Blog - The Lively Merchant

Do you believe the world is changing?

I wonder if any of you remember the famous speech from the '87 classic Wall Street? Gekko the super slick stockbroker with the $5,000 suits told us: "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed- for lack of a better word- is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed...

I’m sick of you – really.

Thursday afternoon I mistakenly made a post to our site that was "not ready for primetime." I screwed up. It just so happens the screw up is exactly what I needed to help this post really make the point. You see, we make the assumption that since you understand the...

Every Show Is A Blessing

I never gave any thought to the worldview of Willie Nelson. In fact, his pot-smoking, Jack-Daniels-drinking, hell-raising stories just doesn't line up real well with my life plan. So when friend suggested a couple of years ago I read "The Tao of Willie," I thought it...

Aberration

A point to ponder, from Brian Clark on copyblogger.com: Mass media is a historical aberration. For a short 70-odd years of human history, a relatively small group of people told us what to think and what to buy, and we were expected to passively accept it. That's not...

Something you ortant, something you shuddha

Peter Drucker said the purpose of business "is to create a customer." This is true, but it is only a single layer of the truth. Another layer is described by Ogden Nash in Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man: It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and...

Idiom: [New Year’s] Priorities

Your priorities are what you do PRIOR to everything else. We spend a lot of time evaluating our priorities this time of year, making promises to lose 20 pounds and call our parents more often. Most people would say that their priority is family, or their spiritual...

Who Cares?

Purpose statements have long tasted like stale Saltines filled with things like who founded the company, when it was founded, the company's position as the market leader, its dedication to customer service, who its customers are, and why you should aspire to be just...

Where Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops…

I'm working through a series of questions about purpose. The first one is: "Why do we feel an organization should aspire to make the world a better place?" Making the world a better place seems to be more important now than ever before among all generations. To me,...

Purpose serves as a principle around which to organize our lives.

Have you ever thought about the questions leaders need to ask in order to instill purpose within their companies? This has really been top-of-mind for me lately, because so much is riding on the decisions leaders are making today. It seems as if the margin of error...