Monkey Business is ready to make your world more fun and yellow!

Book recommendation: Yvon Chouinard – Let my people go surfing, the education of a reluctant businessman

February 8th, 2010

I guess all the monkeys have read this piece of art! I’d say this book is a massive marketing input from Yvon. After reading the story of Patagonia I honestly felt a need of well performing clothes like Capilene underwear and Synchilla fleece that is made out of recyckled plastic bottles.

Behind this manifestation for quality I still knew that Tatu had bought his yellow jacket and hiking shoes from Patagonia store in NY a year ago, and nowadays only the jacket is performing perfectly, shoes went broken soon after the deal was made… And Tatu noticed that none of the clerks in the retail store had read this Patagonia business philosphy book, even if it has been available for 5 years already (published in 2005). So we came up with a conclusion that Yvon has written how he’d like to see his company performing – and the book is a description of a dream company. However this book has inspired all the monkeys to think, live and go surfing when the feeling is right. Thank you for that, Yvon!

The main question in here is: What’s quality in Monkey Business services? What’s the best performance in Monkey Business? Guiding questions for defining this case were found in the product design philosophy of Patagonia.

When doing something, you need to ask yourself: Is It functional?, Is It Multifunctional?, Is It Durable?, Does It Fit Our Customer?, Is It As Simple As Possible?, Is the Product Line Simple?, Is It an Innovation or an Invention?, Is It a Gobal Design?, Is It easy to Care For and Clean?, Does It Have Any Added Value?, Is It Authentic?, Is It Art?, Are we Just Chasing Fashion?, Are We Designing For Our Core Customer?, Have We Done Our Homework?, Is It Timely? (”If everyone thinks you have a good idea you are too late.” – Paul Hawken), Does It Cause Any Unnecessary Harm?

Sure, our business is unmaterial and more close to Service Design than Product Design. Anyway we can think of these questions in relation to our website, offers, user experiences and other key elements in our daily business. It’s important also to think of distribution, like the ease of buying from us, ease of using anything we offer, ease of finding us and getting us to work… Today has been a really enriching day in Monkey office. Johanna was full of energy with a Creative Hub offer that w edo together with Monkey friends Henna Rauhala and Malla Heinistö, Tatu made all the needed decoration in our new nest staring from hanging the hammock and fixing the bar table, and Janne was getting closer and closer to a couple of deals for coaching. Myself I got enthusiasted about one creative expedition and a possible bunch of camps to be organized for vocational school entrepreneurs at my home region in northern Finland.

It seems that the work starts to push us for quality solutions that are As Simple As Possible, Durable, Authentic (which has always been our streght!) and Planned for Our Core Customer.

Rocking it steady and keeping it yellow, Henna Monkey

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Posted in Monkey Business | No Comments »

Monkeys on the road!

February 5th, 2010

” I visited your website and didn´t just get what you do? ” Typical comment from our friends. What do we do? What have been doeing lately? Are we REAL entrepreneurs? How are we making world more fun and yellow?

Every Monday Morning is Monkey Monday. Or sometimes it´s Tuesday. But we need to be in face to face contact to learn, laugh and live. Last week I and Ville hoasted four hours in Lahti University of Applied science. Our hidden plan was to encourage two hundred students towards creative economy and entrepreneurship. But our visible goal was to run the best and most enjoyable schoolday of year 2010. We used stories, dialogue, mental models game and punisher vs. pyromane -exercise. In the end about 90% of students answered YES! So it was “good tennis” from us. Good Job.

Thursday Janne went to coach three days session for start up entrepreneurs in a 1,5 year long process in Central Finland, Laukaa area. And now he is ending a one similar process in Northern Finland, Posio area. Janne is our specialist for long processies. I was working for a day in Helsinkin with Brand Brothers Finland for Tammi publishers. Our task was challenging: “do what feels right”. So we worked as interaction fakirs to make some atmosphere magic…

Henna and Johanna has had several meetings around issue of HUB Jyväskylä in Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Tampere. Henna is fighting hard to save her home region, Iisalmi by entrepreneurship. And aside Henna has closed some related deals. Johanna has found a surprice for us. It´s red? We´ll see it on monday…

Ville the Fox, our geek has been coaching two days in University of Oulu with Zestmark. Aside Ville takes care of our connections to the virtual world. And he is also the brains for Monkey Business with his ideas, precence and jazz. Francis Francis X1, yellow, arrived to our office on Tuesday. And we were really exited. Not a single cup of espresso was made. Cos it was ESE(easy serving espresso) model and we returned it at the same day. The biggest failure of the week. Wednesday we had a deep three hour dialogue with Innovation Professor Antti Hautamäki from University of Jyväskylä. Themes were creative economy and cultures meaning for an area. Results will go to parliaments future forum and we are one example…

So here we go. Again. And again. Something will be remembered and alot forgotten. Take it yellow!

