Book excerpt: An examination of the society-wide relationship crisis that threatens us all--and a strategic look at how we can reverse it -- It is the crisis that everyone feels but that has gone unnamed. We see the pieces: families disintegrating; communities in chaos; businesses losing the trust of customers and employees; political and religious discourse that sows dysfunction and divide. Yet until now, no one has connected the dots that reveal the larger narrative. Our broken relationships have a death grip on economic, political, and social advancements that capitalism, democracy, social programs, and tax policy have been unable to break. Cumulatively this crisis feeds an emerging caste system: Individuals and organizations that possess superior relationships have, while those with deteriorating relationships are destined to have not. In This Land of Strangers, Robert Hall lays the crisis bare, and you will be shocked at the magnitude of destruction he reveals. Hall's best-selling business book, The Streetcorner Strategy for Winning Local Markets, helped spawn the customer relationship management movement. Now, with deep passion and insight borne from three decades of study, he widens the lens to look at the breadth of our relational decline and the societal trends that got us here. Focusing on four key domains--home, work, politics, and faith--he presents wide-ranging research that explores the unraveling of our life-giving relationships and the attendant costs. He debunks the assumption that we can build better lives and a stronger society on crumbling relationships. With engaging narrative style and stories, Hall looks at modern life through the prism of relationships. He challenges readers to embrace three aims that will reverse the forces that gave birth to today's land of strangers to usher in a new era--the Age of Relationship.