Organic customer relationships: old MacDonald had a bank.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Marketing Solutions

People today are involved "in a kind of lostness," in which we destroy the sources of our own lives without knowing what we're doing.... [What's needed is] an ethic that places paramount importance on the cultivation of love and care for one's particular place, its people and its traditional ...

--Wendell Berry

The signs were already emerging. Customers, employees and even shareholders were beginning to view institutions with greater distrust and even contempt. The recent economic meltdown, the attendant demise of several major financial institutions along with shotgun weddings merging into megatrillion financial institutions, and the government bailout will only accelerate the trend.

We revisit of the writings of Wendell Berry and find this prophetic insight: "The computer driven world of high finance has brought the global economy to the brink of catastrophe .. this is what you get when the economic destinies of communities fall into the hands of financers and money men who have no connection to local folks and are not sharers in their fate." Those who see the writing on the wall will find new ways to develop and grow trusted local...