt Beezley, Senior Strategist at Red Fan Communications and creator of the Brand Authority Index, calls it narrative entropy. And in this episode of the Business of Story, he explains exactly why it's the defining brand challenge of the AI search era. Matt has spent more than a decade helping B2B companies across fintech, insurtech, sustainable technology, education, and supply chain find the story that holds through IPOs, acquisitions, and high-stakes go-to-market moments. He built Red Fan's brand positioning methodology from scratch — and then built the Brand Authority Index, a diagnostic tool that quantifies the signals large language models actually use to evaluate, cite, and recommend brands to potential buyers. What those signals reveal should concern every brand marketer: over 80% of AI citations come from earned media, not your website. Query-based rankings barely correlate with what AI actually says about you. And if your brand is described differently on your website, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Google Knowledge Base, AI will either ignore you entirely or invent a Frankenstein version of your brand and serve it to buyers at the exact moment they're making a decision. In this conversation, Park Howell and Matt unpack the concept of entity coherence — messaging consistency across every platform where your brand exists — and why it's the single highest-leverage fix available to brand communicators right now. They explore why gated content is killing your AI citation rate, how the prism model helps one core story speak to 25 different B2B buying stakeholders without fragmenting, and why the brands winning in generative engine optimization are doing the same things great marketers have always done — just doing them with discipline and consistency. You will learn why AI detects and discounts AI-generated content, how a three-question monthly sales feedback loop starts closing the narrative entropy gap immediately, and why training AI on your own proprietary data produces results that are, in Matt's words, "light years better" than anything pumped out from a generic prompt. If your brand is invisible in AI search — or worse, misrepresented — this episode is your diagnostic and your roadmap. Connect with Matt Beezley and Red Fan Communications at redfancommunications.com and explore their Brand Authority Index diagnostic. Find Park Howell and the StoryCycle Genie™ at businessofstory.com, and subscribe to Park's Brand StoryOps™ for Agencies newsletter on LinkedIn.

    #584. Matt Beezley: AI Is Either Ignoring Your Brand or Reinventing it. Here's The Fix

  8. 31 Aug

    #583. Lindsey Busfield: Own Your Niche. Govern Your Story. Win Your Market.

    What separates the brands that dominate their category from those that disappear into digital noise? Two things: a ruthlessly focused niche and a brand story governed with such precision that your ideal client finds no other logical answer. Lindsey Busfield, co-founder of Optimize My Firm, built the nation's most recognized SEO agency for personal injury attorneys by doing exactly that — going so narrow, so deep, and so disciplined in her StoryOps™ that competitors simply can't follow. In this episode of the Business of Story, host Park Howell and Lindsey unpack why niching down is the most powerful brand strategy available to any business, how governing your story with clarity, consistency, and coherence makes you the category king or queen of your market, and why AI-driven search now rewards exactly this kind of high-fidelity storytelling. You'll discover: Why casting a wide net produces shallow results — and how radical niche focus turns your brand into the signal, not the noise How personal injury lawyers use story to win cases — and what every business can steal from that approach to govern their brand narrative How to build your digital footprint across SEO, AEO, and GEO so that Google, Perplexity, and every AI search engine serves you up as the definitive answer in your market Lindsey is also host of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute podcast and author of How Personal Injury Lawyers Get Leads: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why — available now on Amazon. Connect with Lindsey Busfield: Website: optimizemyfirm.com Email: lindsey@optimizemyfirm.com LinkedIn: Lindsey Busfield Learn more about the Business of Story and StoryOps™: storycyclegenie.ai

    #583. Lindsey Busfield: Own Your Niche. Govern Your Story. Win Your Market.
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5
out of 5
11 Ratings

About

The Business of Story helps sales and marketing leaders excel through the stories they tell. Hosted by Park Howell, known as The World's Most Industrious Storyteller, this popular weekly show is ranked among the top 10% of downloaded podcasts internationally and is the #1 Business Storytelling Podcast according to Feedspot. #StoryOn!

Information

  • Creator
    Park Howell, Brand Story Strategist
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2026
  • Episodes
    591
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Park&Co Marketing Communications, Inc. All rights reserved, 2016.
  • Show Website
    Business of Story

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