Monkey Business
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!
Seriously Yellow.
Jun 26th
Monkey Business keeps getting critics from the people who doubt our possibilities to be a ”real company” as we are. One day it’s about the unpromising name, the other day it’s about the seemingly small amount of work we do. One critical friend shared his opinion about the color, too: no serious company has a yellow brand! Yellow is associated with fun, joy, play, holiday…but not with serious business. ”Name me a serious company having yellow as a brand color?”, he challenged. Not that I’d be obsessed with a question, it just turned out that looking for serious yellow companies became a fun habit 
Now, in the sunny yellow lightness of one of these Finland’s midsummer nights, I want to share some of these yellow findings, for example:
SOL Palvelut, a big grown Finnish service business offering laundry, clean-up and staff leasing services, employing 9000 people in 4 different countries and having made a turnover of 157 million euros in 2009. In SOL yellow means the sunny positivity and the culture of freedom and responsibility. Employees can decide how they want to work and what kind of working environment they like. They were in charge of the decoration in the headquarters, too, and therefore SOL City, the uniquely and wildly designed headquarters of the company, is one of the most desired visiting destinations for the international business groups visiting Helsinki. In the past I worked for SOL Palvelut, and still remember the very positive working culture in there. I felt like part of the team and responsible, but free from the 8am to 4pm routines and having all the power to improve my work and be in direct contact with our partners every day. It was seriously yellow.
DHL Express, a German transportation company offering tailored, customer-focused solutions for managing and transporting letters, goods and information. This company made it to this list for two recent reasons. Firstly because we spotted it’s yellow transporter at our yellow office parking place, delivering goods for one of the companies we are neighboring, and secondly because it offered us a smooth solution for serving our superheroe guest when she left to Paris forgetting her iPhone in Finland. DHL delivered it to her to Paris overnight, taking a service time of 10 hours with a price of 155,55 euros. 7 hours delivery would have also been available. Why DHL is recommendable for anyone in need of express delivery? 1) It transports phone batteries, unlike the express delivery operator recommended by the Finnish main post service Itella, for example. 2) Even being a German company, has it’s web pages nicely in Finnish unlike it’s US competitor FedEx, for example. These primary reasons made us to choose for DHL, and surely we supported the yellow color, too.
Eniro with yellow Pages. Not so long ago I received a phonecall from Eniro, the leading contact search company in the Nordic media market listed in Swedish stock. Eniro was renewing it’s Yellow Pages direct search media, and asked if Monkey Business wanted to be found from there. It could have been a traditional sales call, but the first line, a question of Eniro’s agent, changed the system radically. She asked: What is this Monkey Business doing? I went: We make the world more yellow by improving supportive communication systems. She replied: Hhmmm…ahhaa, sounding like trying to construct a thought in her head before voicing it out: “Then we are in the same business! Eniro Yellow Pages is trying to make the world more yellow by improving the communication systems by creating the connections between people.” It was a good talk with the senior sales agent of Eniro who made me think that in fact it would be cool to do one joint project with Eniro. As a company, Eniro plays in another league, but we share the yellow!
These were just some examples of the yellow and serious brands. What we as Monkey Business mean and want to communicate with the yellow color is that we are all about serious fun, positivity and good vibes in communication. Yellow is the mood of action that produces good feeling and good results by empowering people.
Can you name and describe more examples of the serious yellow companies?
With all my yellow (as Johanna would say!),
Henna Monkey
P.S. Bananas are yellow, too. And very serious business, too.
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!
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
Disco time baby!
May 21st
Summer is here. And Discoball arrived to our yellow office. So keep on rocking – as Henna is this picture, very exited.
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?
Loads happening here – What’s up with the Monkeys?
Apr 22nd
Hiphophei,
sorry for the silence with our blog. It’s plenty of things going on in here:
Couple weeks back we started a good big project with Johanna called Apps4Finland. It’s done for Finnish Internet Democracy Association (Suomen Verkkodemokratiaseura ry) and we are the coordinators for that. A good challenge, and interesting case with a hot topic of Open Data. Also we are very happy that it climaxes in the MindTrek conference in Tampere, which is the biggest IT/Geek-conference in Finland. Nice to get involved into new spheres.
Another big thing that just kicked off is Team Mastery 3. We got 10 people on this exciting journey organized by Partus Ltd. I am coaching it together with Mimmu, with whom we have been e.g. to the SoL Global Forum in Vienna and to the Young Leader Training of Team Academy back in 2005.
Henna is right now in Iisalmi working with young aspiring students, future leaders and entrepreneurs, from various vocational schools. She is the headcoach of a 24hr entrepreneurial camp. Creating the learning environment there.