Tantourist.

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Tags: Co-creation, Encourage the heart, Monkey Business, Monkey MCs, Monkey Philosophy
Posted in Friends of Monkey Business, Meeting with cool people, Monkey Business | 1 Comment »

Jonathan Robinson and Monkeys @ Hub Tampere

February 3rd, 2010

Hello helo,

yesterday was a real action day for Hub Jyväskylä and Hub Tampere! Hub Tampere opens next Monday, cool! For that the founder Jonathan Robinson was visiting the spot, and so did we.

Since the morning we had a good speed @ Monkey Business office in Vaajakoski. We’ve had the space for a month and the official housewarming party will be at 26th of Feb. We had our Mondays are for Monkeys dialogue session and then a coach mate Niina Leinonen came to plan the next works with Janne. They went to do it in the sauna upstairs of our nest, because we had just got into the decoration mood and it was rather noisy downstairs. Suddenly we just realized that it’s time to run, otherwise we would lost the chance to meet the people in Tampere! Janne still wanted to go home and change his nice jeans on, and we accepted the delay. (Janne has nice style in jeans)

At 17.55 we arrived to Tampere to the meeting that had started at 17 and was supposed to end at 18. We just popped in and observed a circle of 25 people: students, teachers, WebTV program producer, business coaches and local development centre leaders and reporters. Jukka Siltanen and Elina Ruuskanen, the hosts, welcomed us warmly and invited us for dinner with the core team and Jonathan. Nice and useful talk followed, and we had decided to follow a question-based approach.

We asked ”How can we help you and the Hub, Jonathan?” and the talk started about the Hub community and using the full potential of it. Jonathan told that generally in the Hub they have succeeded to commit the hosts, but not the users for developing the community. We asked could we help in that, for example by organizing aBar Camp for the Hub users globally – that should be explosive!

We also asked is it common in the Hub to have experienced hosts from the existing Hubs to go in the new opening Hubs to help creating the culture and community. It’s not that common, Jonathan said, but would be good to organize. Hub Tampere was already interested.

As Team Academy alumnis having visited plenty of existing Hubs we feel that the sense of community and interaction between the Hubs globally coudl be stronger. Hubs are more professional workspaces than Team Academy for sure, and the users we’ve been talking with normally say that they just need the space and come to use it. In Hub Jyväskylä we are thinking that the space is just a side product – community is the core business. That’s because we believe that the community building brings more business than a building itself. Also the small town case is that getting workspace for cheap is not a problem for anyone, so when creating a Hub we have to think of different ways to highlight the contents of it. Last time in a Hub meeting we did the Blue Ocean Strategy for Hub JKL – maybe it was not objective, but the core idea is worth thinking further. We’ve got to think what features we eliminate, reduce, raise and create grid in Hub Jyväskylä. Desire we share with Hub Tampere is that we’d be able to create a new kind of community Hub model that could be applied well in cities with less than 200 000 inhabitants. Hub movement in Finland now gives a perfect base for experimenting that.

Keeping it yellow,

Henna Monkey

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Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success

February 2nd, 2010

Today we heard from a potential partner that “you should delete your webpage” and get some concrete going on. Also we should get “some more meat around the bone”. Whuh. Heavy stuff. At the same time he cancelled our meeting planned for Thursday morning. Well, we kind of had a feeling that this may be a tricky partnership but still the reaction from him was little surprising.

Anyways, it was about time to hear some negative comments because Tom Peters on his book Project50 says something like this: “Think sometimes if you have pissed off people lately, because if you haven’t, then you are either not working hard enough or not being radical enough.”

And this is what also Jari Parantainen says in his Finnish blog that we need not to be afraid to divide people into two groups because if we get haters then we also got lovers.

Furthermore, practically the same thing from Guy Kawasaki: Do not be afraid to polarize people (point no. 4 in his post about the Art of Innovation).

The third similar minded comment is in this excellent and inspiring TED video by Richard St. John. This is actually what I wanted to share in the beginning. See the video below.

He says that one secret of success is persistence. He says that if we want to succeed we need to persist CRAP – which stands for Critisism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure.

And this is what we say when people ask us about the marketing: Be brave, dare to make marketing that may piss off people. But I have to admit, that when the guy calls you and tells you to delete your website and get some more experience, it doesn’t feel good and kind of it puts me down. Anyways, I am happy to know we got loads of supporters out there and this is probably just one guy, who didn’t get what this Monkey Business is all about, maybe?

Keep it yellow everyone! Peace, Ville

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Tags: Marketing, Monkey Business, Talk, TED, Video
Posted in Books, Marketing, Monkey Business, Video | 1 Comment »

Don’t Eat Yellow Snow! VillaWool Beanies available now

February 1st, 2010

Heyhou All friends of Monkey Business!

