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
*?

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

Tantourist.

In the end, we were the work with the Northern Periphery (EU)-Projects, among which is NoCry that invited us there. They were our customers. We didn’t get to work directly with Icelandic industries as we had hoped for so for me personally it took a little time to motivate myself to work with the EU-projects. But I think we got out quite a good result in the end.

The LAVA09 was a 1.5-day seminar where people from different projects met. The Young Creative Entrepreneurs had initially a one hour slot in the program as the last thing between 5 and 6 pm. Well, the previous content ran overtime and then there was a coffee break so we had to distinguish our presentations (and drop one out) down to about 30 minutes. But I think it was a success nevertheless! So what happened during that 30-40 minutes?

1. Tatu jumps on the stage – he was kind of leader of the whole process and facilitated our part of the program. He said very few words and then the lights went off and Rasmus played some loops and music based on sounds he had recorded while in Iceland. He’s a sound architect. After that Elina started improvise with piano and sang a song she had written. I heard one of the participants say that his skin was on “chicken skin” when he listened to that. It was definitely touching.
2. Tatu asked people to shake hands and say hello to people next to them. I was watching this aside and realized the real systems intelligence behind that. Loads of positive energy was flying around from people and we could feel how they got even more excited about what’s coming up.
3. Daniel of Grus jumped on stage with his presentation about Social Media. He made a quick prototype of targeted ad on Facebook and also for Google Ads. One of his main arguments were that if you are not in Google, Youtube and Wikipedia you do not exist for many people. He also showed the new video about the fast change of the media called “Did you know?“. The title for this post is adapted from that video.
4. Then it was our turn. Me, Anette and Juha-Matti had prepared a presentation for the Pellet project. I think about all of us felt on the previous days meeting with the projects people that most of them had challenges in marketing and reaching out people. However, Tatu said later that customers managed to cheat him again, because he says that it is very easy to say that “it’s marketing that we need” even though  the real challenges may be in the fields of leadership or something else. Maybe the tool to use with the clients could be the one from Toyota Way, to ask persistently five times “why” from the client. We created quite a chaos in the previous day but that’s another story.
5. Back to our show. We picked the pellet project, well, somehow it seemed to be easy to grasp on. We couldn’t avoid the idea of taking totally unsexy and hard to market product such as a pellet and make a little provocative marketing campaign a create a story for the product. You can see the slides below. Juha-Matti from Intotalo made the drawings, he’s very good! Also, we worked very well as a team and it was a good fun. We were working hard but still didn’t take it too seriously, I guess you can see that from the result, too

After our presentation we did a very quick energy discussion with the crowd.  Right after that all the young creative entrepreneurs went to the front to show once again who we all are. And last, but not least, we heard excellent Icelandic inspired improvisational piece by Rasmus, Carro and Elina. Good stuff. Then it was time to head off for a dinner. That was an escapist experience as well…

Now I am starting to think that the two last posts in our blog have been about Marketing. We are ind of trying to get away from that – it’s not the ocean we want to sail in. We are more into igniting collectives and making the world more fun and yellow. Well, coaching for marketing is something we offer, too. That’s a way to ignite collectives, isn’t it?

Ps. The T-shirts with Techno-Pelle doing the moonwalking will be available soon.

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.

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.

Ecuadorians are entrepreneurial by nature, and in Salinas they have done nationally appreciated great work in forming co-operatives to help local farmers to export their goods to the local and international markets. Salinas is a very beautiful, mountainish (altitude 3500 meters) village of just 1200 people, but around it there are 10 000 people living in the area. Those who don´t live in the village are extremely poor, just survive but need support to live fine.

Organizations that we work with in Salinas are taking this situation into account by trying to offer education, access to the knowledge and microloans for the local families to grow out of the poverty.

This is why Salinas School of Entrepreneurship was formed here in June 2008 with the help of Finnish coaches and Finnish Ministry of Foreign affairs. In Salinas people have skills as people in Finland do. We can only offer encouragement and knowledge about how to transform skills and will into action and results. This is what we are doing here now with Valtteri from Team Academy and Timo from Finland and from the founding team of Salinas School of Entrepreneurship.

Our goal here is to try to create a sustainable basis for the project since it is so new. In order to do this, we will establish a facilitator team to work on the project and coach this team. This team will then hopefully be able to secure the diverse content of the project as well as the continuity here.

