Posts Tagged ‘Monkey Philosophy’

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Monkeys on the road!

Friday, February 5th, 2010

” I visited your website and didn´t just get what you do? ” Typical comment from our friends. What do we do? What have been doeing lately? Are we REAL entrepreneurs? How are we making world more fun and yellow?

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Every Monday Morning is Monkey Monday. Or sometimes it´s Tuesday. But we need to be in face to face contact to learn, laugh and live. Last week I and Ville hoasted four hours in Lahti University of  Applied science. Our hidden plan was to encourage two hundred students towards creative economy and entrepreneurship. But our visible goal was to run the best and most enjoyable schoolday of year 2010. We used stories, dialogue, mental models game and punisher vs. pyromane -exercise. In the end about 90% of students answered YES! So it was “good tennis” from us. Good Job.

Thursday Janne went to coach three days session for start up entrepreneurs in a 1,5 year long process in Central Finland, Laukaa area. And now he is ending  a one similar process in Northern Finland, Posio area. Janne is our specialist for long processies. I was working for a day in Helsinkin with Brand Brothers Finland for Tammi publishers. Our task was challenging: “do what feels right”. So we worked as interaction fakirs to make some atmosphere magic…

Henna and Johanna has had several meetings around issue of HUB Jyväskylä in Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Tampere. Henna is fighting hard to save her home region, Iisalmi by entrepreneurship. And aside Henna has closed some related deals. Johanna has found a surprice for us. It´s red? We´ll see it on monday…

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Ville the Fox, our geek has been coaching two days in University of Oulu with Zestmark. Aside Ville takes care of our connections to the virtual world. And he is also the brains for Monkey Business with his ideas, precence and jazz. Francis Francis X1, yellow, arrived to our office on Tuesday. And we were really exited. Not a single cup of espresso was made. Cos it was ESE(easy serving espresso) model and we returned it at the same day. The biggest failure of the week. Wednesday we had a deep three hour dialogue with Innovation Professor Antti Hautamäki from University of Jyväskylä. Themes were creative economy and cultures meaning for an area. Results will go to parliaments future forum and we are one example…

So here we go. Again. And again. Something will be remembered and alot forgotten. Take it yellow!

 

Tantourist.

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Welcome to the Jungle Matti Nykänen & people!

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Yes! “Life is human beings best time.”(Quote by Matti Nykaenen) We have spent the morning by cleaning our new Yellow Office. All five monkeys swinging with mops around floors, walls and toilet. Fun together! Maybe not the core substance of Monkey Business – but we found the life line from sauna.

It was really exiting to open the door to the new world which our friends Jerri&co had painted during Wednesday night. They are graffiti painters and we had not seen any sketch before hand. You step in and turn on the lights. It takes a moment and WOW! A lot of colors and amazing two different worlds at the back wall of training space (and sauna upstairs). Jungle, see, shark, huge Gorilla, VERY cool Monkey Business piece and a lot more.  Easier to change aspect, maybe. Experience Economys E as Escapism and E as Esthetics starts to match. We don´t want office - we want inspiring surroundings to live and meet friends/strangers. To make world more fun and yellow. When are you coming?

banaanikasatupsu

Picture above is drawn by Juhis, Tupsu -a really talented young gun from the Valley of Creativity. We need to save some space on walls for him also. Facinated about cartoons & drawings? Order your own comic strip now from Juha Matti Kinnunen, Cheerful Monkey.

 

Tantourist.

ps. Really living mind expanding times. New office and my younger son Paavo starts to crawl at any moment…

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What´s cooking Linus?

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Our campaign for January is wild as a Jungle and beating like a drum. Order one monkey now – and get second for free! Two monkeys for the price of one! Double amount of action, chaos and mistakes means at least six times more of learning. Maybe? Choose your Monkeys here: MonkeyBusiness_pres (Great profiles made by Nic. THANKS!)

We are supporters of fundamental freedom. Everyone is able to achieve what ever in the world – if you don´t mind who gets the honour. Pekka Himanen´s book, The Hacker Ethic, has had a lot influence to our Ideology. Passion and dedication to that, building on enthusiasm will carry on. So how can we encourage people on that? More listening to heart than rational mind? How do we help people to join enriching communities? How do we help people to find out who they really are? And what are they really passionate obout? And what is their strenght, superpower that they should build on? How do we help individuals to lead theirselves?