Do you remember our Beanie campaign from last year? Even though it was only two that were sold, and the other customer was myself, the beanie got into an English street fashion blog and the brand was also exhibited in NYC later on. Outo wear is doing well and kicking, I think.

We are proud to bring you new beanies to warm your precious heads this year. Sometime ago Janne came to our office smiling and clearly excited about something. He told us that he had found something explosively fantastic from shop yesterday. Well, he didn’t share us directly what is was but the next morning he walked into our office wearing a hat that had big letter writing on it: “Don’t Eat Yellow Snow!”

We were really excited about the new beanie not least because we found out that it was made by VillaWool, a 35-year old family company from Finland. We had been using their other hats for years already. And as the freezing weather doesn’t seem to get much warmer we thought it is time to contact the company for little co-operation. Also the trigger for the contact was that our friend Soren who bought the hat last year told me that his beanie got lost… So Soren et al. here is what Matti from VillaWool says about the hat:

deys (Don’t Eat Yellow Snow) slogan was originally used by the first and only original Helsinki based Ski-Store called SkiSystems somewhere in the early 70s. SkiSystems were our first customers in this beanie business. real tough guys back in the days.

We are proud to say that you can order your own DEYS beanie now. Price is 30€ including Finnish VAT and mailing all over the world. Let us know which color your prefer: white, gray (my favorite) or black (Janne’s beanie is black). You should make the order by tomorrow 12pm in order to catch the first round of orders. If you somehow missed this message do not worry but just make an inquiry for the beanie as we will order couple extra to be sold from our office directly.

Peace, Love and Bananas,

Ville

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Tags: Beanie, Family Business, Marketing, Merchandise, VillaWool
Posted in Cool and Important, Friends of Monkey Business, Monkey Business, Products | No Comments »

MonkeyTV online now in Qik and Youtube!

January 25th, 2010

MonkeyTV now online here in https://qik.com/monkeybusiness!

As part of our Social Media strategy – “you have to give chance an opportunity” again inspired by Matti Nykänen and made famous by E.Saarinen – we have started a MonkeyTV. It’s an online TV Channel that will have for example monkeying around, short interviews, book reviews, live reporting from events and parties and so on what ever we find fresh and worthy being online. We have been online for a month or so, but until now I wasn’t sure if we had got the real essence of the MonkeyTV recorded. But here we are, ladies and gentlemen, see the video below!

You will know us from the following logo:

It is drawn by Pernan Goni, an illustrator and inspiring entrepreneur from Bilbao. He’s got a blog, too. I met him over in Bilbao last October and I am very happy he promised to co-operate with us for the MonkeyTV and also in future. Moreover, he is an excellent cartoonist – see a MonkeyTV video here where he explains one quick cartoon about creativity in Basque Country. Thanks a lot Pernan for the great work!

Currently we operate MonkeyTV with Qik. It’s linked to our Youtube channel, so if you are there feel free to connect with us.

Have a yellow week everyone! Ville

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Tags: Monkey Business, MonkeyTV, Pernan Goni, Qik, Social Media, Video, youtube
Posted in Friends of Monkey Business, Marketing, Monkey Business, MonkeyTV, Video | 3 Comments »

The Yellow Man and the Art of Hosting event

January 24th, 2010

The story of today happened last December in Copenhagen during the Survival Academy event. Every single morning, right after leaving my friend’s flat, I could see it there, standing, waiting for someone to give it a ride. Being myself still half sleep-half awake, while eating a banana as a breakfast, it always made me smile. A big smile. This sort of smile that you don’t want anyone to see you, because you think that others might think: “why is this guy laughing alone, is he going bananas?”

But there it was every morning, cheering me up and encouraging me to follow my heart, be myself and to be open to talk to the new people that I was about to meet. Let me introduce you to THE YELLOW MAN:

That’s him, yes. With a logo that seems to be taken from KaosPilot, he is concerned about what is happening in the world and is trying to offer more sustainable food delivering økologic food. He likes the yellow color too! So he is our Danish Monkey.

Maybe it was a sign, or maybe not, but I just know that what it was about to happen during one of those days in Copenhagen was something meaningful. During the Open Space session in SA, I got to know Benjamin Degenhart from KaosPilot and Kati Thomson from the MSLS crew, with whom I immediately clicked and after introducing ourselves we realized how much we and our schools had to learn from each other.

Where does the learning come from?Action, YES! That’s why we decided to start running a project together and after talking to few more people in the event we decided to organize an Art of Hosting training for our friends from our networks.

