Grow Your Small Business Without Losing Passion or Purpose

Many businesses are born because entrepreneurs have a strong sense of purpose – there's a problem to solve or a passion they can offer the world. As a business grows, it's infused with an electric sense of possibility from new people and ideas. But it's often during these times of growth that entrepreneurs feel like their grasp on everything is slipping away.
We approached Gino Wickman, founder of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a business system that helps companies mold strong leadership teams for long-term success. Gino, an entrepreneur since the age of 21, is the bestselling author of Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business. In the below post, and this great video, he shares his insights on breaking through to the next level without losing sight of yourself or your business.
–Cindy
Most of our clients come to us because they're hitting a ceiling. It's a natural phenomenon that many companies experience once they passed the startup phase. Now they're a successful small or mid-sized business, but they've grown to a point where sheer passion and drive isn't enough to carry the organization forward. There's a need for systems, process, structure and leadership.
One of my favorite examples is Sachse Construction, a Detroit-based commercial construction firm, which has been an EOS client for over 10 years. Founder Todd Sachse's business was hitting a major ceiling when he reached out to us, but he couldn't point to a specific reason or problem.
In our decades of helping small businesses get unstuck, we've been able to take this intangible feeling of frustration and get to its core. Fundamentally, it's about the people – after all, businesses run on human energy.
What Sachse needed was an operating plan to harness this energy and channel it in the right direction. We got to work helping Sachse build a strong leadership team with laser focus. First, we got the business owner and the leadership team into one room for a series of full-day sessions. The idea was to give them a holistic approach to treating the entire company, rather than just symptoms.
Below are a few tips we used during these sessions that you can use in your own business:
1.) Share your vision for the company – The first step is to get the leadership team's ideas out of their heads and into writing. This lets you see where there's overlap with the rest of your team and where there's almost no alignment.
2.) Get your leadership team to agree on answers to eight core questions – To do this in a structured way, we use the EOS Vision/Traction Organizer, which you can download for free. The basic questions are:

• What are our core values?
• What's our business's core focus or sweet spot?
• What's our 10-year target?
• What's our marketing strategy?
• What's the 3-year picture?
• What's the one-year plan?
• What are the quarterly priorities?
• What are all the issues, obstacles, and barriers that we have to solve?

3.) Develop a vision statement based on your answers – Every effective leadership team has a strong vision statement that defines who they are, what they do, where they are going and how they will get there. This will inform every decision within the company for years to come. It's your guiding light, even as people come and go.
4.) Create a solid leadership team based on the vision – This was a real challenge for Sachse because there ended up being some changes to the original team. This isn't unusual, though. I'd say about eighty percent of the time, we end up making changes to the leadership team.
But this isn't a value judgment or indictment. Rather, it's about defining the core functions of the business. Put simply, the leadership team is made up of the people who head up these major functions. For this process, I use an Accountability Chart and the People Analyzer to ensure the right people are in the right seats.
Once the new leadership team and vision statement are in place, then the answers to formerly confusing decisions seem to come into focus. You get unstuck. This is when companies begin to see a shift in culture that cracks the ceiling.
As for Sachse Construction, over a decade later, they've experienced incredible growth – as much as 400-500% – through a recession in one of the hardest hit cities. But over the years, they've had to get unstuck more than once.
If you find yourself getting stuck again, go back to the vision your leadership team agreed on and work towards getting everyone on board again. Once you have the structure in place, it's as simple as reviewing, refining, and reminding yourself about the core focus that gave you passion and purpose in the first place.

5 attributes that are crucial for success in the 21st century By Guy Claxton

We can no longer assume that being ‘in work’ is the same thing as being employed – ‘having a job’. As the world becomes more connected, so companies get bigger, but so too do opportunities emerge for all kinds of small-scale, niche and self-employed enterprises. Many people who do not have ‘jobs’ in the old-fashioned sense bid for contracts online. Websites like http://www.elance.com broker deals between people who need a task done and those why know how to do it. Elance has nine million freelancers and four million clients on its books. It is currently doing one billion dollars’ worth of business a year, and growing.

Education is about the cultivation of competence and inclination. It is what we do to enable children to succeed in the worlds they will inhabit. We teach them to do, and to love doing, the things that will help them to flourish. Especially when we cannot know how tens of millions of children will be earning a living, those competences and inclinations have to be broad and generic. Obviously reading is one such disposition. It is every child’s right to be shown how to read, and to develop a love of reading, for example. The inclination to read is, according to the PISA tests, a more powerful predictor of life success than the bare ability to read. It opens your eyes to possibilities: new ways of earning a living, for instance. Yet the love of reading is killed, for many children, by misguided education.

