Archive for the ‘Travelling’ Category

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Monkey Business Book Project

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

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
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.

DSC_8343

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.

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Posted in Books, Monkey Business, Travelling | No Comments »

In the spirit of Richard Branson, maybe?

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

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?

Don´t mess with serious issues!

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.

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Posted in Monkey Business, Travelling | 1 Comment »

The Yellow Man and the Art of Hosting event

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

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:

MB-Blog1

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

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Posted in Cool and Important, Meeting with cool people, Monkey Business, Products, Team Academy International Network, Travelling | 3 Comments »

Solo Experience in Finland in Summer 2010

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

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!

Solo Experience in the Finnish Forrest by Monkey Business
View more documents from Ville Monkey.

Loads of yellow! Ville

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Posted in Dialogue, Marketing, Products, Travelling, Workshop | No Comments »

X-mas Calendar Day 24th

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Don´t hesitate – don´t open it yet! Oh you did it allready. Is everyday like Christmas eve for you? Life as a gift?

We got a suberb surprise yesterday: we were kicked out from our office. Gotta be out until March. How can they kick us out? We don´t have any rent agreement made. We have been squatting here. What do we do now?

We give you a present. Order us to your office. For a week – month – year? To work with you. To help you. To boost you. What? Like office nomad. All we need is your kind invitation.

Or buy us to collaborate with you. We could:
*make a promotour to Lappland with cyclable electrical cars to work as an instant helpdesk for entrepreneurs(LeTim loves this idea)
*clean your carage
*organize a week long adventure for children of your employees
*?

HappyBrownBanana

“Life is like a banana – the longer you wait the sweeter it gets. Until it turns brown.” -Forrest Gump

Tantourist.

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Posted in Friends of Monkey Business, Meeting with cool people, Monkey Business, Short Article, Travelling | No Comments »

Day 4 – for meetings with people you know but don’t expect to see on the places you go – magic of networks

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Have you ever found a bunch of old friends when participating in an event with an interesting topic but unfamiliar organization? Or going to visit a place from where you know only one person, but while being there meet many other old friends too?

Tilannekuva-2009-12-04-10-19-20

This kind of coincidences happen more and more in this small earth! And I think it’s an uplifting issue because “intelligently accidental” human meetings bring extra joy in life. It just happened to me when I googled Survival Academy, an event I decided to participate to because the topic calls me to go, even though I don’t know the organization. However, by discovering better this http://survivalacademy.ning.com/ I got to know that +15 of my friends are connected in that event and we’ll potentially meet up in there. Today the same phenomenon came when I met a friend called Oliver Saarinen with whom we participated http://www.tulenkantajat.com/, and while visiting his school http://www.hse.fi/en/mikkeli I randomly met there a friend called Joonas Kallankari who was my team mate at http://www.emaxnordic.com/ in 2007. Long time, no see, but it’s definetely good to follow the curious path and choose to go in places where these good old friends can be found.

Try it today: google an event you are interested in, for example this: http://survivalacademy.ning.com/events?page=4 and see who you know out of the participants even though you might not know the organizers. Or make a date with a person you know for some cool reason but haven’t seen for a while, and see how many common friends / actions you have now. You will be surprised!

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Posted in Cool and Important, Friends of Monkey Business, Meeting with cool people, Travelling, Workshop | 1 Comment »

Monkey Christmas Calender – Day 3

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Dear friends,

sometimes when you hear a good song it brings back good memories. July 2008 I had an oppurtunity to see Bruce Springsteen & E Street Band live in Olympic Stadium, Helsinki. When Max Weinberg hit the drums for the first time and Bruce let his guitar sing, I felt right away, that this is the show I had been waiting for.

The gick was in late july and it was a beautiful summernight. At the end of show, after three hours head blowing rockin, Bruce and the Band had one more suprise. Even though it was hot and sweaty, everybody had strenght rock just that one more song. Below you can check the video and please, sing along: Santa Claus is coming to Town!

With Yellow Regards,
Janne Monkey

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Posted in Cool and Important, Monkey Business, Music, Short Article, Travelling, Video | 1 Comment »

Greetings from Iceland and LAVA09

Friday, November 13th, 2009

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?Tatu & Johanna

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.

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Posted in Cool and Important, Dialogue, Marketing, Monkey Business, Travelling, Video, Workshop, facilitation | 1 Comment »

Book of the week in Nordic / Scandinavian spirit!

Friday, November 6th, 2009

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!

Senac Main Campus

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 :)

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Posted in Books, Dialogue, Marketing, Monkey Business, Team Academy International Network, Team Coaching, Team Mastery, Travelling, Workshop, facilitation | 4 Comments »

Monkeys and Iceland – LAVA09

Friday, November 6th, 2009

So this Sunday Me, Tatu and Johanna will take a plane and fly to Iceland. We got three monkeys into an exciting and creative crew of about 15 entrepreneurs. I am not exactly sure what our mission over there will be but I can say that we are very excited. Somehow probably we work with this ad hoc team of ours to shake and bake with the local companies. Maybe? This is what Tatu wrote couple weeks back to Nic, who organized the team of entrepreneurs:

Tatu

I have been rolling with the lottery ball and here are three happy winners on their way to icy & bubling land with recomments:
* Tatu – ofcourse born with golden spoon in the ass and founder of Monkey Business – good action ignitioner, stubborn but human, learning is passion
* Ville – founder of Monkey Business and grown up in periphery, nowadays happy owner of Liikenne Keränen, deep thinker, philosofist, theory mixer
* Johanna – lady to keep things on track and boys in leash, good organizer, power maker, humble leader

I copied some websites (from the event page) that our mixed team are involved with:

EVENT CREATION  www.insomniafestival.no
FREE CULTURAL PAPER GRUS www.grus.as
MONKEY BUSINESS www.banana.fi
VOCAL DEVOTION www.vocaldevotion.com
HEAVY METAL BAND SABATON  www.sabaton.net
CINEMATOGRAPHY http://www.tero-saikkonen.com/
PAIZANO DESIGN http://www.paizano.se/
STILETT DESIGN & COMMUNICATION http://www.designlabland.se/dlab/designlabland-group/
KRAMFORS STUDIO NOCRY www.studionocry.se
BOOMTOWN MUSIC BUSINESS COLLEGE www.boomtown.nu
CARTOON ARTIST http://www.incubiz.eu/page/story-4-blastwave-sfx-business-finland/
SOUND & PERFORMANCE ARTIST http://www.myspace.com/smulton
THE NOCRY VIRTUAL BUSINESS INCUBATOR www.incubiz.eu

You can download a pdf with profiles of the people coming and some other extra materials. Also, see a program draft pdf in here. Good graphics by Nic, again!

I will keep you posted about our trip through Social Media such as this blog, my Twitter, our new MonkeyTV, thru pictures via our new Flickr group and Facebook’s Monkey Business Page.

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