Monkey Business
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
Exemplar Project Meeting in Yucatan, Mexico
Mar 17th
Written in Houston, Texas. On my way to Merida, Mexico and eventually to Hacienda Itzincab.
I am honoured to represent Team Academy along with Vilma Väisänen in this meeting bringing together living ‘exemplars’ creating the new economy of well-being. Idea is that as there are actually few social innovators (folks of TA in our case) in this world today and they should know about each other. It’s something loosely related to the SoL Evolution process which been going on the last year where a question something like this was asked: “Who can hold the space to bring together the different people and networks creating the new economy (of well being)?”
I am very excited about this meeting. Interesting people from interesting organizations are here. The idea is to connect with and to learn from another about personal and organizational change. Meeting is called together by Peter Senge from SoL and Dennis Sandow from Matriztic Institute among few others. Organizations represented include ROCA, La Vaca Independiente, Sustainable Food Lab, Uganda Rural Development Training, Presencing Institute, Icebreaker and few others.
Where to find more info? We have a shared page at Presencing Institute, but it’s closed. I think that sucks. We should be more open when it comes to the communication. It’s hard not to have a real page where to link and where to find more information. I think it’s better to be open and the future is in open communications. As the motivation of Richard Stallman, the originator of GPL “copy-left” license, originally was: nobody should excluded who wants to contribute. Let’s see what I can do related to that. I will keep you posted through the blog and also with some MonkeyTV.
To prepare for the meeting me and Vilma did a phone call with Manish from Presencing Institute, Peter and Jimmy of SoL. Manish put it together and I will upload it here in a moment: The questions were: What’s the essence of Team Academy? What are the challenges? How does all this relate to your work? We also did a little complimentary video about it:
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
Hub and the firemen’s pipe!
Mar 10th
Hihihi! Congratulations team Madrid por el Apertura Hub Madrid!
Cheers,
Monkeys Henna & Ville, who were there visiting the magico space before it opened.
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 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.
In the spirit of Richard Branson, maybe?
Feb 18th
Is entrepreneurship like wrestling? You need to force enemy to fall time after time. You have seen the enemy – it´s you. You take punches but you need to protect the core. You have to have self disicpline to survive.
But what does it all mean when we talk about TEAM entrepreneurship? What is my mental model about it? And when we combine team entrepreneurship to creative economy? How to measure it?
Our mission is to make world more fun and yellow. So is it the main measuring scale? We do have fun and that´s something we focus on. But how to turn it into bread? Richard Branson has said that he has allways done what has felt fun. This is really giving me headache. In my heart I know the path is right. It is leading us towards better lifre. And money has very little to do with that. How do you keep up with the faith?
Tantourist. Feeling powerless.
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
Book recommendation: Yvon Chouinard – Let my people go surfing, the education of a reluctant businessman
Feb 8th
I guess all the monkeys have read this piece of art! I’d say this book is a massive marketing input from Yvon. After reading the story of Patagonia I honestly felt a need of well performing clothes like Capilene underwear and Synchilla fleece that is made out of recyckled plastic bottles.
Behind this manifestation for quality I still knew that Tatu had bought his yellow jacket and hiking shoes from Patagonia store in NY a year ago, and nowadays only the jacket is performing perfectly, shoes went broken soon after the deal was made… And Tatu noticed that none of the clerks in the retail store had read this Patagonia business philosphy book, even if it has been available for 5 years already (published in 2005). So we came up with a conclusion that Yvon has written how he’d like to see his company performing – and the book is a description of a dream company. However this book has inspired all the monkeys to think, live and go surfing when the feeling is right. Thank you for that, Yvon!
The main question in here is: What’s quality in Monkey Business services? What’s the best performance in Monkey Business? Guiding questions for defining this case were found in the product design philosophy of Patagonia.
When doing something, you need to ask yourself: Is It functional?, Is It Multifunctional?, Is It Durable?, Does It Fit Our Customer?, Is It As Simple As Possible?, Is the Product Line Simple?, Is It an Innovation or an Invention?, Is It a Gobal Design?, Is It easy to Care For and Clean?, Does It Have Any Added Value?, Is It Authentic?, Is It Art?, Are we Just Chasing Fashion?, Are We Designing For Our Core Customer?, Have We Done Our Homework?, Is It Timely? (”If everyone thinks you have a good idea you are too late.” – Paul Hawken), Does It Cause Any Unnecessary Harm?
Sure, our business is unmaterial and more close to Service Design than Product Design. Anyway we can think of these questions in relation to our website, offers, user experiences and other key elements in our daily business. It’s important also to think of distribution, like the ease of buying from us, ease of using anything we offer, ease of finding us and getting us to work… Today has been a really enriching day in Monkey office. Johanna was full of energy with a Creative Hub offer that w edo together with Monkey friends Henna Rauhala and Malla Heinistö, Tatu made all the needed decoration in our new nest staring from hanging the hammock and fixing the bar table, and Janne was getting closer and closer to a couple of deals for coaching. Myself I got enthusiasted about one creative expedition and a possible bunch of camps to be organized for vocational school entrepreneurs at my home region in northern Finland.
It seems that the work starts to push us for quality solutions that are As Simple As Possible, Durable, Authentic (which has always been our streght!) and Planned for Our Core Customer.
Rocking it steady and keeping it yellow, Henna Monkey
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