Donny Deutsch Quotes

The greatest business icons-it's not that they were worth hundreds of millions, or billions or trillions of dollars, it's that they moved society forward.

The only thing I hated about the agency business was a lot of business travel. It was the only part of my job that I did not like. I found it very tedious and wearing.

You know you're doing what you love when Sunday nights feel the same as Friday nights.

A good ad is one simple idea, with humanity in it, that connects with consumers, that represents the value system of a company and then can connect it with the consumer. We always say a brand is set of shared values. So if you can simply demonstrate your value system as a brand, so that a consumer could say, "Ah, our values line up. I vote for you, brand!" that's a good ad.

Failure is not an option on this one.

I've always managed by walking around. Any CEO or leader who spends the majority of his time in his office is not doing his job.

Once you realize that there are no geniuses out there, you can think, "I can do that". One reason I've succeeded is that I have that naïve sense of entitlement.

There are moments in business and in life when you have to say, "Failure is not an option."

The happiest people are the ones who follow their own dreams most closely.

Every business is about understanding people. Which people you have to get through. Which people you have to embrace. Which people you have to jump over. Which people you have to push out of the way. That’s the game.

You can be hard on people as long as you're just as hard on yourself.

Every great business leader I've ever met, in addition to being very smart, very driven, they have this, 'Why not me? Screw it, I deserve it, let's go.' And if you don't have that, you can't achieve greatness.

When you see someone who has turned his passion into a profit, ask yourself, ‘Why not me?

And here's what management is: motivating people and putting them in places where they can succeed.

My philosophy is to always find the smartest people you can. Hire people smarter than you.

To me, it’s always what’s next and I think that’s what drives most very successful people. It’s never about the money. I mean that’s a way of keeping score. It’s about achievement and it’s about winning a game and it’s about upping the ante.

There are agencies who are good losers, places where losing is not only accepted, it becomes part of the culture, it is expected. That is debilitating. Don't let that happen to you. At Deutsch we go into every pitch assuming we are the Yankees. It's amazing what happens when you go into a room of smart, hungry people and say, "Failure is not an option." People are galvanized.

I appear wild on the outside, but I'm a conservative businessman.

Changes in my personal life are nerve-racking for me.

If the person who runs a company has a belief system and everything he does stays fairly truly to that system, it will attract like-minded people who buy into it and then keeps selling itself in concentric circles.

The failure-dichotomy principle: failure is good. Failure is not an option. Balance those in your brain.

That outgrowth of arrogance comes at a price: some people don't like is. I take responsibility for that.

The best bosses understand the people working for them. That's the first component: what makes my people tick? What are they in it for?

It's a very simple thing on the make-or-break decision, it's the guy, and that's what separates the great leaders and great successes, and if you don't listen to it, you don't have it, you're never gonna get it, 'cause it's never gonna come from someplace else.

If you can't embrace both failure or the possibility of failure, or the tremendous fear of failure, you can't be wildly successful. It's just an axiomatic truth.

When I looked into the mechanics of being a businessman, I found it wasn't rocket science.