Tuesday September 20, 2005

Often Speaking, Never Saying Anything

You’ve seen him on the beach, and you’ve seen him on TV. Now self-styled ad icon and muscle mary Donny Deutsch—who we were led to believe would be running for mayor right about now—has a book coming out. Often Wrong, Never In Doubt: Unleash the Business Rebel Within, due Oct. 4, is apparently a foul-mouthed self-help how-to about how to make buckets of cash.

But at least it has an original title, right? Wrong. Rather, Donny Rebel has done the literary equivalent of cribbing someone else’s tagline—or, in this case, a lot of other people’s tagline.

The “often wrong, never in doubt” chestnut is usually attributed to Russian physicist Lev Landau, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died in 1968. Landau is quoted as saying, “Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt.”

But Deutsch is not even the first business mogul to appropriate the motto. General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz famously claimed it in a well-known 2002 memo, while others who regard it as their personal credo include hedge fund manager Bill Fleckenstein, former TV judge Mills Lane and the dude who edits the Manhattan User’s Guide. The phrase has become so popular that it is frequently used (often derogatorily) to sum up the swagger of George W. Bush—a comparison Deutsch, who worked for Clinton, would probably not enjoy.

As rebel yells go, “often wrong, never in doubt” is about as outside the box as, well, “outside the box.”

Posted by jim at 03:46 PM ||