In Memoriam

Dr. A. Gregory Stone was a professor in the School of Business & Leadership and served as the director of the MBA. Joining the Regent faculty in 1995, his primary research areas were servant leadership and exploring the use of entrepreneurship as an economic development tool to remove people with disabilities from welfare. Through a grant funded by the Coleman Foundation, he developed the first website designed to encourage and support people with disabilities in their exploration of entrepreneurship as a career alternative.

Stone was recruited to the California Lutheran University School of Business in 1988. He was the “Entrepreneur in Residence” and chair of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Global Trade Center. He authored a two-year $170,000 Business and International Education Program grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education. In 1990, he led the first Trade Mission ever undertaken by a university to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore, with his students representing five U.S. companies and their products.

He was responsible for designing, developing and implementing the first formal marketing department at Cardservice International, Inc., a fast-growing, privately-held credit card transaction processing company in Agoura Hills, California. As marketing director, he managed the corporate racing program involvement in the NASCAR Featherlite Southwest Tour and was liaison between Cardservice International and the Spangler Racing Team.

Stone consulted with the Tile Institute of America, Joni & Friends (JAF Ministries), Amerigon Incorporated and Monsanto Corporation. He assisted small businesses in the areas of new-business start-ups, business planning, market planning, customer relations and exporting. While living in Thousand Oaks, California, he founded Starfire Foundation, Inc., an innovative nonprofit that provided alternative sentencing job-training programs for persons convicted of alcohol and drug violations. The program provided rehabilitative job training in lieu of serving time in the county jail system or state penal institutions.

Dr. Gary Oster joined the faculty of the School of Business & Leadership (SBL) in the summer of 2007 after more than two years as associate dean for academics in the Regent University School of Undergraduate Studies and a decade in senior administrative roles at William Tyndale College. He had served as a classroom and online instructor since 1994 and served as a professor, director of the M.A. in Business & Design Management, and editor of the Journal of Transformative Innovation.

Prior to his academic endeavors, Oster was an executive in high-technology corporations, both domestically and overseas, focusing primarily upon the computer, electronics and automotive industries.