Cool and Important
Facebook Username for Monkey Business?
Aug 29th
Help needed!
I recently figured out that we can have a username for our Monkey Business page in Facebook. You may wonder, what’s a FB username? Well, it’s the name that appears in the web-address of our page. Currently the web address for our FB page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Monkey-Business/34489254526. Not so handy, I think.
So, we have a little challenge to come up with something for the Monkey Business page, and I would appreciate your help. What would be a good username for us?
Please drop your suggestions in comments below. Award and fame for the person providing winning suggestion! Keep it yellow, Ville
Learning Journeys à la Monkey Business
Jul 22nd
July 2010 has been a great learning journey month with friends from TA around Europe. I felt like harvesting a bit of this concept of Learning Journey, because that’s becoming such a key element in Monkey Business’s business!
One significant day in the 3-weeks journey of mine was the day of attending the thesis presentation session of Liher at Mondragon University / MTA. Liher had done his thesis about Learning Journeys. In his presentation he reflected what he had learned in the journeys he did together with the TA network over the past 1,5 years, and how he will use his learnings in the future. The topic was really real and tangible, because due to the experience Liher had gathered, MTA had given him a challenge to organize all the learning journeys of LEINN and MINN University programs to Finland, US California and China during this and the next year. Quite a nice challenge, I thought! One significant interest factor at Liher’s story for me was that I had been with him in most of the learning journeys he described, and he had indentified that we could work on the journeys together in the future as well. Super! For me the Learning Journeys theme resonated well with the Travel Agency for Superheroes concept, that we have been developing in Monkey Business recently, so here I’ll share the ideas that popped up while enjoying the dialogue at Liher’s session.
The style of the event was open and full of inquiry, such as: What is a learning journey?, that Liher asked from us. I made a drawing of the success factors of my kind of learning journey and here it is:
Then the dialogue moved into the learning journeys with a meaning. What’s your meaning of taking a journey?, was the question. What’s the trigger? There must be many, ne could go to learn about people, surf, Art of Hosting, SoL, food, the Hub’s, sports, learning, Team Academy, Kaospilots, fun, sun, snow, hot, cold, history, personal discovery or cultures – you name it!
As organizers of multiple the learning journeys we then wondered: What’s the needed agenda / structure for a successful journey? Connections, networks and the first night booking were the obvious first thoughts. But the type of the journeys Monkey Business arranges is preferably with open agenda and created in dialogue with our guests. We try to avoid arranging trips with predictable results (referring to the slogan in our Banana card ”How would you feel if someone gave a you banana that had been chewed already?”). Cornerstones of our journeys are Monkey spirit, TA spirit and knowledge of the destination with local friends. Challenges are to network even better in the world of facility providers, such as accommodators and restaurants so that we could concentrate on our main strenght which is creating experiences rather than booking facilities. However, we gotta build the network of trusted facilities as well!
After talking about the facilities Maria, a professor of MU asked: How can we move people into a learning journey? Because for sure learning journey does good, but only if a person is ready to take it and jump in. Can we create a need? Creating the need might work out by talking about the content / calling questions / topics of the journey, but what if Learning Journey guests come with the fear of jumping in and opening up for anything that might come? Fear is the one that blocks the most. So how do we overcome the personal fear and closure? That was the final question posed in the session, and stayed unanswered.
Now in the case of LEINN journeys, Liher and Monkeys practice the way to create a journey that takes off the fear. The fact is that in the coming September there are 60 people to come for a Learning Journey to TA Finland, and soon after that in March 25 people going to California and on the next autumn double to California and 25 to China… Liher, Monkeys are there for you to help you and for sure this concept of Learning Journeys deserves some thinking / dialoguing work. Maybe it starts from creating the Leading Thoughts for our Travel Agency for Superheroes? Who’s up to that!?
With Yellow summer mood,
Henna Monkey
p.s. I’ve just finished reading a book Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie, hence the artsy illustration trial. Note the nailpolish that acted as a glue and marker!
Purpose of Being in Social Media? Ideas from Likeminds
Jun 17th
Yesterday I attended a pre-event for today’s Likeminds seminar in Helsinki. It was a part of Dicole’s OZ-events, indeed a very nice way to organize people to meet up and socialize on some nice theme, which in this time was social media. Scott Gould gave us a presentation which I enjoyed. I got couple ideas to take home.
