Books
Hit Mr in 2012
Dec 23rd
Intra-pre-neur
More action! That is the core of Monkey Business. What is it that challenges us to do and act more? It can be more money for one, for other it is more challenges – some of us could motivate them through competing with others. On 21st of December, on a very cold and wintery Monday morning Monkey Business sat down started to think about goals and budget for the year 2012, which I have named as following;
“2012 – The Year of Intrapreneurship”
What is the attitude towards entrepreneurship nowadays? What about trying new things, acting before thinking and planning for ages? Experimenting and then maybe even failing? Finnish society hasn’t been so kind and positive towards these. This is something that I feel that has slowly started to change. (Correct me if you think I am wrong?) I heard something recently, and it puzzled me;
- In Finland every 42nd person is considering about becoming an entrepreneur
- In rest of the Europe the average is that every 7th person has at least considered becoming an entrepreneur.
I am not saying that the only route to happiness is to become an entrepreneur – but surely it is an option. I also want to generate discussions around the topic ‘intrepreneurship’. That is what Monkey Business wants to create within organizations. People, who are willing to speak from their hearts, take responsibility and act. Atmosphere, that doesn’t judge failing and mistakes – it’s a pity, that people are afraid to admit their mistakes in organizations. Sharing those would make others to learn from those too! There should be an award in every working space and place named “The Golden Screw Up” – not for encouraging people to fail but for not being afraid making mistakes, either.
I am slowly starting to relax and calm myself towards Christmas – I want to end this year 2011 with the Hit Mr. – theory*, which will be the guideline for us in Monkey Business in the year 2012; (The letters for this theory come from the Finnish words Haasta, Prosessi, Tee, Mallinna, Rohkaise)
- Challenge the process / Haasta prosessi
- Inspiring and shared vision / Inspiroiva (ja jaettu) visio
- Enable others to act / Tee toiminta mahdolliseksi
- Model the way / Mallinna tie
- Encourage the heart / Rohkaise sydäntä
For me the year 2012 will be guided by these five sentences – especially the 3rd and the 5th; Enable others to act and Encourage the heart.
I wish a Merry Christmas for you all who are reading the Monkey Business Blog – I hope to meet many of you during the year 2012 face to face. For the fellow Monkeys I just want to say this Let’s keep it yellow!
*Hit Mr. Philosophy’s main headings have been adapted from Kouzes’ and Posner’s bestseller book The Leadership Challenge
Three Books on Brands
Nov 15th
This Saturday, I was asked which books I would recommend if a person wanted to learn about brands. My response may not be the most obvious. But here they are, three books to start with:
- Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard. In my opinion, this one is a great example how building the brand starts from passion and mission, and is based on strong business philosophy.
- Project50 (Re-invenvting work) by Tom Peters. Visiting Kisko Labs last week reminded me of the genius of Tom Peters. I think in the core of the brand is attitude. And this book has thought me a lot about that.
- It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be by Paul Arden. This book will give you an idea about the visual side of branding and sales. It has nice design, is easy to read, and was highly insightful at least for me.
What do you think? Where would you start when it comes building a strong brand?
Monkey Business Must Books Vol. 1
Jan 27th
Over a month ago, on 13th of December 2010, I asked on our Monkey Monday weekly meeting about the must books for Monkeys and our friends. Meaning books that have influenced us a lot, and if you read them you may gain a better understanding what this Monkey Business is all about. This is the first volume of the list, and with the help of our bookshop friend Esa, you may soon find them in our private bookshop at the Yellow Office. See the books below and get yours from Amazon. If you buy them after clicking the links below, we will receive a small credit to buy more books, too. So thanks for you support and have a good time reading! It would be great if you let us know your key insights and favorite books as well.
Ps. If you are on Facebook reading this, you may wanna click here to see the page online, I suppose the shop isn’t available there. Or, just manually, the books are Papillon, The Fifth Discipline, The Alchemist, Let my People go Surfing, Blue Ocean Strategy, Orbiting the Giant Hairball and One from Many.
Ps2. The Finnish musts Vol. 1 will be revealed next but here’s a taster: Tatu ja Patu Supersankareina.
What is Our Story?
Aug 12th
Here’s a post taken from my first blog “Flow of Meaning” that I had written in late 2007. I find it’s pretty timely even today. -Ville Monkey
I just learned about it from a Finnish Entrepreneur Jari Sarasvuo from his book Huomiotalous – Diilin opetukset (freely translated – Notion Economy – insights from The Finnish version of TV-show Apprentice: Diili). He stresses a lot the story of a company. Too many companies today lack a story. A story that changes people both within and outside the company. He asks us to ask ourselves:
“What in our story signifies hope, feeling of control, love and calls for growth? How these promises change the reality both inside our company as well as outside world?”
Ok, so this is the mission, right? He continues:
“If you and your friends in your company could create history, should you? If you could rewrite the rules of your field, why would you not do that?”
Let us all ask ourselves:
“How does the world become a better place, if our story becomes a reality?”
