Recession? What recession?

Blah...Blah...Blah! I'm covering my ears and making my own noise so I don't hear all that negative stuff going on around me. I've made the conscious decision not to participate in the recession. I'm running and I'm not ready to stop. I'll admit, I've fallen a few times, but like the Chumbawamba song: "I get knocked down, but I get up again. You're never gonna keep me down..."

It is a time of opportunity. Yes, opportunity for new things, creative concepts, thinking outside the box and reconnecting with old values. Stop doing things the same old way and start thinking about new ways to apply new ideas. I've just finished reading a fantastic, eye-opening book entitled: What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis uses Google as an example of a company that took advantage of the new economy... the free economy of the Internet ... and figured out how to turn it into a very profitable business. He suggests that if you take advantage of all the free stuff that's available and then add to it with some free stuff of your own (that is, provide a benefit to others), then you will become part of the new win-win economy.

The concept is more akin to "pay it forward" and it will come back to you in spades. Granted, this is a whole new way of looking at business. The "old school" philosophy was not to give stuff away for free, but rather keep what you have a big secret until someone was willing to pay for it. This worked with most things from software to encyclopedias. But now, we have evolved to open source software and Wikipedia. Today, no one cares about your secrets because everyone can get everything they could ever want, and more, on the Internet, cable, YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Myspace.

Forget the recession... there isn't one. There is only a new way of doing business. Either figure it out and join the trend, or sit on the sidelines and wait for the so-called recession to be over.