Start With a New Story
About this episode
Matt Stone discusses the importance of narrative in business and how it can drive growth and change.
On the show built around the line “let their stories power their growth,” Matt closes the week with the clearest case for what that actually means. First, a market signal: British retailer John Lewis is launching Gift List , a YouTube chat show hosted by Angela Scanlon (Louis Theroux is a guest), for a strikingly specific reason — AI has upended search. A year ago just 0.3% of its customers used AI to find products; now it’s about eight times that, and because large language models favor third-party advice and live conversation over brand messaging, the retailer is generating exactly that kind of talkable, conversational content. It’s the split Matt keeps naming: media for humans and media for machines — and conversation feeds both. It’s also, he notes, the premise The Bigger Stage was built on, playing out faster than he expected. Then the heart of it: Sonos. After a 2024 app redesign nearly sank the company, new CEO Tom Conrad’s first diagnosis was, of all things, narrative — Sonos had been behaving like a hardware company. So he changed the story first: we don’t make individual products, we make the Sonos system, hardware and software as one interdependent whole. Only once…
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- Lead the Whole Industry
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- Take Them on a Field Trip
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