But reading is only one of these key dispositions. Here are some others. There is the disposition to be your own teacher: to design learning activities and experiences for yourself, either alone or in collaboration. Young people will not be accompanied by kindly and experienced teachers for the rest of their lives; they will have to become adept at thinking, “What will be the best way to acquire the knowledge and skills I am going to need?” You don’t learn that if learning is always designed for you by your teachers.

There is the ability to think on your feet, when your expectations are dashed and novel responses are required. In tomorrow’s world, learners will be much more in demand than knowers. But traditional education doesn’t build the capacity to cope with the unexpected. It tries to fill young people up with well-rehearsed performances of understanding – which is not the same thing at all. And those performances tend to be confined to single disciplines, whereas the real worlds of both work and play do not respect the boundaries between ‘subjects’.

There is the capacity to manage your attention. Learning how to pay attention to things that you consider to be worthwhile, and often challenging, rather than being at the mercy of every advertisement, flashing link, tweet or email that comes along, is, for many people, one of the big challengers for 21^st century education. Concentration and discernment are mental muscles that grow stronger with exercise – but that growth won’t happen in a classroom where everything is beautifully quiet and orderly. Yet the ability to concentrate is crucial to ‘getting the job done’, whether that be in employment, in self-employment or for one’s personal satisfaction.

What about scepticism: the inclination to subject knowledge claims, especially ones that are written and authoritative, to critical scrutiny? Many teachers are worried that their students are too ready to believe whatever they read on the internet – yet, without thinking, they have been training their students into an attitude of credulity by treating the textbooks as if they were beyond question. Students can get A grades in examinations but not have developed this inclination to question, yet a questioning mind-set is the foundation stone of creativity and innovation, and it is these that employers say they seek, but too often fail to find, in applicants for jobs.

Here are five dispositions that are crucial for life, work and play in the 21st century: a love of reading; the inclination to design your own learning; the capacity to think on your feet; the strength to control attention; and the disposition to question knowledge claims. Any system of schooling, no matter how well it performs in international comparisons, is miseducation if it stifles rather than nurtures these tendencies.

Published in collaboration with WISE. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

Author: Guy Claxton is Visiting Professor of Education at King’s College London.

Reinvention As A Life Skill

By Saul Kaplan

@TheBIF Founder & Chief Catalyst. Author, The Business Model Innovation Factory

Ask any group of people if they’re doing today what they thought they would be doing when they started out. I begin every speech that way. Occasional a few people in the audience raise their hand, very few. Almost everyone will readily admit that they have had to reinvent themselves multiple times over their lives and careers. And yet if you ask them how they did it or if formal education prepared them for reinvention you get mostly blank stares. You hear answers like, I just did it because I had to. Most seem unable to share useful knowledge on how they reinvented themselves. If anything is clear about the 21st century it’s that change happens faster than it used to. Reinvention isn’t something to be done only as a last resort. It’s something we need to do all the time in order to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. We have to make personal reinvention safer and easier to manage. Reinvention has become an important life skill.

If we wait until we have no choice but to reinvent ourselves it’s too late. It’s sad beyond words to see how many people and families have been devastated by the latest economic downturn. Politicians may take credit as the unemployment rate improves but we know better. Good high wage jobs with career ladders are few and far between. People not seeking work and the underemployed aren’t counted in the unemployment rate and their numbers are growing. The gap between the skills of our workforce and the needs of a new economy are also growing. If we wait for our political and institutional leaders to act we will be waiting a long time. If we wait for things to return to the way they used to be, we will be waiting forever. Everything about our current economy screams for making personal reinvention more of a natural act.

Why aren’t we taught how to reinvent ourselves in school? Reinvention is imperative as a life skill. You would think we would at least be exposed to the fundamentals of personal exploration and reinvention while we are in school. Instead we seem increasingly focused on the skills necessary to get a specific job, a job that is highly unlikely to exist five years from now. As a society we highly prize specialty education pathways that track students toward narrow career choices instead of celebrating education pathways emphasizing a broad platform and skill set useful in doing future work that doesn’t exist today. Education and workforce development programs should emphasize foundational life skills that are transferable and enabling the personal confidence and skills to constantly reinvent ourselves.

Reinvention is a journey not a destination. It doesn’t have to be a scare word. You don’t have to know what you’re reinventing yourself to in order to work on reinventing yourself. It isn’t about stopping one thing in order to do or be something else. It’s about spending time every day, every month and every year constantly reinventing. It’s about personal R&D to explore and test new possibilities. It’s about experimenting all the time to uncover latent opportunities. It’s about continuing to strengthen our current selves while simultaneously working on our future selves by actively engaging in new ideas, environments and practices. You don’t have to stop doing what you’re currently doing you just have to allow yourself the freedom to try more stuff.

