Welcome To Shrinkonia. : About.

Now is the time to work on your “bounce back”. It is time to work on personal resilience. Whatever your take is on the current economic climate, we can all agree: times are changing.

And we all know … (right?) … the secret to coping with change is: MIND + NETWORK!

“The resilience from every individual is a combination of his mind and his social networks. The mind provides the lenses to which reality can be perceived, and the network provides information and social constructs that feed and shape the mind.”

In this post I will provide a simple sample of what this means, how this can work (it is a question I frequently get). I will use my favorite subjects: me and this blog .

I am currently blogging for about 18 months. I’ve been writing my book between 2001 and 2005… so I can seriously say that I have been working on my “mind”. (yep… and lost it several times – hmmm, sounds like a new series of posts: “narcissistic Monday” )

The site attracts daily 1500 new interested visitors and the blog has 22.000 subscribers. And that is just my virtual network!

I am not telling this because I love looking in the mirror… it is an illustration of how the formula of MIND + NETWORK applies to me. It is an example of what I am writing about.

And now, what do you do with the network?

The power of the network is amazing. The network can achieve so much more than I could ever achieve on my own. So we need something to work on, a purpose for the crowd. But why should people want to work on my project?

“Because you have a project that is life changing, that is worth their effort. Because you provide an awesome creative and inspiring environment. You provide leadership that inspires people to rise to the occasion, to become larger than themselves. You give trust, and you can be trusted.

A few weeks ago I called this working environment a Project Tribe:

The central element of a tribe is the leader and the idea, the goal. You need a leader who can inspire, one that can present Big Audacious Goals that seem to rock the world. Your project needs Al Gore, your project needs goals like “Save The Planet”. That’s why people join the gang. That’s why people want to be part of it .

The leader will set some rules of interaction. The leader will keep efforts aligned. Within this context the teams get self-organized and the Big Hairy Audacious Goal makes sure it’s all in the right direction.”

Yeah, yeah… I will be working on my engaging leadership skills… I didn’t say that I was an example for everything! I definitely need working on my Al Gore mojo.

I have the Big Hairy Audacious Goal though: a few weeks ago I posted the new mission for SoftwareProjects.org… (ambitious enough?)

“The mission of SoftwareProjects.org is to make global, virtual and multi cultural software projects work. By this we don’t only mean delivering the proper end result within agreed constraints, but also by running the projects in such a way that they provide a genuine contribution towards a sustainable global society.”

So, what I will be doing the next couple of weeks?

You guessed it … work on my “inspiration” skills and provide means for the Project Shrink Tribe (yeah, that’s you) to get organized around the mission.

And what could you do?

I can only recommend to you to build your MIND + NETWORK.

“Software projects are ideal conditions for using labor from all parts of the world and using technology to let people work together. Even the main output of the endeavor (software) is digital!

If you are trying to get on board a fabulous project team, you are competing with the rest of the world. Why should the project manager pick you? Why should the organization pick you as a PM? Why should they have even heard of you?

“Self promotion, Baby!”

Keep reading and learning. And start working on your network.

Tip: Give Twitter a spin. It is easy to start, and it’s a great way to learn virtual networking. This movie explains how it works.

Of course you can follow me on Twitter.