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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Often
Wrong, Never in Doubt by Donny Deutsch |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Entertaining If you’ve watched Donny Deutsch on his
CNBC show, The Big Idea with Donny
Deutsch, you’ll appropriately expect a high energy level, positive
attitude, and high entertainment value from his book, Often
Wrong, Never in Doubt. You’ll be right to expect this, and Deutsch
delivers as expected. Typically a contrarian, always full of himself, Deutsch
provides stories about his own life and work that are enjoyable to read. Here’s
an excerpt, all of the Chapter titled, “The Doctrine of Female Superiority: Advertising’s
dirty little secret: Women are better than men,” pp. 78-83: Women are superior
beings. It’s that simple. Certainly in business. Give me a choice between a
woman and a man with the same talents, I’ll take the
woman every time. Here’s why. There’s so much emotional
bullshit that comes with men and the battle for success. We men, the alpha
males who fight our way to the top of the business food chain, spend a lot of
time worrying about our stripes, about the pelts hanging from our belts. That
time could be spent working at our jobs, but no. Our goals include greed and
domination. “Why did that guy get the corner office? Why was his raise bigger
than mine? I’ve got to run this place.” Size matters. Women, on the other hand,
want to do the job. They want to work in a collaborative environment, they
want to succeed, and they want to be paid fairly. This is exactly what you
want in a senior executive. No nonsense, just good work and respect. How did this happen?
Watch the commercials on Saturday morning TV; that’s where the American
socialization process starts, if not before. Advertising is not going to
change the deep wiring of what men and women are all about, but it does often
serve to perpetuate society’s roles. In the advertisements for a doll or a
girl’s game, there are always three or four girls sitting around in a group,
playing, giggling, having fun together. For a boy’s
toy or game, at the end one boy always wins, shoots his arm in the air and
shouts “Yeah!” The other boys are losers. Things go downhill from there. One of the reasons
Deutsch Inc. has been so successful is that I’ve recognized the superiority
of women in business and have consistently put them in positions of
responsibility and power. If I put out a job spec for senior people, seven
out often prospects will be women and the men will always be the weakest
candidates. My choices, except as to which of several highly qualified women
to promote, are rarely difficult. The ad business has
become increasingly feminized in the last twenty-five years. When I graduated
from Wharton in 1979, there were two idiots out of the entire graduating
class who went into advertising. I was one of them largely because my father
was in the business. Ogilvy & Mather was paying
$22,000 a year; Salomon Brothers was starting people off at $75,000. After
five years in advertising you could have made $110,000; five years at
Salomon Brothers and you could be pulling down a million. You’re a business
student with a newly minted master’s, which industry are you going to join? Advertising is an
industry in which the pay scale is demonstrably lower than that of other
professional industries such as banking, real estate, and consulting; women,
with far more restricted career options and the upper echelons of fewer
industries open to them, entered the field in large numbers and have somehow
been able to rationalize the pay scale inequity, look to the future for their
earnings, find something other than simply money to work for, and forge
successful careers. The pay scale was and continues to be so out of whack
that we’ve lost an entire generation of male business talent; the
overwhelming majority of those alpha males are certainly not stampeding into
advertising. The ones who do are facing the best women, some of the most
talented business-people anywhere. Is it a surprise that women in advertising
are succeeding? Of the ten top executives
at Deutsch, eight are women. The two men are spectacular, but guess what, it’s eight to two. In our Advertising, by its
nature, is a more feminine industry than most. It’s hard for alpha males,
having grown up to be firemen or to fly jet fighters and shoot down enemy
aircraft, to do something so personally subservient
as service an account. I was always able to do it because I saw the field as
a bigger game, but if I hadn’t had a family business to go into, I wouldn’t
have lasted a month. As men get older, in any
service business—and advertising is about as service-oriented as it gets—the job
gets more difficult. We need to live more on the content side of the
equation, but we are always at the mercy of some guy who tells us we’ve got
to go meet him at his ski house. I don’t know how it