Here are 15 things you can do now to start building reinvention muscle.

1) Hang out in places where more collisions with unusual suspects are likely to happen. Stop hanging with usual suspects!

2) Create a list of new stuff you’ve always wanted to try or be able to do. Start working the list today.

3) Make something and try to sell it online. We can all be makers and entrepreneurs even if society has tried to convince us otherwise.

4) Attend events you wouldn’t normally go to and really listen and engage. Like #BIF2015 for instance!

5) Commit to learning something new every day and keep track. Reinvention requires a get better faster mindset.

6) Share your new experiences and what you learn from them on social media. Be genuine and vulnerable.

7) Have coffee with someone completely new every week. Someone who has a different point of view and experience from your own.

8) Read books and articles from genres you never read. Expand your vocabulary. Stretch your interests.

9) Try new foods. Order something on the menu you’ve never had before. Experiment with different ethnic foods you haven’t tried.

10) Go listen to talks on subjects you know nothing about. Ask naïve questions.

11) Audit a class in a surprising subject area, the more experiential the better.

12) Figure out how to sell something you don’t need anymore online. Ask any millennial, they know how to do it!

13) Travel to places you haven’t been before and really experience the community. Avoid being a tourist!

14) Volunteer on the opposite side of town from where you live. Leverage volunteering to both be helpful and to learn new skills.

15) Explore art if you’re a scientist. Explore science if you’re an artist. Explore both if you’re in business!

Stop thinking about reinvention as a scary, all-or nothing, proposition. Reinvention is a life skill. Reinvention is a life long journey we’re all embarked on whether we like it or not. There are many practical steps we can each take every day to explore our future selves. We can all develop the life skill of reinvention. What are we waiting for? Try more stuff.

10 Things Your Daughter Should Know by the Time She Is 10

By Laura Usky

1. How adored she is. No matter what you disagree on and even though sometimes you may yell, she should know she is the center of your universe -- always.

2. How to cook. She should be able to prepare small snacks such as eggs, pasta, toast, sandwiches etc. My daughter loves to cook and letting them experiment enforces this life skill.

3. Body changes are coming and what to expect. She needs to know that along with these hormonal changes will come some emotional changes as well. I have bought my daughter a great book by American Girl called The Care and Keeping of You that breaks down the physical and emotional changes in a very easy to understand way. I highly recommend it or a book like it to assist in explaining all that is going to happen to their bodies in the next few years.

4. The harm of drugs. Unfortunately, no matter where you live, drugs are a threat to your child and it starts as early as 10 in some cases. Explain to them in no uncertain terms that no drugs are safe to try even once. Make them understand the tragedy that results in the use of drugs and how dangerous and illegal they are. I have made it clear to my daughter that friends will try to convince you to experiment and that she has to be strong enough to walk away, even if it makes her "uncool" to them. I have also let her know that when she gets older and is out and ever feels a situation is becoming unsafe or making her uncomfortable to call a parent to come get her no matter what.

5. At this age, it's important for them to know something about the facts of life. I know it's a tough convo to have, but you surely don't want them getting their info on the playground at school. I don't think they need every detail, but a small chat will help them feel more mature about body functions and will prevent crude talk about the subject that they may hear from other kids.

6. They should be aware how there are people all over the world and even in their own community who may not be as fortunate as they are. They should know that helping someone in need is a gratifying feeling and that the help they give may be the boost that person needs to turn their day around. Take them to a local animal shelter or a senior center and let them spend some time volunteering They will feel so good when they are done and it's a life long habit of helping everyone should practice.

7. Money doesn't grow on trees. I admit I'm definitely a shopaholic, but I try hard to make it clear to my daughter that nothing comes for free. I worked since I was 15 years old and that gave me the opportunity to shop and travel. She is aware that no work equals no money equals no fun. When she gets money for birthdays and holidays, her father has taught her to split it up into three funds: one to spend, one for emergencies and one for long-term goals such as college. She keeps three separate banks so as not to confuse her funds. It's a good habit for them to get into and will keep them on track later in life.

8. Appearance is important. She should know that personal grooming and appropriate clothing for different events are something that will be necessary throughout her life.

9. Everyone won't always be nice. My daughter is going into fifth grade and it's the time that all the nasty girl drama starts. It was already peeking its head a little in fourth grade, but I anticipate the next two years is when they really get catty. I have talked to her about what girls get snippy about and how to stay out of the drama. You have to stay true to your close friends no matter what, and don't be involved in groups that talk about other girls because eventually, they will talk about you, too. I've tried to teach her to be confident enough to hold her own, but aware of trouble makers and not afraid to report issues that seem dangerous, like extreme bullying or threats.

