tdog.blog

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A lot of web sites have an “about us” page, in which the company or organization goes on and on about how they were founded in 200x, their mission is Y, their goals are Z, and blah blah blah. This kind of thing is important, to be sure, but equally important is some kind of statement that tells you what we’re looking for. Since we’ve been around for 6+ years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with all kinds of folks, and we’ve created a nice list of favorable qualities.

In other words, we like to work with the following kinds of people.

1. People with a sense of humor. No, we don’t mean that you have to laugh at everything we say. And no, we don’t mean you have to have our sense of humor. I tend to go for the Denis Leary meets Voltaire meets Don Rickles meets Shane Black type humor (wry/sarcastic/satirical/laugh at the pain kinda thing), which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I’m fully aware that I live in a society that finds Will Ferrell funny and I don’t. Sorry. Can’t do anything about that. But I digress. I’m just saying, have a sense of humor. I’ll be doing a humor check at some point, because I believe that the funny bone is very close to the sentience bone.
2. People who are open to contrarian views. Mostly cuz we’re a bit cheeky, non-PC, contrarian and un-normal. I mean, what would you expect from a firm named Triple Dog Dare Media? Not that you have to be a totally out there, risk-ignoring, flat-out crazy person willing to do anything at all, but we do want to challenge some of your expectations and mental models. It’s good for the soul.
3. People who give us room to solve problems. Our problem-solving process is very heuristic, and is tied in with our learning style, which some have labeled as fearless. Listen, you can tell me about the problem all you want, and I’ll certainly listen and ask questions, but I’ve got to wade in a bit to see what the issues are. That may mean just jumping in and swinging a cat around. Or it may mean just standing very still and watching the world go by for a bit. Rest assured, I have about 300 tools in my problem-solving toolbox, and 1 or 5 or 12 of them will help you.
4. People who really want to partner and collaborate. We don’t have all the answers. We’re not experts on your business. We need to ask you a bunch of questions. We need access to your experts, your data, your thoughts/emotions/values. We tend to work in iterative cycles to achieve incremental perfection. If you can give us this, we can really drive a ton of results quickly and with high value.
5. People who know the difference between a real crisis and a manufactured crisis. I grew up in a war zone at the height of 1980s US foreign policy debacles. Bullets really did fly around, and people really did bleed. Everything else is trivia. Yes, I understand that your web site is down, and I will fix it as soon as I can, but please also understand that nobody is actually dying. And oh yeah, sometimes the site being down isn’t anyone’s fault, it may be bad hardware or a hacker in Finland trying to bring you down. This doesn’t mean that we’ll wait until tomorrow to get your site back up, just that you should have some perspective.
6. People who ask for clarification. My single biggest curse and gift is that I’m exceptionally good at pattern matching. I can extrapolate from A to Z after only seeing the sequence A B C. Translation: I can see the end at the beginning, and then I act and talk as though everyone also can see it too. Which means that I can take what appear to be huge leaps and zig-zag course corrections. If something looks weird to you, speak up. I’m trying to do a better job of explaining how I do my thing, but sometimes even I can’t explain it.
7. People who need something done. Yes, I’m all for planning and thinking, but what we’re really good at is execution. If you need something pushed out, I’m the guy who will do that, and keep doing that until the order comes in to stop the presses. One of our key values around here is tenacity. What does this mean for you? If you don’t have a goal in mind, we’ll help you formulate it, because without it, we’re just not the right choice for you. We hate to wallow. I’d rather be moving in the wrong direction then just sit and spin my wheels.
8. People who actually listen. It’s your dime, but if you’re paying us to be the expert, how about putting some of our ideas into action? We’re not saying that you should automatically operationalize every word that comes out of our mouths–of course not! We expect the give and take. But the whole paying us for advice and then not doing anything at all gets really old.

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