Posts tagged Monkey Philosophy
Isaacs’ Dialogue is at the Core of Monkey Business
Dec 5th
As I wrote couple days back in the blueprint of our mission statement, dialogue is at the core of what we do. There are couple of books that have inspired a lot in the field of Dialogue. E.g. William Isaacs’ Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together as well as Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. Moreover, we can go back to Bohm’s Dialogue, and then we are talking! Here’s a great illustration by Pernan Goni about the four disciplines for dialogue as stated by William Isaacs in his seminal book, the dialogue and the art of thinking together. I got the book back in 2003 from my Godmother and it’s been with me ever since.
The picture is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License so feel free to use it when appropriate.
For a higher quality version get in touch with Ville.
SURPRISE!
Oct 31st
Don´t do,
if you don´t do with full heart
-
Don´t even start.
-Jama Jamas father-
How could we get people – to behave differently?
How could we get people in flames?
How could we get more people to focus in impossible?
I love you Alex Castellarnau!
Aug 11th
Never met you, never heard about you. Instantly fell in love after receiving these principles freely translated by @Hennaism. Alex you ROCK! Original video here in spanish. These principles make me fly, cry and almost die. Really encouraging me about Monkeys being on the right track. THANKS!
Alex: After more than 5 years of experience in IDEO, we identified six principles to build environments that create innovation
1. “It’s about how we learn, not about how much we gain financially.” Not to do but to learn. The return should be learning, not economic performance.
2. Do not define a job desccription 100 % clearly. Employees come to explore and define what their job is.
3. Helping employees to explore fully their passions at work.
4. Each employee is its own brand. There are as many brands as there are people in organizations.
5. Our leaders must reflect, not direct, they have to be a mirror, no arrow. The CEO goes from executive to be explored and to be evangelist.
6. We have no destination but a good sense of direction. We have some knowledge and we have good tools for the road.
This empowering and explosive flying kiss goes to Alex and Henna, well to everybody who accepts to take it:
Tantourist – playful, everyellow and redcheeked acticboy really feeling alive. YEH!!!
“Don´t worry – be crappy!” -Guy Kawasaki, Art of Start-
Nov 17th
Old finnish saying says that it´s better to have one goose in backpack than ten flying free. So here I go. Strongly believing that one posted writing is better than ten unposted. In a way that is how all started in Monkey Busines. No business idea. A lot of questions, small and bigger ones. Or even before that here was a meeting between two humanbeings, Ville&Tatu year 2005. Maybe even Adam&Eva before that. Later some biercans and mugs of coffee. And an attitude that we can have impact. WE HAVE IMPACT!
What would an organisation from future be like? Why is business so serious? What does mother Earth say to that? What is the best misunderstanding of my life? For me it´s Monkey Business – when people were talking about Funky Business. It was something we had been seeking out. Can´t be taken too seriously, yellow and playful. Travelling was meaningfull, ideas came through conversations with new people and surfing in new cultures. Bananashaped businesscard, logo and core message.
What is the tribe I want to join? Whose truth do I believe? Who/What leads me? After what I am running for? Is it possible? What inspires me? What keeps me moving? Dream? What is the cartoon I want to create?
Juha-Matti Kinnunen aka Tupsu has drawn these cartoons. And by serendipity we have started to use it as a tool for running interactive workshops. By telling our stories and raising questions and then throwing them to participants. And sharing our story is something that inspires me. No logic. Just attitude. Yellow spirit. And a lot of actions&Dialogue. Love me or hate me. Do the newer!
Lifestyle company. With Impact. Like organic plant. Maybe?
“Follow that yellow man!”
Sep 9th
We allmost missed a flight on our way to Oman SOL Global Forum April 2008 to do our world kick off. In Frankfut Airport staff pointed way for Johanna&Hugo by pointing me running ahead and yelling:” follow that yellow man”. At the same time Henna was holding the Plane… (Btw. my Iphone went just blackout when writing this.)
Since Oman we have been creating more action here and there. And despite that we are still smiling. We see the world as we look at it. Yellow, sunny and bright. As that photo taken yesterday in our office upstairs. Or this one taken in our hoods today morning when cyckling here.
We made our record revenue in August. But we still must improve to keep our enterprise sustainable. Yellow man has got company, friends to work with us. We have been doeing right things right. Maybe. And information board downstairs is updated too!
Hey! I am happy. Life is good. Love. (Iphone still blackout.)
Thanks Monkeys & All. Wouldn´t be here alone.
Tantourist.
Seriously Yellow.
Jun 26th
Monkey Business keeps getting critics from the people who doubt our possibilities to be a ”real company” as we are. One day it’s about the unpromising name, the other day it’s about the seemingly small amount of work we do. One critical friend shared his opinion about the color, too: no serious company has a yellow brand! Yellow is associated with fun, joy, play, holiday…but not with serious business. ”Name me a serious company having yellow as a brand color?”, he challenged. Not that I’d be obsessed with a question, it just turned out that looking for serious yellow companies became a fun habit 
Now, in the sunny yellow lightness of one of these Finland’s midsummer nights, I want to share some of these yellow findings, for example:
SOL Palvelut, a big grown Finnish service business offering laundry, clean-up and staff leasing services, employing 9000 people in 4 different countries and having made a turnover of 157 million euros in 2009. In SOL yellow means the sunny positivity and the culture of freedom and responsibility. Employees can decide how they want to work and what kind of working environment they like. They were in charge of the decoration in the headquarters, too, and therefore SOL City, the uniquely and wildly designed headquarters of the company, is one of the most desired visiting destinations for the international business groups visiting Helsinki. In the past I worked for SOL Palvelut, and still remember the very positive working culture in there. I felt like part of the team and responsible, but free from the 8am to 4pm routines and having all the power to improve my work and be in direct contact with our partners every day. It was seriously yellow.
