News and Insights
The Crane Outside My Window
December 17, 2025
Why Business Wisdom Still Travels Best Through Stories
There is a crane outside my window. Actually, there are four. They’re part of an enormous construction site with bridges, walkways, concrete and scaffolding, and what seems like a thousand workers all coordinating to raise a building that will transform this corner of the city in about two years.
Watching this orchestrated chaos, I am suddenly seven years old again, paging through Richard Scarry’s Busytown books. For those who did not grow up with these gorgeous stories, Busytown is a world where everyone has a job that matters. The baker (who happens to be a mouse) makes bread for the town. The builder fox fixes houses. The bear drives trucks. The cat works as a nurse. A beaver teaches all the town’s children. Every character wears “human” work clothes, carries tools, and contributes something essential to the community.
I have not touched a Richard Scarry book in decades, yet I can still picture the baker’s white hat, the builder’s tool belt, and the truck driver’s cap as clearly as if I read those stories yesterday. The pigs driving the fire truck that races through town, the construction site buzzing with activity, the way every job connected to every other job. These images stuck. The stories stayed.
Here is what I cannot remember: How many women work in construction today? How many truck drivers are there in America? How many bakers operate in New York City? These facts, which I have surely encountered, slide right out of my brain. But those Busytown stories? They built something permanent in my memory.
The Ancient Art of Storytelling
This is not a quirk of childhood nostalgia. This is how human brains work.
Long before PowerPoint decks and best practices documents, humans taught through stories. Our ancestors used narrative to explain which plants were safe to eat, how to track animals, and why certain rituals mattered. You could not hand someone a manual on avoiding saber-toothed tigers. You could not email best practices for hunting mammoths. Instead, elders gathered the young around fires and told stories.
“Let me tell you about the time your uncle tried to cross the river at the wrong spot.”
“Here’s what happened when we hunted in the rain.”
Cave paintings were not just art; they were instruction manuals. Hieroglyphics combined pictures with symbols to preserve knowledge for future generations. The oral tradition was not entertainment but education, wrapped in memorable tales that stuck in the mind. These narratives carried crucial information in a form that could be remembered, ensuring our species would not just survive but thrive.
Today, in our business world, we create elaborate onboarding processes and detailed procedure manuals, yet the lessons that really stick still come from stories. “Let me tell you about this one client situation…” carries more weight than a dozen training modules. “Here’s what happened when we tried that approach,” teaches more effectively than any case study.
The Construction Site as Classroom
Watching those construction workers reminded me how much professional learning happens through observation and guided practice. The crane operator signals to the ground crew. The foreman points out adjustments to a younger worker. Everyone has a role, and seasoned hands guide those still learning their craft. The experienced crane operator does not just hand over the controls to a newcomer. There is a process of watching, then trying small tasks under supervision, then gradually taking on more responsibility. Mistakes happen within a safety net of experience.
This scene brought to mind recent conversations about mentorship happening across different corners of our culture. Actor Colman Domingo spoke recently about the responsibility he feels to guide younger actors, particularly young Black men entering the industry. Scott Galloway has been writing extensively about the crisis of connection among young men and the need for older generations to step up as mentors. These voices from entertainment and academia echo something I have been thinking about throughout my career in communications: how do we effectively pass down what we know?
The same dynamic should play out in our industry. Young professionals need to see how senior colleagues handle difficult client conversations, navigate internal politics, recover from mistakes. They need someone to decode the unwritten rules that govern so much of business life. They need stories that illustrate not just what to do, but why it matters.
The Mentorship Gap
What Domingo and Galloway are highlighting goes beyond individual industries. There is a growing disconnect between generations in the workplace. Senior professionals, overwhelmed with their own responsibilities, often lack the time or incentive to mentor. Younger workers, especially those who started their careers during the pandemic, missed out on the organic mentorship that happens when you can pop into someone’s office with a question or grab coffee after a tough client meeting.
This gap has real consequences. Without that guidance, young professionals make preventable mistakes or miss opportunities for growth. Companies lose institutional knowledge when senior employees retire without passing on their insights. The whole ecosystem becomes less resilient.
In a world that seems to value disruption over continuity, we risk losing the thread. Those informal moments where knowledge transfers naturally—the coffee conversation about why that campaign worked, the debrief after a difficult client call, the offhand comment that reframes everything—are becoming rare.
Building Modern Apprenticeships
The construction industry has never abandoned the apprenticeship model, and perhaps that is why the scene outside my window looked so purposeful. Everyone understood their role in the teaching and learning process. In communications and other knowledge industries, we need to reclaim this approach but adapt it for our context.
This does not mean formal mentorship programs, though they have their place. It means creating space for storytelling. It means senior professionals taking time to explain not just the decision they made, but how they thought through the options. It means being transparent about failures and what they taught. And it means recognizing that teaching others is not a distraction from our “real work” but an essential part of building our industry.
We have a responsibility to be intentional about story-sharing. Every senior professional in our field carries a library of these stories. Client victories and disasters. Campaigns that soared—and those that crashed. Moments when intuition trumped data and times when data saved us from intuition. These are not just war stories or office folklore. They are the real curriculum of our profession.
Public relations relies entirely on storytelling, yet we sometimes forget—in our rush to compile data, metrics, deliverables and measurables—that it matters to us, too. Young PR professionals need to hear stories about recovering from public mistakes, handling ethical dilemmas, and knowing when to push back versus when to adapt.
Whether we work with cranes or concepts, concrete or communications, we are always building something, and we are always teaching someone else how to build too.
POSTED BY: Lisa Heathman
