Mark Granovetter's book, Getting a Job (1995), revolutionized how I saw the value of the people I've met casually. (Warning--the book is a sociological analysis, not a how-to guide). I was going to post a quote from the book, but then I found this wonderful speech given in the midst of our current unemployment agony.
The American Academy of Political and Social Science Blog: Mark Granovetter on The Need to Take Social Processes as Seriously as the Economic or Psychological, 2010-Jun-1, by AAPSS Staff
In normal
labor markets, most people find jobs through personal contacts, and if
you get skills and you get psychological counseling but you do not get
connections to employers then you are still disadvantaged compared to
those who are connected to the people in employing companies.
The
solution obviously is to develop programs where some personnel are
responsible for creating network connections to employers, gaining
their trust, and brokering connections to their firms for clients they
can vouch for because they actually know them. But this does not happen
very often and one of the reasons is that training has often been
identified as the province of clinical psychologists, whose conception
of professional identity precludes the dirty work of traveling to
factories, which are not very pleasant environments compared to the
nice places where they do this training. So, the sociology of
professions helps us see, I think, not only why the policy is misguided
but also how vested interests create resistance to the kinds of changes
we need.