And we want to make the world a better place, I think. We need a strategy: how can we make this happen? Strategy is very much connected to leadership. A story is a strong tool for leaders. If you don’t have the story, you are probably lost. Do people know about your story? Who wants to be part of our story of creating revolutions of teams and team learning?
Customers whom we want?
Mar 23rd
We Monkeys aren´t like most people. But we do need friends(customers) to play with. To learn, lead, cocreate and to make world more fun & yellow! We have to first know who we are. Seth Godin, Tribes:
“ The art of leadership is understanding what you can´t compromise on.”
Beginning of year 2010 for us has been a bit like hike in a desert. Just have to believe that the oasis will come. Seth Godin, Tribes:
” The second thing you need to know is that the only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it´s worth doeing. Faith that failure won´f destroy you.”
Cosmos has challenged us by asking: are you serious about this? Time on desert has put our values in test also. Inner pressure is sometimes almost too hard to handle. But returning back from uncomfortable zone is rewarding. Things look clear for a while – illusion of infallible.
Prahalad & Krishnan, The new age of innovation:
” Start-ups do not need well-developed proseccies.”
Form follows funtion, said someone. So what we can do is keep on doeing. Culture is the Strategy. More experiments with customers who play with same rules. So we want:
*You, whom don´t want to work overtime daily to keep up the status quo
*You, whom don´t want be sheepwalking anymore
*You, whom wants to change, yourself, organization, world
*You, whom wants to learn, all the time, everywhere, from everybody
*You, whom wants to do all this together, smiling
Eye for an eye makes the hole world blind. – Gandhi-
Tantourist.
Book Recommendation: Synchronicity – The inner path of leadership by Joseph Jaworski
Mar 19th
I first saw this book in the hands of Rowan Simonsen, one of the hosts in the AoH Karlskrona seminar we organized exactly a month ago. Few days later a friend lent it to me and it’s been probably one of the most inspirational books I have read in my life.
During the book Joseph shares his own personal journey, but helps a lot to reflect the reader’s journey as well:
Who am I?
Why am I in the journey?
What is this journey all about?
Why am I really here?
What is my higher purpose in life?
We all have plans, ideas, projects, dreams…therefore we all are in a journey. Jaworski asks: “Are you serious about this?are you serious about dedicating yourself to what needs to be done to achieve it?Are we deeply committed to creating what we truly want for its own sake?”
He shared that the American Indians and The Samurai were warriors that were so open that they were ready to die for the cause. Monkey Business being a travel agency for superheroes, are we Samurais enough?
Jaworski shares one very important thing, and I fully agree, that one of the big mistakes we do is that we get blinded with all the day-to-day tasks. Myself personally for some reason I tend to end up being hands full in projects, emailing…complaining that I don’t have time for reflection. Ville once told me: “ Liher, you have the time to reflect but it’s yourself who chooses not to take it”. And it’s totally true. It’s always very easy to leave apart the reflection and the book reading, which is as important as taking action in the learning process.
Strongly recommended book for the Monkeys preparing the Solo Experience.
Have a great yellow weekend!
Liher, The Green Monkey
Monkey Business Book Project
Mar 7th
This idea has been in my head for while in some forms and it ignited again when me, Petrus, Liher, Ola and Rogerio where driving back from the excellent Art of Hosting training in Karlskrona that brought together people from Kaospilots, MSLS and Team Academy. See Liher’s post about it here.
Ever since our flight back from SoL Global forum in Oman me and Tatu have been talking about writing a book. In fact, back then we did actually come up with a loads of different ideas. The basic idea was to make an inspiring book with stories, theories, quotes and pictures. We were inspired a lot by Paul Arden, Seth Godin and Tom Peters.
Empty page
Well, time goes on and the idea develops and we are lazy to write the book. And we keep on printing out more Monkey Business notebooks. And the idea comes up when we are somewhere about 200km from Stockholm. Let’s make a Monkey Business notebook version 2.0 where people could send their own ideas, drawings, illustrations, theories, quotations and so on whatever they have put in their Monkey Business notebooks. So it would be a mash-up notebook. Still with loads of room to write your own things in but with some text already there at the bottom of some pages, or a big drawing on the other or something totally different.
Idea is to get this book out by June 2010. We need your help. Please, send us pictures of your notebook’s pages with something on them. We will give them to a designer and eventually print some of them into the new version of Monkey Business notebook. You’ll be accredited for your contribution and also get a copy for yourself before they go for sale in public. The deadline for submissions is 31st of March. Then we will give the material to a graphic designer who will put it all together.
I am very curious to see what kind of book we can create together. All questions, contributions, ideas are most welcome! Ville Monkey
Ps. If you want the version 1.0 Monkey Notebooks we still got some left. 12 euros including mailing. They are good for your thinking.
How Do We Think?
Feb 11th
Just found this cool video on Facebook through Innovandis & Asier of Funky Projects.
Has anybody read the book We Think by Charles Leadbeater? What do you think about it? Yellow mellow, Ville
Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success
Feb 2nd
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
What´s cooking Linus?
Jan 19th
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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