A lot of work is to be done in here still, and the main improvement to do would be improving the education. For example people in normal school in Salinas have studied English for 3-4 years, and when you ask them “How are you?”, they can answer just “¿Que?”, “What?”. Education styles are like they were in Finland 50 years or more ago, based on learning by heart and listening to the teacher giving the knowledge. Team work, interactive learning and own responsibility for learning are very new things in here. What a great field to work – we´re ignited!

After travelling for about 84 hours from Finland through London, New York, Miami and Panama city, sleeping a bit here and there, also spending an evening in New York, we finally arrived to Salinas on Wednesday evening.

Our first impression about Salinas School of entrepreneurship was: what a marvellous work they have done already! On the first night we were welcomed by the whole team of 30 learners and 4 coaches and organizators. They had prepared a program for the night for us to get to know what is going on with the school. I (Henna) also had to speak Spanish for the whole group right away, and it was okay despite the mistakes make all the time. Valtteri and Timo are fluent in Spanish already, and as a team we can manage.

I got to know Roosevelt a little bit when we met in the SoL Global Forum in Muscat, Oman in April 2008. And now when I heard he will give a presentation at SoL Finland’s members meeting I had to go there because I am quite interested in his work for couple of reasons.

Fireworks of one show of Rio Carnivals 2008

Firstly, I was in carnival in Rio last year during my trip around the world. See the picture above. That was a great experience, thank you Paulo for hosting me and Tapio there. Secondly, I think Team Academy is using festivals quite a bit in it’s processes. Third reason is the Esa Saarinen’s fantastic James Bond philosophy. In that the 5th point is following the real meaning of things is revealed in Bahamas. So one day I want to go to Bahamas and understand the real meaning of things.

What Roosevelt told about people who participate organizing festival reminded me of what Pekka Himanen talk about people writing code in his book the Hacker Ethic. In both cases, people are enthusiastic about what they do, are willing to work long hours, they want to do their best and get even better, they feel that they are appreciated and part of something bigger than themselves could achieve alone. The challenge is to bring this into practice. How can we build workplaces where people are like coders at their best or people working for the festival?

In the meeting there was also talk about power of images in building the vision and the power of self-organizing. He mentioned open space as a starting point for a new way of organizing.

This is a question that has no simple answer. (Maybe?) But for this complex issue of building organization Roosevelt brings the ideas of Festivals. He encourages people to organize festivals in their workplaces also literally. They offer people chance to take responsibility and thrive in a position other than their usual one. They are also good for bringing up the spirit of the organization, networking both internally and externally and celebrating success and learning. Like Kouzes and Posner say in their book The Leadership Challenge: Encourage the Heart! Is there a better way to bring up the spirit than celebrating together?

In Team Academy, where I used to learn on a daily basis, there are many festivals. Some are internal and some are open festivals for the whole network including customers and partners. When new penguins (first year teampreneurs) join the Team Academy in August there is a so called baptism party for them. After that they are officially part of Team Academy. That’s usually on the first week when they arrive. About after a month in early october there are the first ones of the bi-annual rocket days. The Rocket Days is a two-day event where whole Team Academy participates. This is the real carnival. All the teams are dressed according to a theme. For example once the general theme of the rocket days was the middle age and thus one team was dressed as farmers, the other one as monks, third one as nobel folks, some as slaves etc. So teams are clearly distinguished from each other. The other Rocket Days are held in March.

Ville & Tapio in Rio Carnival 2008. We got to pose by the truck.

The biggest festival of Team Academy is the anniversary held around the 19th of January. The biggest party so far was the 15th anniversary which was also the day when Team Academy reached it’s vision to be the top unit of entrepreneurship in Finland. We had about 300 people in a seminar on Friday and 500 people celebrating in a gala on Saturday night. That was a nice party. Monkey Business (Ville and Tatu) were the MC’s of the seminar and Tatu even continued to host the gala. That was probably also the most international of our festivals as it had Ignition participants there as well as people from the first Team Mastery who actually did their final birth giving at the seminar and people from a Learning Expedition. All that was a good fun.

What are the festivals of your organization? Or your tribe and network?

Ps. Yesterday we were working at Aivomyrsky. It was loads of fun. Good action. I’ll post about that soon. It was a one kind of festival for young people interested in Entrepreneurship. Written by Monkey Ville

Ps2. Pictures and post in Finnish about the above mentioned Rocket Days at LeTim’s blog. Highly recommended!