Be creative and look for good deals. Ask for discounts and measure your results. Explain your needs and your reality and work with your vendors to get deals that are fair for everyone. Stay calm and remember your vendors are probably as overwhelmed and challenged right now as you are.

Finally, be kind to other people. After the last few weeks, everyone's a bit on edge and some people may lash out. Just be nice. It'll help everything run more smoothly, it'll help you feel better about yourself, and it may help you get what you want more easily.

When it comes to the economy, we're all in this together, for real -- whether you live in the United States or somewhere over the pond. This is an ecosystem as much as it's an economy. The buying and selling we all do fuels everything around us. And it's that flow of money that keeps trucks on the road delivering produce, planes in the air delivering us to meetings and conferences, cars on the road taking little Jimmy to soccer practice, and you and me in our homes, sleeping soundly.

Hang in there, folks. We're a pretty resourceful people and it could have been a lot worse. I think we've dodged a bullet.

One warning, before I go, for the next boom time: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

P.S. While The Flexible Enterprise is out of print, I'm working on a nextgen version of the book to be called The New Flexible Enterprise, which should be out some time next spring.