The initial idea was born about a month ago, and now with the concept more defined the event will happen in Karlskrona (Sweden) from February the 18th until the 21st. Idea is to gather up around 70-80 people from all around the world under the same roof (KP, MSLS, TA & others), connect with like minded young entrepreneurs and get an Art of Hosting training. It will be a 4 days hands on training, having conversations that matter as a great source for us to learn from the interdisciplinary teams, plus experience and learn to host circles, World Café, Open Space, Dialogue and other group processes. We, the young generations, need to start working together cross-disciplinary to tackle the complex challenges of our time. So this is the place to be!Bold, brave and caring for each other, YES!

Hosts will be Toke Moeller from Denmark, Tennesson Woolf from the US, Rowan Simonsen from UK, Simone Poutnik from Belgium, Valentine Giraud from Brazil and Jasmine Cargill from New Zealand, a truly Dream Team!

As Ben said, having those ingredients plus some extra spices from other networks together… uhja, i wanna taste that soup

Price will be 150€ for the team entrepreneurs/students and 250€ for alumni/staff, VAT included. For registration and further info you can check this web and/or write me at liher@banana.fi

I believe that the Yellow Man knew what was about to happen, but he just showed us the way. He encouraged me to be open to meet and spend time talking to new people. Plus,I happened to be in the right place at the right moment. Rest I had to do was to trust the process.

ROCK!

Lihis

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Posted in Cool and Important, Meeting with cool people, Monkey Business, Products, Team Academy International Network, Travelling | 2 Comments »

Welcome to the Jungle Matti Nykänen & people!

January 21st, 2010

Yes! “Life is human beings best time.”(Quote by Matti Nykaenen) We have spent the morning by cleaning our new Yellow Office. All five monkeys swinging with mops around floors, walls and toilet. Fun together! Maybe not the core substance of Monkey Business – but we found the life line from sauna.

It was really exiting to open the door to the new world which our friends Jerri&co had painted during Wednesday night. They are graffiti painters and we had not seen any sketch before hand. You step in and turn on the lights. It takes a moment and WOW! A lot of colors and amazing two different worlds at the back wall of training space (and sauna upstairs). Jungle, see, shark, huge Gorilla, VERY cool Monkey Business piece and a lot more. Easier to change aspect, maybe. Experience Economys E as Escapism and E as Esthetics starts to match. We don´t want office - we want inspiring surroundings to live and meet friends/strangers. To make world more fun and yellow. When are you coming?

Picture above is drawn by Juhis, Tupsu -a really talented young gun from the Valley of Creativity. We need to save some space on walls for him also. Facinated about cartoons & drawings? Order your own comic strip now from Juha Matti Kinnunen, Cheerful Monkey.

Tantourist.

ps. Really living mind expanding times. New office and my younger son Paavo starts to crawl at any moment…

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Tags: Creativity, Encourage the heart, Monkey Philosophy, news
Posted in Cool and Important, Monkey Business | No Comments »

Legendary letters to Inspiring people: Esa Saarinen

January 19th, 2010

In Monkey Business we have been playing with idea about having a Board for Enthusiasm. That board would be responsible for encouraging us to go even further to areas where we haven´t been yet. Board for thinking with heart, for families and humanity. And at least I think that philosopher Esa Saarinen would be the MAN for Managing (firing up) that board. Who else should be in?

From Esa I have learned most about interaction, systems thinking and systems intelligence. Esas week long seminars in Cyprus are astounding experience. He is a master of storytelling. Storyes that make normal people like me to understand philosophy. “Good life is born from better thoughts. You are allways more than any of your own expectations. There is allways more good in us than what you can see.”

I send the letter to thank Esa about making my life more rich and meaningful. And to thank about Conspiracy of Positive Force which we in Monkey Business really meet at unexpected places. Esas Queen, Pipsa, has named us Monkey Babes.

ESA – keep it yellow!

Tantourist.

(Monkey Business reserves the right to change the world.)

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Tags: Encourage the heart, Letter
Posted in Friends of Monkey Business, Monkey Business | No Comments »

What´s cooking Linus?

January 19th, 2010

Our campaign for January is wild as a Jungle and beating like a drum. Order one monkey now – and get second for free! Two monkeys for the price of one! Double amount of action, chaos and mistakes means at least six times more of learning. Maybe? Choose your Monkeys here: MonkeyBusiness_pres (Great profiles made by Nic. THANKS!)

We are supporters of fundamental freedom. Everyone is able to achieve what ever in the world – if you don´t mind who gets the honour. Pekka Himanen´s book, The Hacker Ethic, has had a lot influence to our Ideology. Passion and dedication to that, building on enthusiasm will carry on. So how can we encourage people on that? More listening to heart than rational mind? How do we help people to join enriching communities? How do we help people to find out who they really are? And what are they really passionate obout? And what is their strenght, superpower that they should build on? How do we help individuals to lead theirselves?

Linus Thorvalds created source code of Linux and story goes on. What is source code of Monkey Business? The DNA that people monkeying around are sharing? Do you feel the call?

Tantourist.

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