Cuban on titles:
It’s OK to allow people to raise their voice to you. I want people with strong opinions that they get passionate about. I don’t care if someone is yelling and raising their voice in my direction. It’s not a sign of disrespect. Hell, it’s a sign of passion. … If someone is passionate about something, share the passion. And if I don’t agree with you, I’ll tell you, but at least I’m going to appreciate the passion. That means you care.
A lot of CEOs say, ‘Don’t disrespect me,’ or, ‘I’m the CEO.’ I just hate that, when people hide behind a title. I’ve never been CEO of one of my companies until this year when I had to do it, and the reason I wasn’t was because, A, I didn’t care about titles and, B, I was superstitious — I’d been the president of every company that had been successful. To me, titles never matter. I try to keep all our organizations very flat. I never wanted managers reporting to managers. There was everybody, there was the level of management, and there was me. If I had to have somebody in between me and the managers, I minimized it as much as possible.
It’s not as much setting the ego aside; it’s setting formality aside. It’s ego, but if you’re a good CEO and you’re in a successful environment, there’s 1,001 ways to get ego gratification, and it should be in winning as opposed to driven by title. If anybody ever makes you feel like you’re a lowly anything, the problem is not yours, it’s theirs.
Cuban on control:
It’s not that the glass is half full or the glass is half empty, it’s who’s pouring the water that matters. And that’s the way it should be. Everyone’s, ‘Oh, you have to look at it positively.’ You have to take control of the situation.
Sometimes you can’t — then you have to figure out who’s in control. When you think about it, if someone says, ‘Is the glass half empty or is the glass half full?’ that already means you’re at a disadvantage, because you’re stuck. You’re making an adjustment about what’s already done as opposed to figuring out if I want to pull to the top, pull halfway or pull down. It’s not about taking a positive or negative attitude. It’s about taking control.
That’s part of the job. If you’re trying to kick everybody’s ass and you realize you’re getting your ass kicked, you better re-evaluate. It happens. You get your ass kicked from time to time. If you’re playing the game, you’re going to lose some games, and you have to go and figure out who’s beating you and why.
Sometimes you can’t. MySpace isn’t going to know why Facebook beat them, but they did. Yahoo doesn’t have an immediate response or an immediate solution [to Google]. If they said, ‘Mark, you go run Yahoo,’ I wouldn’t have an immediate solution for how to beat Google. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t.”
Cuban on the role of the CEO:
The show ‘Undercover Boss’ is a good learning model. You’ve got to get out there and watch. You’ve got to get out there and experience. And you’ve got to be out there. I’ve always had the attitude that there’s no job in my company that I shouldn’t be willing to do. I can’t ask someone to do a job I’m not willing to do myself. If I see paper in the parking lot, I’ll stop and I’ll pick it up. I won’t call someone to do it.
I don’t have a PR agent. I’m probably the easiest CEO in America to find and e-mail and to get ahold of. It’s more efficient and takes less time to deal with things directly via e-mail than it does for someone to go through your e-mails and go through this and not know what you’re missing and then have to have them communicate to you and you communicate back to them. The time it takes for you to answer an e-mail or hit the delete key, if it’s not worth responding to, is probably about 20 percent of the time it takes to go through one, two, three assistants. I go into Hollywood and I see four assistants sitting outside somebody’s door, and I’m like are you [expletive] kidding me? It takes more time to deal with them than it does to do it yourself. Sometimes CEOs get caught up with what they think CEOs are supposed to do. Rather than working in a way that you think CEOs are supposed to work, just do what you know is the right thing to do. Do the most expedient thing; do the most efficient thing. That sets a better precedent and a better example than doing things the way you think a CEO should do them.
Whatever you think is the standup of your culture, you have to do it yourself. If it’s selling, you have to be a salesperson. If it’s programming, you have to understand programming and engineering. If it’s design, you have to understand design. If people don’t think you know your business, how are they going to respect you and follow you?
Cuban on learning:
When I get into a business, I try to know it better than anybody else. It doesn’t matter how much I have to read or how many people I have to visit or what I have to do — I’m going to do it. There’s always someone out there trying to kick your ass. If you’re not out working, they are going to kick your ass. Regardless of what it is, I want to know more than anybody about what we’re doing. …
It’s an ongoing, nonstop process. That’s my job. My job is not to shake hands and glad hand and say, ‘Hey, how are you?’ My job is to get into a business and learn it better than anybody else and try to come up with angles and ideas that they haven’t.
You’ve got to love learning. The hardest thing, particularly once you’ve reached a level of success, is people have an inclination — myself included, and I’ve kind of learned the hard way — to say, ‘OK, I’m smart. I know this stuff.’ You’ve got to always say, ‘There probably is somebody out-working me; there’s some 18-year-old kid, somewhere, who’s trying to know this stuff better than I do.’ … Either the kid wins or you’re going to put in the same amount of work and have the same understanding or better of that 18-year-old or whoever it is. I don’t think most leaders are willing to do that. I think most leaders say, ‘I’ll just go out and hire the right people, I’ll package the right people, I’ll take some basic understanding,’ and that’s how they get outdated very quickly. The world changes very quickly. You have got to love to learn because the world always changes.
