Video
Greetings from Hacienda Itzincab: 1st Day of Exemplar’s Meeting
Mar 20th
Mwalimu of URDT on this QIK MonkeyTV video shares what’s about to happen on the first day.
We are here to learn from one another and yesterday we started by a presentation by ROCA. The story was told by the founder Molly, and the work they are doing is amazing. Building spaces where change can happen. For high risk youth. They work in the city of Chelsea, close to Boston, USA with youth that have big trouble ion their lifes. Suchs as drugs, gangs, violence, guns, teen pregnancy etc. What they do is to build a community and a follow a change process that slowly helps them to change. The story was also a story of struggle and growth of the founder, how she had to change first herself in order for the youth and the police and the officials to change. They use Peace Making Circles, and people can call whenever there is need: “Could we organize a circle?”. It’s the same with our dialogue circle, helps to deal with internal and external. The same with us Monkeys, we need to have our Monday Mornings are for Monkeys in order to keep the alignment and good spirit.
We also started to talk about the challenge and joy of scaling up the efforts and organization. Does the business stand for itself or the founder? asked Jeremy, the founder of Icebreaker. What’s the original intent of the organization? What will happen if the leader/CEO/founder/entrepreneur is suddenly taken away by accident or something?
Another idea what I wanted brought up here was ideas and pondering about leadership. How do we conceive leadership? a)Acting oneself? b)enabling action of others? Or how do we lead in a way that enables learning? Maybe leading loving? if love is to see a person as they really are and not as our projection or self-reflection? Nurturing people’s growth to be the best they can be?
Thanks for all, I feel grateful to be here. Keep it yellow!
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!
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
Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success
Feb 2nd
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?
Keep it yellow everyone! Peace, 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
X-Mas Calender: Day 16. Theme Years of Monkey Business
Dec 16th
Hou hou hou!
Monday I was participating Partus Ltd. strategymeeting (and Xmas party..) and there supercoach Stu Vainio reminded me about Team Academys theme years before achieving our vision (YHY = Top Unit of Entrepreneurship). I think that themes were planned by our head coach Johannes, but they sure wen´t into action by the people of Team Academy. Well, then I thought that we in Monkey Business should also have themes for upcoming years. So here we go.
2010 – Mahatma Gandhi – We must be The Change We Wish to see in The World. Monkey Business is about changing the world more yellow and fun. Since joining Monkey Business, I have noticed that in most of cases world is not ready to change. That is why I chose Gandhi to be be the first theme. If we don´t believe that change is possible, I don´t think that nobody else will either. Monkey see, Monkey Do.
2011 – Urho Kaleva Kekkonen – Stubbornes & Continuity. Season 2 is always the hardest. After start we won´t be so new and fresh anymore. Or will we? We have to be stubborn and brave enough to walk the path that we chose. UKK did not explain if somebody didn´t understand. He just said: “Relax, you´ll see it someday.”
2012 – Tupu, Hupu & Lupu – Year of Victories. Very often winning is about attitude. If you wan´t to win, you have to think everything through winning. When you decide to win, you will do what you have to do.
2013 – Paola Suhonen & Linus Torvalds. – Creativity & Networking. What is the difference between good and great? I don´t know. But I think that one difference at least is that great can change faster. In this fast and furious world that we live in, nothing lasts if they can´t create something new and succeed again. Life is about learning and learning is the fuel that keeps us going futher and futher. We will be Monkeys forever but our business won´t be the same forever. Like Matti Nykänen said: Living is the best part of life.
2014 – George Foreman – Ali knocked me out and I started my own BBQ. What happens 2014? You´ll never know. Will we get knocked out? Maybe.
Janne Monkey
Monkey Christmas Calender – Day 3
Dec 3rd
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
Nathaniel the Kaospilot taught us Graphic Facilitation
Nov 23rd
Finally on Friday last week we put the graphics on our offices wall but read below what happened before that.
Last week we got a great surprise guest to our office. He is a friend of a friend of a friend of ours and he was visiting Jyväskylä and then he popped up into our office. And now he is a friend of ours as well. His name is Nathaniel, and he is probably the first ever Kaospilot to actually visit Team Academy. Kaospilots are cool, they have a strong sustainability value to their education, and also they have eye for design. Besides, they do learn about process facilitation, team work and entrepreneurship. The goal is to educate social innovators, I think. Be sure to check them out if you didn’t know about them yet. I also wrote earlier about Kaospilot’s good marketing.
Anyways, we got along very well with Nathaniel, and he taught us some cool tricks about Graphic Facilitation. After having some coffee and talking about various things Nathaniel showed us a video he had done. And, you maybe guessed, we wanted to do the same kind of things about our own products. We picked up our new product called Kick Ass Event Facilitation and here are the results. First Nathaniel himself and third one is Tatu in Finnish. We also got a small making of/behind the scenes video on Youtube and we got pitches by Henna, Hugo, myself and Johanna waiting to be published shortly. Tatu kinds of comes to this video shooting from the bushes; he wasn’t told beforehands what product he was supposed to explain about. The idea was to keep the video presentations authentic and alive, kind of the jazzy style improvization. Any questions, ideas or similar? Please share them through comments or get in touch with us directly. We are ready to rock with you!
edit: Henna wasn’t happy with her video being online so I took it out. Sorry for that – both Henna (for putting it here in the first place) and the world (that it’s not online anymore).
Greetings from Iceland and LAVA09
Nov 13th
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.
Nic Mepham Singing the Blues about Yellow
Sep 7th
Our friend Nic Mepham, the creative agent from Kajaani Finland, also working for Intotalo Kajaani came by Jyväskylä this last Thursday. As he arrived in the evening he said that he has an intuition that we should go and visit Team Academy: “Maybe someone is there.” So I saw the bike of Petrus outside and I thought he was probably working on Team Mastery Arena but we found out that he was there for a training session of his new rhythm and poet orchestra Mahtavaa Tennistä (Amazing Tennis in English). He was there with a guitar and Nic wanted to participate. This is the result!
Quite amazing, isn’t it?
Nic also taught me (Ville) a little about how to sing blues, and we got into a deep dialogue about creativity, courage and coffee. Those three C’s are Nic’s thing. Aki of Spym was challenged about his thing and Petrus was encouraged to play his own songs. I think that’s what we should all do. Just as William Isaacs in his book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together tells a story about one piano playing consultant who is being asked: “Who plays your music if you don’t do it yourself?”
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