1. Think about the purpose of being in the different Social Media.
2. Broadcasting vs. Social Participation
3. For the Likeminds the hashtag is the platform.
This event and ideas came in a right time because I was just about to help our superhero friend Claudia with their Social Media tools and systems. I was about to do that by writing and explaining our tools and methods in this blog and now I got a whole new perspective – not only tools and methods, but also the purpose. Why Twitter? Why Qik/Youtube? Why Facebook? Why Blog? Am I just using the social technologies to broadly cast my own ideas? Do I really want to engage participation? What’s all this noise I am creating? Or maybe just like Henna asked at some point of our summer days: “What are you saying and is it connected to anything?” I will dig into these questions later on in another blog post.
The third point on my list is about the way this movement called Likeminds is being organized. If I have understood correctly anybody can organize anything for so called likeminded people. Who are these likeminded people? I think you are because you are reading this, and I am because I am writing it. I had heard about likeminds breakfasts through hellohelsinki.fi and from our Green Monkey Liher. How to do it? You just add the hashtag #likeminds into your event, youtube video, Flickr images and so on. So then, likeminded people, can go and see what’s going on near you or participate virtually. I think simple is beautiful. Hashtag as a platform for organizing probably truely approaches the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing. I am starting to believe more and more in self-organizing, and starting to doubt more hierarchy and control. Let’s trust people.
Ville Monkey
Ps. Thank you Teemu, Mikko, Petra and everyone at Dicole for hosting this inspiring event. We will follow your example here in Jyväskylä. Thanks also for all of you whom I met and shared interesting conversations. In this event with many start-ups and related people, I am happy I also saw futurist and philosopher Sam Inkinen, who made remember that Monkey Business is a lifestyle company. Thanks a lot Sam!
Streetpreneurship: Street culture + Entrepreneurship
May 21st
I was mountain biking yesterday evening and while observing some magical views I started thinking about the street-art, street-wear…street culture in general. In Monkey Business we feel inspired and support all these movements, but how can we act and add some yellow spices to all the street culture? It was then when I came with the idea of Street + Entrepreneurship=Streetpreneurship.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately about the role of the architects in our cities. They do not simply create buildings, but they design the working and living dynamics that will happen in the buildings (cities thinking on a larger scale), meaning how people will behave in there. If learning is a change in our behaviour, how can an architect help Monkey Business designing interactive learning environments?
In that sense I’ve been visiting couple of interesting offices lately, meeting great people who are running fantastic projects. But unfortunately their offices were really far from the city centres. If we want to change the world we may need to be closer to the world and citizens, maybe? So that interaction among citizens and us happens on a bigger scale.
After couple of trips around Scandinavia during the past few months I realized that probably the highest rate of entrepreneurship is among the immigrants, which is really inspiring from my perspective. People who come from radically different countries and cultures, but are still able to create their own businesses for their own survival and feed their families. Unfortunately in most of the cases the biggest added value they can offer is cheap price and having their stores open for unlimited amount of hours. But they are close to the people living in the neighbour. They might run a bike store and people come to say hi and hang around while their bikes get fixed. Their create an interaction culture.
I started googleing some of the ideas mentioned above and discovered that Jane Jacobs, an economist and urbanist, wrote extensively on the ways that interaction among the people who live and work on a particular street can reduce crime, encourage the exchange of ideas, and generally make the world a better place.
Until now only bars, restaurants, banks and clothing stores were the most typical businesses in the city centres. Businesses that had access to quite a wide range of citizens, but unfortunately haven’t succeeded in creating the change. In contrast, street artists or street dancers have managed to make the city centres more fun and yellow, always playing with the limits of the law and for limited time though.
Gandhi made the change spending time in the streets and being closer to the citizens. How close is our business and our office to the world? Summer is here, weather is perfect. Go out and do some StreetPreneurship!
Have a yellow weekend,
Liher
How to lead a network well? ideas from AoH Karlskrona
Feb 20th
Hey all,
here’s some online fruits from the Art of Hosting training I am happy to attend in Karlskrona. We have a unique opportunity to learn together with many Kaospilots, MSLS-students, Team Entrepreneurs and other inspiring people from different networks.
I hosted a session in Open Space, (which Tennessee one of our excellent hosts calls the best tool to get people into action fast) session at Art of Hosting training in Karlskrona with a calling question or topic: Networks / Tribes – How do we eliminate the limits of growth?
We started with Oliver from Kaospilots, and soon also Marco from MSLS (thanks for harvesting), Rovan one of our hosts and Vilma from TA/PArtus/SoL joined the dialogue. Thanks all for participating and supporting the thinking together.
Impact for me to host this session is that I am part of many networks (e.g. SoL, The Hub, TeamAcademy, PrecencingInstitute, WorldCafe, AoH, AppInquiry etc.) that are growing and somewhat aligned, but still I wonder how we could really leverage the power of these networks making the world better. Also a question in my head is that why there are so many of them? Could we combine or bring them together somehow? Furthermore I am really pondering what we can learn from the way Open Source communities are being organized?