DHL Express, a German transportation company offering tailored, customer-focused solutions for managing and transporting letters, goods and information. This company made it to this list for two recent reasons. Firstly because we spotted it’s yellow transporter at our yellow office parking place, delivering goods for one of the companies we are neighboring, and secondly because it offered us a smooth solution for serving our superheroe guest when she left to Paris forgetting her iPhone in Finland. DHL delivered it to her to Paris overnight, taking a service time of 10 hours with a price of 155,55 euros. 7 hours delivery would have also been available. Why DHL is recommendable for anyone in need of express delivery? 1) It transports phone batteries, unlike the express delivery operator recommended by the Finnish main post service Itella, for example. 2) Even being a German company, has it’s web pages nicely in Finnish unlike it’s US competitor FedEx, for example. These primary reasons made us to choose for DHL, and surely we supported the yellow color, too.
Eniro with yellow Pages. Not so long ago I received a phonecall from Eniro, the leading contact search company in the Nordic media market listed in Swedish stock. Eniro was renewing it’s Yellow Pages direct search media, and asked if Monkey Business wanted to be found from there. It could have been a traditional sales call, but the first line, a question of Eniro’s agent, changed the system radically. She asked: What is this Monkey Business doing? I went: We make the world more yellow by improving supportive communication systems. She replied: Hhmmm…ahhaa, sounding like trying to construct a thought in her head before voicing it out: “Then we are in the same business! Eniro Yellow Pages is trying to make the world more yellow by improving the communication systems by creating the connections between people.” It was a good talk with the senior sales agent of Eniro who made me think that in fact it would be cool to do one joint project with Eniro. As a company, Eniro plays in another league, but we share the yellow!
These were just some examples of the yellow and serious brands. What we as Monkey Business mean and want to communicate with the yellow color is that we are all about serious fun, positivity and good vibes in communication. Yellow is the mood of action that produces good feeling and good results by empowering people.
Can you name and describe more examples of the serious yellow companies?
With all my yellow (as Johanna would say!),
Henna Monkey
P.S. Bananas are yellow, too. And very serious business, too.
Disco time baby!
May 21st
Summer is here. And Discoball arrived to our yellow office. So keep on rocking – as Henna is this picture, very exited.
What is this Monkey Business?
Apr 7th
Common desire? Trust? Shared vision? Ugh. Puzzled. Yes. Words are challenging, even dangerous, ´cos it takes time to create common understanding. And we use words to get our experiences in somekind of order or frames. Is lack of imagination the only limit? Through words we create the world we live in, thus they are important. Is the glass half full or empty, or maybe the glass just has some water in it? What happens when we are on holiday? What it does to us?
We’ve been learning the hard way that without shared vision we are like a bunch of kids in a playground. Through anxiety we have realized we need to spend more time together as a team. That’s what they say that teaming up needs, shared time and a shared challenge.
According to Senge:
Premature converge of words of the vision sucks the life energy out of it.
So how do you know that time is right? By trial & error? What are the corner stones of building shared vision?
More action. More chaos. More mistakes. More learning.
More Creativity.
More trust. Myself. Us. Monkey Business. You. World. Life.
Customers whom we want?
Mar 23rd
We Monkeys aren´t like most people. But we do need friends(customers) to play with. To learn, lead, cocreate and to make world more fun & yellow! We have to first know who we are. Seth Godin, Tribes:
“ The art of leadership is understanding what you can´t compromise on.”
Beginning of year 2010 for us has been a bit like hike in a desert. Just have to believe that the oasis will come. Seth Godin, Tribes:
” The second thing you need to know is that the only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it´s worth doeing. Faith that failure won´f destroy you.”
Cosmos has challenged us by asking: are you serious about this? Time on desert has put our values in test also. Inner pressure is sometimes almost too hard to handle. But returning back from uncomfortable zone is rewarding. Things look clear for a while – illusion of infallible.
Prahalad & Krishnan, The new age of innovation:
” Start-ups do not need well-developed proseccies.”
Form follows funtion, said someone. So what we can do is keep on doeing. Culture is the Strategy. More experiments with customers who play with same rules. So we want:
*You, whom don´t want to work overtime daily to keep up the status quo
*You, whom don´t want be sheepwalking anymore
*You, whom wants to change, yourself, organization, world
*You, whom wants to learn, all the time, everywhere, from everybody
*You, whom wants to do all this together, smiling
Eye for an eye makes the hole world blind. – Gandhi-
Tantourist.
Monkeys on the road!
Feb 5th
” 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?
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…
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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