Friends of Monkey Business
Friends of Monkey Business
Key Points for Superheroes Travel Agency
Aug 2nd
Thanks to our partners CoMind and Catherwood Travels, we are working on the philosophy for the Superheroes’ Travel Agency. This is based on our shared experiences, but our crystallization. Also, this is work in progress and a process.
Key points right now are:
- Learning Process (Time & Leadership)
- Customer Intimacy (Before, During, After the event)
- Cultural Experience e.g. Finnish
- People-to-People Approach
- Philosophy of Co-Creation (Dialogue, Access, Risks, Transparency ref. C.K. Prahalad)
- Shared understanding about what we are doing and why (x5)
- Main theme and Purpose
- Serious Fun.
- Systems Intelligence
- More Action. More Chaos. More Mistakes. More Learning.
Does this make sense? What do you think?
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!
Travel Agency for Superheroes acts again!
Jun 1st
1 year ago in Quito, Ecuador, while working at local entrepreneurship school and after having coached about the Team Academy in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for University Senac Sao Pauolo & Bank Grupo Santander Brazil, I made a Learning Contract defining that I want to work more with international big companies and surf. This is a post about how the wishes come true. It presents the learnings from a Creative Expedition we did for a group of 20 Marketing & Sales executives of a big French bank Crédit Agricole of in Finland in partnership with Entrepart.
Our relationship with Entrepart and Crédit Agricole dates back to 2007, when I was a teampreneur in Team Academy and we were invited to give a taster of Team Academy for a Crédit Agricole group in Helsinki. I went, together with 3 more teampreneurs, and apparently we succeeded to pitch the case well, because this time CA decided to start their week-long Finnish expedition from Team Academy of Jyväskylä and I had a chance to organize the program for the week as Entrepartner in Finland.
The idea of CA spending a week here in Finland was to do a Translation Nomade, a kind of creative expedition that takes people out of their normal living & experience cycles, and opens up new ways of thinking business. Topic of the week for marketing executives was HR management. We met companies with curious HR aspects, such as Nokia with challenges related to the aim of transforming the engineering business into service business, Docrates Clinique combining Socrates philosophy and doctors, being a unique private cancer Clinique in Nordic Countries and Fujitsu with long cooperation with the National Theatre (meeting took place at the National Theatre). As bankers, our guests were very curious about Finnish banks, and we learned about OP-Pohjola and Sampo, which were both rock’n’roll learning moments with highly interesting peer practice-exchange.
We also discovered the buzzing places of the entrepreneurial wave of Finland in places, such as Team Academy, Design Factory and Korjaamo. Just to give an overview, we were with Demos Helsinki with Manifest of Good Work, Monkey Business as a product of Team Academy joined with Carola Wictorsson and Kaisa Oksanen from the research group of Antti Hautamäki, contributing for creating innovation environments, regionally, Ellun Kanat with a study of Y-generation, STARA with age management program, Outi Ugas from Hahmo presenting the Helsinki World Design Capital 2012 project, Teemu Arina from Dicole talking about the Homo Connectus online, Sulake with Habbos around the globe and Ramine Darabiha with MySites and Aalto Entrepreneurship Society going to Shanghai World Expo on Tracks. In Jyväskylä we also met Stafix with static stickers and most importantly, a 7-nationality team founded by an Ecuadorian, working in Vaajakoski, Jyväskylä, and crushing it worldwide.
Whoah! Lots of meetings! We really had a week full of action and the program covered the Finnish society and landscape pretty comprehensively. “Participants come back with many insights.” said Christian Mayeur, founder of Entrepart on the way back home.
At the last night dinner in Kappeli we dialogued (time for it comes afterwards) and concluded that: In Finland a lot of trust and space is given for the youth, and that creates interesting companies & projects. And what about this well-being, every company promises a package of it for the employee, but what’s the individual responsibility of each own well-being, isn’t there any? Also the area of exact information was thought: in France and especially in the bank numbers & measuring the facts are appreciated, but it seems that in Finland the process and feeling the move and having dialogue is more important. Maybe this feeling resonates with the people we met on the way?