So here is some of our thinking:
Potential bottle necks limiting the growth of a network are for example but not limited to following:
1. Hierarchy: It’s hard to fight to the top of the hierarchy in order to get your voice heard.
2. Exclusive Inner Circle that is hard to be part of.
3. No room for action of members, if you need to act permission it may be hard to get
4. Values and spirit are not attractive
5. Somebody is exploiting the network
6. Business Model is not sustainable and
7. Communication or the lack f it
So, how do we eliminate the limits of growth? And what is this growth we are looking for? (Money/Members/Impact/Practitioners/etc/etc?)
Or, thanks to Rovan, the new question emerged: What are characteristics of good, nourishing leadership for a network/tribe? Here are some ideas that we came up with:
1. Open and transparency of decision making process and “organizational” structure, even if it’s dynamic. No Taboos or un-written rule. The aim should be to make the system as visible as possible.
2. Empowers loads of action (systemically): What is the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing and action?
3. Good communication culture (this is the real challenge I guess)
4. Clear process of creation and updating the leading thoughts
5. Low entrance step, it’s easy to join, accessible.
6. Inclusive, nobody is left out if they want to contribute and participate.
7. Purpose large enough but clear enough. People should feel that I want to be part of this. Purpose is container both for action and expansion. Case: 350.org brought together many networks, as did Survival Academy.
All right, I also participated in two other session of which fruits I may share online later. But I really would appreciate any comments on this so the space is still open.
Don’t Eat Yellow Snow! VillaWool Beanies available now
Feb 1st
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
The Yellow Man and the Art of Hosting event
Jan 24th
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
Welcome to the Jungle Matti Nykänen & people!
Jan 21st
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…
BarCamp inspired Open Space in Tiimimestarit Areenalla
Jan 16th
Tatu and myself got a change to host an open space today at Tiimimestarit Areenalla (Team Mastery Arena) inspired by the BarCamp Alsace6 I participated in Strasbourg Project Factory. This is just quick post to share the ideas from Johannes about the BarCamp /Open Space and moreover about the new Prahalad book, The New Age of Innovation. This video is in Finnish, sorry for the non-Finnish speaking folks.
And below is picture of a very couragious Penquin (in reality 2nd year) Anssi and the program grid of today’s OpenSpace that the participants created.
Tonight is the 17th Anniversary of Team Academy. Should be massive! Maybe I will be doing live reporting through Twitter and Qik Live of ours. Keep it yellow! Ville
X-Mas Calender: Day 16. Theme Years of Monkey Business
Dec 16th
Hou hou hou!
Monday I was participating Partus Ltd. strategymeeting (and Xmas party..) and there supercoach Stu Vainio reminded me about Team Academys theme years before achieving our vision (YHY = Top Unit of Entrepreneurship). I think that themes were planned by our head coach Johannes, but they sure wen´t into action by the people of Team Academy. Well, then I thought that we in Monkey Business should also have themes for upcoming years. So here we go.
2010 – Mahatma Gandhi – We must be The Change We Wish to see in The World. Monkey Business is about changing the world more yellow and fun. Since joining Monkey Business, I have noticed that in most of cases world is not ready to change. That is why I chose Gandhi to be be the first theme. If we don´t believe that change is possible, I don´t think that nobody else will either. Monkey see, Monkey Do.
2011 – Urho Kaleva Kekkonen – Stubbornes & Continuity. Season 2 is always the hardest. After start we won´t be so new and fresh anymore. Or will we? We have to be stubborn and brave enough to walk the path that we chose. UKK did not explain if somebody didn´t understand. He just said: “Relax, you´ll see it someday.”
2012 – Tupu, Hupu & Lupu – Year of Victories. Very often winning is about attitude. If you wan´t to win, you have to think everything through winning. When you decide to win, you will do what you have to do.
2013 – Paola Suhonen & Linus Torvalds. – Creativity & Networking. What is the difference between good and great? I don´t know. But I think that one difference at least is that great can change faster. In this fast and furious world that we live in, nothing lasts if they can´t create something new and succeed again. Life is about learning and learning is the fuel that keeps us going futher and futher. We will be Monkeys forever but our business won´t be the same forever. Like Matti Nykänen said: Living is the best part of life.
2014 – George Foreman – Ali knocked me out and I started my own BBQ. What happens 2014? You´ll never know. Will we get knocked out? Maybe.
Janne Monkey
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