Behind the Conversation: Higher Ed Icons Episode #1 with Michael Stoner
Our first podcast episode for Higher Ed Icons, The Fundamentals Are Still the Fundamentals, dropped yesterday, 7 April 2026. Our inaugural guest, Michael Stoner, my long-time business partner and friend.
The Backstory
Michael hired me as his web producer when he was the vice president of new media at Lipman Hearne, back in 2001. Nine months later, he walked into my office to tell me that he was planning to leave. I was just finishing my MBA at the time and decided that then was a good a time as any to take my chances in the job market, so I told him I’d walk out the door with him. Rob Cima, the owner of Global Image, the outfit to which we outsourced all of our development work, offered to be our angel investor. Pourquoi pas? We plunged in together and founded mStoner together. Over more than 20 years, we did what many small businesses never accomplish: we grew, we thrived, we built a name for ourselves in our industry, and — when the time was finally right — we sold our business to Carnegie and brought our team into a much larger agency that was on the move.
Michael’s Superpower
Well, at least one of them. ;) One of the things that has always impressed me about Michael is his quiet and powerful ability to identify “the next big thing” before anyone else. He led the first national practice in new media for higher education. He spotted the need for higher ed institutions to employ content management systems and put me in charge of what I believe was the first CMS-driven website launch in the country for a college. He edited “Social Works” and “Follow the Leader,” the two books that mStoner published on the use of social media in higher education. Time and time again, he zeroed in on important inflection points in our industry. As Mallory said, “He just kept being right.”
What I Learned From This Talk
I stepped away from web work a few years ago. After more than two decades as a web consultant at mStoner, I moved into a creative leadership role at Carnegie. For the first time in a long time, the web wasn't my daily focus. When I returned to it — this time as an executive consultant blending brand, creative, and web strategy — I expected the landscape to look different. It does, in the ways you'd expect. The tools are better. The platforms have multiplied. And AI is reshaping the conversation in real time.
But Michael reminded me that the fundamentals haven't changed. Strategy. Content strategy. Governance. Accessibility. User-centered design. These were the things we were trying to get right 25 years ago, and they're still the things institutions struggle with today. The vocabulary has changed. The org charts have grown and shrunk. But the core challenges are stubbornly, almost maddeningly, the same.
Michael named this in the interview without even trying. When Mallory asked him what he'd tell a VP of marketing today, he didn't reach for something flashy. He talked about identifying goals, understanding the awareness gap, and figuring out how to close it. Fundamentals. And then he said something that's been rattling around in my head ever since. People can be eager to focus on the bright shiny object, but strategy must always come before tactics and tools.
That's not a new insight. But hearing it from someone who has been right about the next big thing more often than anyone I know — that gives it weight. Michael didn't stay ahead of the curve by chasing trends. He stayed ahead by being a little skeptical. He asked hard questions before he placed his bets. He didn't build Second Life campuses. He didn't chase every emerging platform. He watched, he waited, and when he moved, he moved with conviction because his instinct and insight told him it was time.
I think that's the thing I'm going to carry with me from this conversation. Not a prediction about what's next — Michael would be the first to tell you he'd need to learn a lot more before offering one. But a reminder that the discipline of returning to foundational principles is what separates the people who get it right from the people who just get lucky. And that after 25 years, the fundamentals are still the fundamentals.
P.S. Buy me a drink, and I’ll tell you the backstory of how Michael originally hired me “in spite of …”