Linus Thorvalds created source code of Linux and story goes on. What is source code of Monkey Business? The DNA that people monkeying around are sharing? Do you feel the call?

 

Tantourist.

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Posted in Books, Friends of Monkey Business, Monkey Business | 1 Comment »

How to become a superhero?

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Year 2010 and new decade has started rolling really fast. And it feels good. Monkey Business coreteam has had good dialogues around issue of each player role. Henna answered to question about responsibilities that she would like to be a superstar.

That ignited my thinking – how to became a superstar? We all have super powers, I am sure. But we need help to find them, to feel secured enough learning to use them. And that is where we need communities, loving and caring surroundings. And that is why I feel so good about being in Monkey Business.

What kind of history you want to create? What is your superpower?

“God won´t  ask me why I wasn´t Moses. He will ask me why I wasn´t Susya.” -Rabbie Susya-

 

Tantourist. In flames!

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X-mas Calender day 13 – What is this Monkey Business?

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

That´s THE question. Here are some quotes from people whom we have met while chewing bananas:
*Experienced Business Coach, woman: “Monkey Business is formed around easy customers who buy what ever these Monkeys sell.”

*Senior Business Coach, man: ” Monkey Business is nothing,  it´s just a tribe of fifty people or so.”  

*Manager for International Affairs, man: ” Do these people know what Monkey Business means? How can their thinking  be that low?”

*Innovation Manager, man:” You can´t be the best in the world. It is not possible.”

 

So, what do you think? What is this Monkey Business?

 

Tantourist -giving big warm hug to our supporters around the world. THANK YOU!

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Posted in Christmas Calendar, Meeting with cool people, Monkey Business | 2 Comments »

First reply to our legendary letters!

Friday, December 11th, 2009

YES! I got a letter yesterday. Chritmas card in an envelope, with printed address sticker. Text was written by hand. And I was sooo exited to realize it was from Jaana Venkula. I wrote to her 14th of September – it´s also in our blog, here.

Jaana thanks me for the splendid letter which she got and wellcomes us to be in contact with her later. And all the best for 2010.

Jaana – this was really uplifting! THANKS!

Tantourist.

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Posted in Friends of Monkey Business, Meeting with cool people, Monkey Business, Short Article, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Thesis about Team Academy by Esa Saarinen

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Our Office

We still are squatting in the premises of Team Academy, and today when I came from the surprisingly close-by grocery store I thought once again: “Team Academy is great because in here it is ok and encouraged to be excited.” Why did I think that? Well, I had just seen one Teampreneur painting graffiti related to the 24hr birth-giving of Team Company Dilectio. He was enjoying and laughing while doing the painting. And then Kaisu of Dilectio saw the graffiti, and she clearly was very excited about that.

That reminded me of the 7 thesis our friend, the explosively insightful philosopher Esa Saarinen has coined about Team Academy. He introduced these in the Team Academy’s 15th anniversary seminar in January 2008 where me and Tatu were the MC’s. I thought I should post them here to remind people who have seen them before, and maybe there are some to whom these are new.

The Core Reasons to the Success of the Team Academy: Esa Saarinen, the Famed Finnish Philosopher speaking

  • Thesis 1 In the Hall of Fame of Experience-Based Learning Team Academy is # 1
  • Thesis 2 Some People Speak, Team Academy Acts.
  • Thesis 3 Team Academy Brings Dreaming Back to Professional Education.
  • Thesis 4 Team Academy Calls Out to Young People to Express their Sincerity and Joy, apparently as the Only
    Educational Institution in Finland.
  • Thesis 5 In the Endless Fight Between Stick-Disciplinary-Narrow-Mindedness and Breaking Out from Barriers, Team Academy Chooses Excitement.
  • Thesis 6 The Core of Team Academy is Based on the Most Sustainable and Solid Foundation of Finnish Basic Values: Robust Pragmatism and the Spirit of Equality.
  • Thesis 7 Team Academy is Based on the Power of Community and the Human In-Between, but behind it All is an Individual Who is Willing to Give Out His Everything for the Cause that Matters.

My favorite is maybe number 7 phrasing very nicely the connection and relationship between the individual teampreneur and the team/community. What are yours?

Ps. We are planning to organize an after party for all times Paphos-meeting in January together with Esa and the Paphos Alumni of  Design Factory.

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Ten Steps on Tribe Marketing Offline

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Hey all and especially Jaana,

190509_Monkey_Business-2014

this morning when I biked to our yellow office I saw a vision of a blog post with then steps or principles about marketing to your tribe. This list is about building your tribe outside the internet and web 2.0. That list will come a little later on. So here we go!

