First We Take Manhattan…

20101007: Time for us to leave for New York. Visiting Droga 5 for Futuregames students, Quest2Learn for inspiration next step elementary school, Central Park for…anyway seven days, it will be lovely…We’ll keep you posted! And listen to what Leonard sings…

Cheers! Per & Tom

20100915: Collective Brainwork…

We have now – as a part of following our strategy to build new education concepts every year – developed and being involved in eight new applications for Yrkeshögskolemyndigheten,  in two applications for EU programmes and two offers for quite big projects. All in the last two weeks.
We haved worked hard and it have been a perfect teamwork involving both internal and external people.

Meaning that the first step in our business strategy is fullfilled.
Now time to turn our attention to good old consulting. We have great desires to do good work and make you some new offers helping your business to develop and prosper.

We will over the next period develop that side of our business and present ways to improve your business and daily life.

Our simple goal right now is to keep up the speed and keep on delivering new albums every half year.  And to celebrate that we did well right now.

Kindly,  Tom

20100901: Tom reports from a boat… – news from Turkey
I´m sitting on the deck of a Güllet, somewhere in Turkey. We, Changemaker, are in the middle of our most hectic month in a long long time – everybody is needed, everyone has crunchtime.

So what am I doing here? Well, somehow I’m doing my work too: sitting on a boat in Turkey, drinking a cold glass of white wine, doing my business.

At Changemaker we decided to – looking over a year – to place out some oasis, free zones, a marathon in Berlin, doing nothing on a boat, beeing curios in New York or in Bjursås – that kind of things. We decided to try to work more “artistic” if you like. Longer periods with lots of creative space – and with no demands coming home with the big answers. Knowing us, we’ll do that anyway. We will benefit from our excursions into the wild, or in the books, whatever, in long periods thereafter. I´m doing nothing – and it is good business.

We now launched our new website. We are pretty happy with it – simple, easy to develop, alive. Right now the future looks so interesting we got to hold on. Starting a company together with Anton B Nielsen – the biggest education company in Scandinavia – with Changemaker as the smallest. We are going international, mainly through our flagship education Futuregames – building business and projects around our students being abroad. Looking at both Germany and UK. And India for a start. And we are heavily into applying new education concepts. We loose some and we win some. We lost Almir to Japan – but he´s back now. We lost Lotta for a period but she still around. More focuses than ever.

Last week we had to postpone our new education in Arvika due to lack of interested students, we got not as many applicants as we needed. And for the first time in a long time we had to close down a process. It was a hard decision, also telling the people that actually wanted to study, that we did not start. But it was the right decision, both regarding people and money (but we definitely lost on this one). Also an internal learning process. And that is whats is´s all about.

Changemaker will go on doing projects and educations in the quite broad areas that concern and interest us. We don´t have one goal. All though all management and business theory tells us – you got to focus on one thing. But – again with an art perspective – we don´t want to reduce ourselves or the type of work we are doing, or the people we are working with, to one thing. We are all over.

Sitting in a boat with blue water under me, looking towards home and changemaker – it seems to me that there is much more at stake right now than just running a daily business. Moving into social entrepreneurship, self organizing movements, the changing of the global scene, combinations of all these, the changing in how we want to live our lives, with our families and loved ones, the need to combine the individual with the responsible community, combinations – doing just business becomes – well, irrelevant. I don’t know where we at changemaker is going with this, we keep trying the creative balance. Boat, hard work, rethinking. this is what we do. keep on changing.

Love, Tom