Posts tagged Monkey Philosophy
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.
Welcome to the Jungle Matti Nykänen & people!
Jan 21st
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?
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…
What´s cooking Linus?
Jan 19th
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.
How to become a superhero?
Jan 12th
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!
X-mas Calender day 13 – What is this Monkey Business?
Dec 16th
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!
First reply to our legendary letters!
Dec 11th
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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