Our Culture
We believe that any success at DDJ comes from two things: our people and our culture. We believe that brilliant people operating in a great culture will produce the best outcome. Our culture is our DNA, it defines who we are, how we operate, and how we handle disagreements with each other. We operate, hire, develop, and promote people based on the values below.
Dream Team
We are like a professional sports team. We hire, develop, and retain elite athletes only and place them in the right spots to win.
Candor and Collaboration
We don’t settle for players who are just good. We always choose to be a smaller team of brilliant people rather than a larger team with some average players in it. We define brilliant people as those who can self-define the right goals, self-direct to reach them, and redefine the standards while they get there.
We are radically truthful about each other’s performance. The bar is very high, and we evaluate people accurately, not kindly. If someone falls short of perfection, we deliver honest feedback respectfully, in a non-personal way, even though it might hurt sometimes. As a dream team, we are not concerned with appearing good, we are concerned with achieving our goals.
We never compromise on talent. We select, coach, and retain the top talent only and give them all the support to achieve greatness. We think of our managers as tough coaches, putting the right champions in the right positions to win. We help those who might be good but not the best to leave gracefully with a generous package, even though it is so emotionally hard because we love all our people. But being the dream team always comes first.
High Performance for High Social Impact
DDJ members always push through! We stopped listening to excuses a long time ago – we care about results. We believe that grit, determination, skill, smartness, and courage can break through almost any wall.
We believe that the importance of a great work ethic is underrated. People who consistently put in more smart hours greatly outperform their peers in the long run. We think about committed hours the same way as a compound interest (the most powerful force in the universe). We invest over and above every week as we know that the outcome will be vastly superior in 5 years time. People who are afraid of hours are almost never successful.
We bet on people who have grit. We believe that people who have character and a desire to be successful will learn and adapt to the ever changing conditions of a competitive world. We want these people in our dream team.
Autonomy and Accountability
We look for people who are execution machines: structured, self disciplined, proactive, results-oriented. They know each day what they need to do and have the discipline to do it. Their to-do lists are reasonably prioritised, they use all modern project management tools and they do not react randomly to the stuff that bumps into them.
Life First, Work Second
For today’s young digital professionals, an excellent quality of life is a must-have. As an industry we need to embrace a new employment model if we want to hire and keep the best and brightest.
At DDJ we believe in working smart rather than working hard, that said we have put away the traditional work system of 5/6 days working week. We operate on a 4day work week and we have even narrowed down our working schedule to suit everyone’s needs. We believe that maintaining a healthy relationship with your family and friends is more important than work. We want our members to put their personal life first and then work second. They can take as many vacations as they want so long as they get the job done.
Diversity, Inclusion And Belonging
We live in a society where discrimination is the order of the day, our vision is to create a world where diversity, inclusion and belonging is a reality. We have an international working environment with people from diverse backgrounds. One of our strong beliefs is that our strength lies in our differences and not our similarities. We hire those who have this mindset and are ready to make a change bringing discrimination to a negative number.