happened, I don’t know if it started on television with Bewitched, but none of the other professions—not investment
banking, not consulting, not accounting—comes with the expectation that, in
addition to our professional services, we are to provide extensive wining and
dining. No matter how good you are—and Deutsch as an agency does as little of
that wining and dining as possible—you’re still dramatically on the service
side of the equation. And after all that, we must always get put into review
every three or four years. For an alpha male, that gets very difficult. If you’re a top-shelf
heart surgeon, you don’t have to talk to anybody. If I sat in that profession
where I sit in mine, you wouldn’t be able to breathe my air. The top
investment bankers, even if they’re on the sell side of the equation, carry
themselves like kings. In advertising, on the same sell side, you could be
the top person in the field, but you still strap on the knee pads. Yet, Deutsch is a very
masculine agency. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule. Two of my
partners, Eric Hirshberg and Mike Sheldon, who
built the LA office, are stars of the first magnitude and punch holes in my
theory. Our female executives don’t think of themselves as women first,
executives second; they’re all hard workers dedicated to the task. In fact,
they are all very feminine, beautiful women—but extremely tough. I would put
each of them in a street fight with any guy any time. So we have the toughness
you need in business added to an essentially collaborative nature. Women are
easier to deal with than men, less insecure, more concerned with doing their job
and working collaboratively and getting paid fairly. Basically, less of a pain
in the ass. I gave a presentation to
the executive committee of Interpublic, the group
that bought Deutsch, in which I discussed our top management. I was talking
to eighteen men and one woman. (I suspect she was there because, as with so
many committees, they had to have a woman.) These were gray and graying men,
average age around sixty. I showed slides in which they saw exactly who was
involved in running our company and said, “Guys, I’m going to share with you
my dirty little politically incorrect secret: Women are superior to men in
business. And, I think, in life.” I told them very much
what I’m telling you. After I spoke I didn’t
know whether they didn’t want to hear it, didn’t get what I was saying, were
taken aback, or were sitting there thinking, “Wow, that’s pretty smart.” The
room was very quiet. The good news is that, since that time, Interpublic has recognized the situation and is now
taking an active role in the issue of diversity. NBC and Donald Trump shot
part of the second episode of the first season of The Apprentice in our offices. It was classic, a science
experiment come to life. The teams were divided eight-on-eight, men versus
women. The producer told me, “The women kicked ass yesterday, opening up
lemonade stands.” I gave them their assignment, to create an advertising
campaign for a corporate jet airline. The teams broke away into separate
conference rooms to choose team leaders and began to work. An hour later one of the
producers came to me and said, “You are going to crack up.” He took me in to
see the women. They were sitting around a table, talking, working. They had
twenty ideas up on the whiteboard already and were well on their way. Then he
took me to the men. The room, which had started out swept clean and ready for
action, was full of half-eaten sandwiches and paper bags tossed all over the
place. Now, men may be pigs—and I have no problem with that (we are who we
are)—but worse than the casual disorder was the fact that they hadn’t chosen
a team leader yet. They were fighting over who the team leader should be. The
question of biggest balls hadn’t been decided. Interestingly, it was the
women who played the sex card on that campaign. Their ads were phallic and
more than a little obvious, but they were consistent throughout. These were
all sexy women and they knew—from firsthand experience, I had a feeling—that
sex sells. The men’s ads, once they got them going, were well-considered if
lacking in some kind of edge. But worse, while the women had been in contact
with the owner of the airline to find out what he wanted to emphasize about
his company, the men had neglected to cover that base. In all hubris, the men
had decided for him. They never thought to ask, “What’s a win for you?”
That’s a major error, and when it came time to pick a winner, I chose the
women. As I usually do. One of the men got fired
as a result. That’s the way it works. Deutsch speaks a confidence and
certainty in Often Wrong,
Never in Doubt, as the title suggests. In some ways, the book is an ad
for the Donny brand. Whatever it is, you’re likely to find it entertaining to
read. Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Often
Wrong Never in Doubt.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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