A very good friend of mine is out of work. He has been seeking a job for about 5 months (note:  I am writing this blog entry with his permission).

The process, as you might expect, is difficult, sometimes humiliating and frustrating.  And yet, my friend “soldiers on” treating his job search as a business to which he devotes 5 or 6 10-hour days a week.

Needless to say I hope my friend finds a job quickly. He is doing all the right things. It is just that he is fighting a very difficult economy.

This economy is causing us all to sit up and take stock. Some of us work for employers.  Others of us work for customers or clients. Still others for investors. But, no matter who we work for, we need to be sure that we are always adding significant value to our “bosses.”

It has never been enough to just provide adequate products or service, and yet during the boom times some of us got complacent. Now we are all paying attention in ways that we should have been for years.

What’s more, we have a right to expect more from our vendors – those who provide products and services to us. It is no longer sufficient to be “good enough.” I want my vendors to work hard for my money, as my clients (rightly) expect me to work for theirs.

Someday soon my friend will find a job and I will be the first to celebrate with him. As I have met with him over these last four months, I have experienced his pain of wanting to work – and work hard – but having no opportunity or forum in which to do so. He has two young children and the search is taking a toll on him.

What I also take from his experience is that we need to help each other in every way we can. I have been networking a little bit for him and I am going to do more. There are many innocent victims out there right now – people who got caught up in a storm that was not of their making. People who were doing a good job for a company that had to cut back to stay solvent. No villains here, just victims.

I will be doubling my efforts to provide good value to whoever I am working for … and to help others caught in the storm. If we all do that, then perhaps it will be at least a decade or two before we are back into this kind of economic malaise again.

Jim Randel is the founder of The Skinny On book series.  His first book, The Skinny on the Housing Crisis, just won first prize in a book competition sponsored by an organization of 650 journalists.