1. Make meaning. (Guy Kawasaki)
2. Come up with a good name. (Guy Kawasaki)
3. Find a good slogan. (Like a core promise a la Thomas Gad)
4. Print the slogan on an ecological and fair trade T-Shirt.
5. Find a cool artist to draw a logo for you.
6. Print the slogan and logo on a notebook and distribute notebooks to your friends and customers.
7. Make cool stickers and hit them on the streets.
8. Make pins.
9. Get busy meeting (new) people.
10. Have fun doing all the above.

This is what we have done. Well, we also bought yellow jeans. Did I forget something?

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Monkey Business Top Salary Limit

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Greetings from Tulimyrsky. Me and Tatu are here on stage today. Very exciting experiment coming up in less than two hours: Dialogue with Keränen. It’s a talkshow Conan O’Brien style with four guests: Antti Kettunen from Solidi, Juha Kauppinen from SiteFactory, Karoliina Luoto from Sitra and The Office Nomad, Janne Saarikko.

Anyways, before our show we had a key note by Sami Salmenkivi from N2 Laundry. More about all this later, but in our table talk I got encouraged to push more content to our blog. With the philosophy of bringing value (hopefully), but more experiments rather than pursuit of perfection. So here we go, a post written about month ago. Idea has been around for 1 year or so. Keep it yellow!

We have been thinking about making a volunteeringly a top limit to the salaries in our company which would equal to the average Finnish salary that currently is about 2870 euros.

I think this one way to be a sustainable company. Firstly, we don’t pay ourselves out of the market. Secondly, I think often the ones who earn most also consume more than those with less resources.

It is said that we need to dramatically decrease the amount of the Greenhouse gases. Still I am writing this post at the Airport in Paris on my way to Bilbao. Peter Senge says we need to innovate new ways of living, nobody planned the industrial revolution and it was not centrally governed. It was more like thousands of small initiatives that made it happen. And that is going to be same with the new sustainable lifestyle revolution. It is not centrally governed and it will not be televised, although YouTube and Twitter and other social media will surely play a big role. World is flat and a member of The Hub here in Jyvaskyla can easily go and work in The Hub in Madrid, Sao Paulo or London, just to mention few. We will start with little monkeys a sustainable coffee house here in Jyväskylä and it is going to be a great success!

It is also maybe related to the transparency of our business. We want to make the world better by making it more fun and yellow. We are in the business of encouraging people. We work only with nice customers (our friends) but we are ready to take on joyful challenges. We work on projects that make the world better. We work with people who share this mission. Because the drove towards your dream is the biggest driver in this world.

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Monkey Business Design Philosophy

Friday, October 30th, 2009

We are working on building a new lay out for our blog (and there’s a blog in Finnish coming up too!) and for that process I wrote out some of the design philosophy down. This is version 0.5 BETA but I thought I should still drop it out for you. Here’s the classic banana with classes drawn by Lady My of MyJok back in late 2007.

The Banana

1. Our mission is to make the world more fun and yellow. Our design are also fun and colorful.
1. Things are as they look and feel to a person. Not as somebody intents them to be but as someone experiences them.
1. All yellow is good. Our graphics don’t need to follow one clearly defined pattern or a set of rules, but part of our brand is that the visuals change a lot.
2. A Banana drawn by Lady My is the banana for us. We will stick to that until something totally explosive comes to our way.
3. All monkeys and bananas are part of our design strategy.
4. Our graphics should be aligned with our style. That is yellow, playful and sincere. Our Graphics and Designs should enhance the same message.
6. We like skateboarders, clothing designers, surfers, musicians and other party people in general. The idea is to enjoy life and have fun. Our designs should also follow that ideology. We search for ideas and inspiration everywhere but nature and pop culture especially.
7. We like to promote a wide range of designs and designers. We work with people we like and think are cool. We want to have loads of different designs.

Have a yellow weekend everyone!

Ps. The book recommendation of this week is by Hugh MacLeod and is called “Ignore Everybody – and 39 other keys to creativity.” I read it over the summer and is a quick read and gave me quite a few insights. There loads of good quotes and even more insightful drawings. Some of the things he writes and draws seems a bit cynical to me but he cleared it all by saying this: “Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle i.e. being human.” That’s the spirit I guess. You can read plenty of samples of the book at Hugh’s website.

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