Johanna is maybe having the most fun of us all. She’s being a teampreneur for her friends who have their own commercial garden. And now it’s the busiest time of the year as the spring is here so loads of seeds to be planted. That keeps Johanna busy during the days this week. “The most important thing in life is gardening, and even that is not so important.” Old Zen wisdom goes.
Janne has been doing a learning environments with our partner Business Arena today working on the local innovation ecosystem of Central Finland.
Janna and Tatu did a journey to Kokkola last friday and Tatu has been typing fingers on fire proposals for co-operation for the regional council as well as for the univ of Applied Sciences over there. Let’s see what we can cook up.
This Saturday there’s a BarCamp in Helsinki. Me and Henna will be there of the Monkeys. Very interesting to see based on my experiences with hosting Open Spaces such as the Un-conference in Jyväskylä last Friday with Jane Porter. It was great to host a pretty revolutionary event made in co-operation between the Jyväskylä’s two universities.
Next week we have about 20 people coming from all over Europe to visit Finland. It’s a gathering of people with spark in their eyes to learn something about Systems Intelligence and how to deal with uncertain times. Very excited about this co-creational jungle trip with CoMind fellows.
I wonder what I am forgetting. Oh yes, we’ve got a new Monkey into the office. Iiro is a DJ, and about to graduate from Team Academy before the midsummer. He’s finishing now his thesis about exporting Finnish educational model into abroad. I am very honoured to get his energy and expertise into the Monkey Business. You are most welcome Iiro!
And finally, join our email list in order to get some exclusive news in a yellow and playful form. Keep us posted and we will do the same?
What is this Monkey Business?
Apr 7th
Common desire? Trust? Shared vision? Ugh. Puzzled. Yes. Words are challenging, even dangerous, ´cos it takes time to create common understanding. And we use words to get our experiences in somekind of order or frames. Is lack of imagination the only limit? Through words we create the world we live in, thus they are important. Is the glass half full or empty, or maybe the glass just has some water in it? What happens when we are on holiday? What it does to us?
We’ve been learning the hard way that without shared vision we are like a bunch of kids in a playground. Through anxiety we have realized we need to spend more time together as a team. That’s what they say that teaming up needs, shared time and a shared challenge.
According to Senge:
Premature converge of words of the vision sucks the life energy out of it.
So how do you know that time is right? By trial & error? What are the corner stones of building shared vision?
More action. More chaos. More mistakes. More learning.
More Creativity.
More trust. Myself. Us. Monkey Business. You. World. Life.
Team Evolution & Dialogue – insights from TA@Uni Surrey
Apr 4th
At 18th-19th of March we had an honour to work with Uni of Surrey and SoL UK by hosting 2 days of TA workshops at UK. There’s a plan to implement TA to the educational field of UK, and therefore we are learning and working together. The workshops were hosted by Surrey Team Enterprise Project, STEP1 team. From TA the hosts were Petrus Piironen from 3rd year team company Cromita, Alexandra Tancula from the World Wide Team, myself from MB and Mikael Hirvi from Partus, the Team Academy adult education and brand managing company.
In the workshops one theme was rising up as essential part of TA, and here I want to reflect on it. There had been a thought of implementing TA in Surrey as short courses / summer programs with an intention of piloting it so. Before we even got into deeper discussion about the benefits and downsides of the short courses, Petrus got a system intelligent insight of showing this Team Evolution modelling made by a Monkey fellow Ville Hast.
We described this figure by sharing a fact that on the first year teams are less productive than members of the team as indivuals could be, but investing time for working as a team makes us exponentially productive by the 4th year. Then Arie de Geus took this figure in deeper analysis by sharing us a story and example of the power of dialogue from the Roayl Dutch Shell, where the management teams aimed to spend hours and hours dialoguing. Why so? Because due to the shared knowledege and understanding they gained by dialoguing their desicion making process improved remarkably making them fast at implementing desicions and committing people to work on changes. Dialogue simply brought competence for the company.
It was clear then, that short courses of TA are useful as pilots, but for making it really a successful learning program in the Uni no less than 3 years is the recommended lenght of a program, because team learning and dialogue need time. In Team Academy Finland team companies the first two years go for learning the dialogue with 8 hours / week basis and investing for learning, and the 3rd and 4th year as a team bring exponential growt in quality of the ideas and action of the team members and thus the revenues also grow. In adult learning programs 1 year time frame works well, because adult learners come with more experience and capabilities to think together than the BBA learners aged 18-30.
Summasummarum: dialogue is power and it’s wise to make effort for allowing time for it in any learning program and company. At this UK journey I started valuing our Mondays Are For Monkeys dialogue sessions especially! …we’ve got a chance to improve so much when we invest on dialogue.
With yellow Easter regards,
Henna Monkey
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