Posts tagged Interaction
Core Competences of Monkey Business
May 16th
We were planning a coaching session with Ville for an organisation that had problems with quality. Organisation is working in a field where the quality is extremely important. We were chatting and talking about the case and different views we need to consider. We were thinking should we make an intro about the quality; maybe tell the steps to the good quality or something. I was thinking the quality and noticed that I know very little about it. I asked Ville does he know something about the quality. He said no. Then Ville looked at me and asked the same question and the answer was the same again. We both were smiling. Why in earth we’re trying to speak about quality when we don’t know anything about it and the organisation we are coaching are the experts of it. I understood that the organisation’s CEO didn’t want us to speak about quality, but to help the staff to speak about it. Helping people to speak is what Ville and I can do well.
It is important to know what you want to do, but it is also very important to know where you are good. When you find something that combines these two aspects you have found something precious. Something you could build your business on. Monkey Business is good at creating an interaction environment, teamwork and entre /intrapreneurship.
When we started the business I had a clue what we want to do: to make world more yellow and fun. Help organisations and individuals to find meaning for their work. The second question: Where we are good was not that simple. It took two years and hundreds of meetings and projects to have some clarity to this matter. When I look these three main things, it is obvious that those are our core competences, but it was really hard for me to understand that.
Core competences make our life easier
When we are planning a coaching session or process we know what we can do by ourselves and where we need to use external professionals. If we don’t know about the issue, we should ‘t try to be experts on that field. It is really good for your self-confidence when you can say:
“I don’t know anything about that”.
It makes it possible to concentrate where you are best.
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
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?
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