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?
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.
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
Happy new year everyone also from my side! The blog has been a little sleepy last days just like the bears sleep and hibernate over the winter. And Moomins do the same. Nevermind that, because we are thinking warm thoughts and next summer.
1.5 years ago we did a brave experiment with our friends Ralf, Charles, David and Marie. It was called a Penquin Expedition (a pdf) and it included a special thing called Solo Experience. Solo may be familiar to you for example through books like Syncronicity and Presence. Our experience was very good, we have a special place by the lake Saimaa where we can work and the summer in Finland is spectacular.
This coming year we are planning to open solos. The first one is in the first week of June and the second one will be together with a Penquin Expedition and during the last week of August. Here are some slides about the first one!
When we left for the #LAVA09 we were not exactly sure what was going to happen. We were asked to trust the process. We were facilitated by a Kaospilot and a Creative Agent. It was cool to be a participant in a process like this after a good while. I suppose we are not the easiest participants to work with but I believe there is also loads of potential in us.
In the end, we were the work with the Northern Periphery (EU)-Projects, among which is NoCry that invited us there. They were our customers. We didn’t get to work directly with Icelandic industries as we had hoped for so for me personally it took a little time to motivate myself to work with the EU-projects. But I think we got out quite a good result in the end.
The LAVA09 was a 1.5-day seminar where people from different projects met. The Young Creative Entrepreneurs had initially a one hour slot in the program as the last thing between 5 and 6 pm. Well, the previous content ran overtime and then there was a coffee break so we had to distinguish our presentations (and drop one out) down to about 30 minutes. But I think it was a success nevertheless! So what happened during that 30-40 minutes?
1. Tatu jumps on the stage – he was kind of leader of the whole process and facilitated our part of the program. He said very few words and then the lights went off and Rasmus played some loops and music based on sounds he had recorded while in Iceland. He’s a sound architect. After that Elina started improvise with piano and sang a song she had written. I heard one of the participants say that his skin was on “chicken skin” when he listened to that. It was definitely touching.
2. Tatu asked people to shake hands and say hello to people next to them. I was watching this aside and realized the real systems intelligence behind that. Loads of positive energy was flying around from people and we could feel how they got even more excited about what’s coming up.
3. Daniel of Grus jumped on stage with his presentation about Social Media. He made a quick prototype of targeted ad on Facebook and also for Google Ads. One of his main arguments were that if you are not in Google, Youtube and Wikipedia you do not exist for many people. He also showed the new video about the fast change of the media called “Did you know?“. The title for this post is adapted from that video.
4. Then it was our turn. Me, Anette and Juha-Matti had prepared a presentation for the Pellet project. I think about all of us felt on the previous days meeting with the projects people that most of them had challenges in marketing and reaching out people. However, Tatu said later that customers managed to cheat him again, because he says that it is very easy to say that “it’s marketing that we need” even though the real challenges may be in the fields of leadership or something else. Maybe the tool to use with the clients could be the one from Toyota Way, to ask persistently five times “why” from the client. We created quite a chaos in the previous day but that’s another story.
5. Back to our show. We picked the pellet project, well, somehow it seemed to be easy to grasp on. We couldn’t avoid the idea of taking totally unsexy and hard to market product such as a pellet and make a little provocative marketing campaign a create a story for the product. You can see the slides below. Juha-Matti from Intotalo made the drawings, he’s very good! Also, we worked very well as a team and it was a good fun. We were working hard but still didn’t take it too seriously, I guess you can see that from the result, too
After our presentation we did a very quick energy discussion with the crowd. Right after that all the young creative entrepreneurs went to the front to show once again who we all are. And last, but not least, we heard excellent Icelandic inspired improvisational piece by Rasmus, Carro and Elina. Good stuff. Then it was time to head off for a dinner. That was an escapist experience as well…
Now I am starting to think that the two last posts in our blog have been about Marketing. We are ind of trying to get away from that – it’s not the ocean we want to sail in. We are more into igniting collectives and making the world more fun and yellow. Well, coaching for marketing is something we offer, too. That’s a way to ignite collectives, isn’t it?
Ps. The T-shirts with Techno-Pelle doing the moonwalking will be available soon.
this morning when I biked to our yellow office I saw a vision of a blog post with then steps or principles about marketing to your tribe. This list is about building your tribe outside the internet and web 2.0. That list will come a little later on. So here we go!
We are seated in a nice cozy not-for-profit cafe in the center of Reykjavik. Tatu just asks if we reached our goals for this trip. Why were we here? Did we make the Iceland and the LAVA09 more yellow and fun? Did we have fun all together?
This is a short postcard to all of you. More detailed reporting may come a little later. Have a good weekend you all!
Here is a 5 min video with a short interviews of our new friend Niklas (the secretary general of Nordic Periphery Projects), Tatu Tantourist and Ville Monkey. Here we reflect all together what was our role. It’s filmed two days ago just before our final dinner at the spinning restaurant.
Ps. Two Icelandic and real cool initiatives in the fields of clothing and music, respectively: Naked Ape and GoGoYoKo. Check them out.
H0op! On Sunday 3 Monkeys will go to Iceland to the magnific LAVA09 event presented below, and that makes me feel like happy to be Nordic! Also I feel like fostering our roots and culture here in the north of Europe, and thus, the book recommendation for this week comes from Sweden. Unlike the normal business reading, it’s a novel…bestseller of the Swedish novels in 2005! The book is named Små citroner gula… and in English: A restaurant of yellow lemons.
It’s a sory of young Lady who opens up her own restaurant…and meets the reality of life as a young business owner. Agnes with her partners is giving it all for the initiave, but they face a variety of challenges starting from the customers that write critics into the media and drunken chef as an employee… All could be real, but it’s just a novel…excellent weekend book!
Next week after this relaxing weekend is holding another big journey for Monkeys too. First TA invites 8 people coming from Brazil, England and Barcelona for a Learning Expedition to Team Academy, and Monkeys are hosting the funnily serious evening program B-) Then after LE Henna Monkey and Sari and Liher from Mondragon Team Academy will go to Brazil to work for opening the Team Academy in there together with a University Senac Sao Paulo. Cool! We are turned on by that challenge and humbly dialoguing for gathering the best knowledge for leading that journey into a success!
Keep it yellow!
Henna Monkey
P.S. Writer of this blog entry is often seriously oriented hard worker, who needs novels to let the brains rest sometimes! If you recognise yourself from this description it’s propably time for you to read a novel too
I am about to send an update to all our Fans on Facebook, and before that found out about this badge about our page. So if you are not our fan yet, click below and become a fan. As a Monk Bus fan you may get some cool updates, event invitations etc. directly to your facebook page. Sometimes it’s spam, sometimes it could be also useful. My philosophy with social media is borrowed from famous Finnish skijumper, Matti Nykänen: “You have to give the chance an opportunity.”
Our dear friend, the creative agent, Nic and Monkey Business (3 monkeys) will travel to Iceland for the second week of November to shake it. It’s an event called Lava 09, tha annual conference of Nordic Periphery Program and related to Nordic Creative Youth project, too.
Why think out of the box when you can think inside as well? The comic strip above demonstrates that innovation can be brought about by being resourceful with what you have and by recognising your own potential. – Lava 09 website
Here’s a little comic strip by Juha-Matti which I found on the conference brochure. Download the 1 pager for more info through this website.
So maybe my, Ville Monkey’s, questions for you are: who should we meet for a coffee or beer in Iceland? Who could help us in this challenge to work over there for one week?
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