Personally, I was honoured to meet with all these people and companies that are highly intersting for Monkeys. Now it’s time to start discovering the seeds this learning journey has planted. Thank you for your commitment and presence, all who contributed and joined the journey! My next goal, other one written in the same Learning Contract in Quito, is to make 100 % of the turnover from outside of Finland. Maybe this week with CA was a step towards that too.
Cheers and love,
Henna Monkey
Ps. Special thank you for Christian Mayeur and Sanna Tossavainen for creating this and giving us a chance to be part of this and work with you. It’s been quite a trip!
Renewed Elevator Pitch: Help with Interaction Culture
May 4th
Monday morning was good for us. I think it was because last week we had had a busy week working with some customer projects. We learned a lot.
We visited Design Factory at the Aalto University in Espoo and met Inka (in the picture below on the left) there. Actually, she was already a friend of Henna’s since Paphos seminar last summer but we didn’t know that before Tatu gave her our Banana business card. She is also a designer, also for material but nowadays more and more for intangible. Very interesting place that Design Factory.
I am sure the visit to Design Factory contributed to our learning. What we learned for example that we are at our best when creating the interaction culture. We can create an environment for learning, and an environment where people can talk with one another. And that probably is the core of our business.
Here are first three development versions of our elevator pitch, first one was: We are Monkey Business and we first thought that we ignite collectives. Hä? Now that doesn’t say much, right? Let’s try again… We are MB and we are learning designers. Hmm. Still pretty broad and doesn’t really tell what we do. Ok, we worked a bit more and with the time came the idea of MB building learning environments. That was quite ok, but many times people associate learning environment with something virtual and happening with computers. So not so good for us. So finally we came up with this…
We are Monkey Business and we help our customers to build a better interaction culture.
How does that sound to you?
Forest Solo is coming, Do you wanna join us?
Mar 11th
Johanna met in Tulimyrsky a really nice lady, Hilkka from Tupaswilla. In Tulimyrsky was speaking Heikki Peltola and he asked us 8 questinons. Those were
1. What I love to do?
2. What I´m good at?
3. What ignites me?
4. What pisses me off?
5. What do I value in life?
6. What do I want to avoide?
7. What I want to learn?
8. What will I become when I grown up?
Then we got a chance to find a new person and share our answers with each other. Hilkka waved to me and so we shared our answers. Their answers were quite similar. I told to Hilkka about Tralvel Agency for Superheroes and we noticed that we share the passion for similar things. We both are creating experinences and in the centre of everything is learning.
Couple days ago Henna and Johanna went to meet Hilkka in Laukaa, Tupaswilla. When we arrived in there Henna said that ”ou, we came in the winter wonder land !” It was becouse there was so much of snow! We met also Jussi who owns the place with his father. The place was awesome, nearby the place was small lake and we walked with Jussi up to the hill. There was beautiful fiew, fire place and a hootchie. Its´ a great place to quiet down. In Tupaswilla you can walkabout with snowshoes and you can do many things over there.
We have been asked when would be next Forest Solo. Tupaswilla would be great place for that. Do you wanna find your personal mastery with us at Forest Solo in Tupaswilla?
Yellow, Johanna
Monkey Business House Warming Party Videos
Mar 2nd
Last Friday on the 26th of February we had a house warming party at our new office in Vaajakoski’s Teollisuustalo. According to wild guessing there where maybe 80 guests in total. Thanks for everyone who came by, and also greetings for those who couldn’t make it this time. We will host a new party when the snow is gone.
Here are three videos that you may already have seen at MonkeyTV at Qik or Youtube. First two are in English and third one in Finnish. We also took plenty of pictures but those will come later. Enjoy!
Monkeys on the road!
Feb 5th
” 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.
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
MonkeyTV online now in Qik and Youtube!
Jan 25th
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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