Business of Story
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!
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#587. Parker Howell: How to Use AI as Your Slop-Free Creative Amplifier
<p>Most creatives are terrified of AI.</p> <p>And honestly? That terror makes sense.</p> <p>Sameness. Replacement. Theft.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>But here's what I've come to believe after years of building the Story Cycle System™ and developing what I call Artful Intelligence™:</p> <p>The fear isn't about AI itself.</p> <p>It's about how most people are using it. Like a vending machine. Like a ghostwriter. Like...
#586. Magda Adamska: Four Strategic Traps That Destroy Even Iconic Brands
<p >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.</p> <p>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 it...
#585. Attia Qureshi: How to Negotiate Sales and Marketing Into Telling One Story
<p >Most organizations don't have a brand storytelling problem. They have a negotiation problem.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Attia Qureshi knows how to stop it.</p> <p>A negotiation and influence expert with two decades of experience, At...
#584. Matt Beezley: AI Is Either Ignoring Your Brand or Reinventing it. Here's The Fix
<p>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.</p> <p>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 hi...
#583. Lindsey Busfield: Own Your Niche. Govern Your Story. Win Your Market.
<p >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.</p> <p >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.</p> <p >In this episode of the Business of Story, host Park Howell and Lindsey unpack why niching down is the most...
#582: Gavin McMahon: The Arrow of Coherence That Unifies Your Brand Storytelling
<p>Gavin McMahon: The Arrow of Coherence That Unifies Your Brand Storytelling Business of Story Podcast | Host: Park Howell</p> <p>Most brand stories fragment the moment they leave the marketing department. Gavin McMahon has a name for what stops that — and it may be the most important concept in business storytelling you haven't heard yet.</p> <p>Gavin McMahon is a recovering mechanical engineer, founder of a 25-year leadership and storytelling consultancy, and author of Story Business: Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business. He joins Park Howell on the Business of Story podcast to...
#581: Rain Bennett: Why Your Brand Story Belongs to Operations, Not Marketing
<p>Rain Bennett — award-winning documentary filmmaker and author of The Chief Storytelling Officer — joins Park Howell on the Business of Story to make the case that your brand story doesn't belong to marketing. It belongs to your entire organization. And if no one is governing it, AI is fragmenting it faster than you can fix it.</p> <p>In this episode, Rain introduces his Narrative Operating System (NOS) — a living, governing architecture that threads a single coherent brand story through every department, every touchpoint, and every AI tool you deploy. He explains why the Chief Storytelling Officer is not a commun...
#580. Sharon Toerek: Don't Sell What You Do. Profit from How You Think
<p>Sharon Toerek: Don't Sell What You Do. Profit from How You Think — Libsyn Description</p> <p>Most marketing agencies are unknowingly giving away their most valuable asset — and AI has quietly turned that mistake into a legal emergency.</p> <p>IP attorney Sharon Toerek, founder of Legal+Creative and host of The Innovative Agency podcast, joins Park Howell to reveal the intellectual property and AI legal risks every agency principal needs to understand right now.</p> <p>Sharon is the agency industry's most trusted legal strategist on IP protection, trademark, copyright, and AI governance — and she's seen firsthand how fast a...
#579: Collin Henderson: The 5-Part Mindset Storytelling Method for Confidence
<p >What separates elite performers from everyone else isn't skill, strategy, or preparation. It's psychology.</p> <p>Collin Henderson knows this firsthand. A former Division I wide receiver at Washington State University, seven-time author, and host of the Master Your Mindset podcast, Collin has spent his career cracking the code on peak performance — training number one NBA draft picks, Heisman football finalists, and top sales teams at Nike, Amazon, Salesforce, and Alaska Airlines.</p> <p>His new book, The Oz Method: Psychological Secrets of Influence for Sales, Leadership, and Life (IdeaPress, 2026), delivers a parable-driven framework inspired by L. Frank Baum's cl...
#578: Find Your One Word and Become Impossible to Ignore, With Brian Burkhart
<p >What does it take to stop competing on price and start commanding attention? One word. Your core belief.</p> <p >In this episode of the Business of Story, host Park Howell sits down with Brian Burkhart, founder of Square Planet and one of America's top communication strategists, to reveal why most businesses become invisible commodities — and exactly what to do about it.</p> <p >Brian has spent decades helping Fortune 500 leaders, CEDx speakers, and senior executives find the single galvanizing word that transforms how teams align, how audiences feel, and how brands compete. His insight is simple and powerful: if...