10. Life is not easy. There will be challenges she will face that will seem cruel and impossible. It will take her faith, her family and her perseverance to get through some of the things that life throws at her. It's important to know life is going to be a series of ups and down and be prepared to deal with both.

Learning these 10 things is a good base with which to begin the tough preteen and teen years. Helping our children maneuver life is our jobs as parents, even if we haven't quite figured it all out ourselves yet.

RESPECT

It was the master story teller himself, Proffessor Chinua Achebe who once said something to the effect that "Those who wipe their dirty bottoms on a tree, should check every so often if the tree has not grown thorns overnight."

The point, I see, in this simple yet power proverb is that it isn't about the tree, cos the "waste" could even serve as nutrients for it to grow and produce, but it is about those shameless ones who think in their pride that the tree could never harm them in return for their needless show of power and imagined superiority.

We must treat all men, regardless of race, tribe, age, social or economic status with the utmost respect reserved for royalty for each of us is a unique work of art with a mind, like that tree in Achebe's proverb, which if nurtured and cultivated could produce fruits beyond our wildest imagination.

Dealing with disappointment

In the course of living and trying to make sense of this world, we will take some unsure steps and fall, or take some sure steps and get hit or pushed over by others that walk this path called life with us. In the course of a lifetime we will be confronted with failure or loss of some scale, whether by our poor choices or the seeming insensitivity of others.

When confronted with loss of any kind, as we must from time to time - be it a relationship, finances or property - we experience a variety of emotions which fall into one of two categories:

1. Denial: this is the point where you tell yourself that this can't be happening to you or that for some supernatural inexplicable reason the situation will be automatically reversed. This seldom happens, leaving one frustrated or in a perpetual state of not being in touch with reality.

2. Anger:  is the point at which you blame some person, institution or situation for your predicament. Whether they really caused it or not anger ties put's happiness out of your control as you come to associate your being happy with the actions of others.

Denial and anger can both make one to continually scratch at the surface of our wounds which, rather than heal, makes them worse.

The perfect life doesn't exist in the world as we know it today, and striving for it is chasing after the wind, for no man can attain perfection. Maturity on the other hand is a more realistic goal to aim at, as maturity means coming to accept the fact that we have our inadequacies, but we can become better by continually striving to improve with the knowledge that learning never ends.

As Wharton School Practice Proffessor of Management, Stewart Friedman puts it "part of reaching maturity means coming to know ourselves – our strengths and our limitations – figuring out how our gifts can realistically flourish in the world." Maturity is coming to realize that it may not be your fault, but it is your problem and the responsibility for your happiness rests squarely on your shoulders not on the actions or choices of others.

Maturity is understanding as Al Paccino says (in the Movie Any Given Sunday) that "as we get older things get taken from us" or as Mandela state's that "with freedom come's responsibility" or as the popular cliche goes "to whom much is given, much is expected." Maturity is knowing that my freedom to choose and live means that I must protect the right of each and every person to live and choose how to live.

Each of us has an infinite capacity to keep on the steady path of growth and learning till we attain maturity, at which point we clearly see as Nelson Mandela did that "after climbing a great hill one only find's that there are many more hills to climb." Doing our best only fills us with the realization that we still need to do more, while not robbing us of the belief that we have the capacity to accomplish even more for the largest room in the world is the room for improvement.

Mark Cuban turns failure into success

Mark Cuban Interview with Smart Business By: Kristy J. OHara | March 1, 2011

 

I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed. You only have to be right once. Mark Cuban Dallas Mavericks owner and HDNet chairman, president and CEO

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Mark Cuban’s parents wanted him to learn a trade so he’d have something to fall back on. So the guy — who is now worth $2.5 billion — got a job working for a carpenter laying carpet and quickly learned he was absolutely horrible at it.
He was so terrible at his next endeavor as a short-order cook that he couldn’t tell if the food was done right unless he tried it, so he always cut off tiny pieces to sample.
And then there was the time that he was a waiter in a nice restaurant and could never open the wine bottles without getting cork in the wine.
“It was just horrible,” he says. “I was like, ‘Why aren’t you scheduling me more hours?’ [They said], ‘You can’t do this worth a damn, Mark.’”
But through all of these early experiences, he learned that it’s OK to not be good at everything.
“I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed,” Cuban says. “You only have to be right once. I tried to sell powdered milk. I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.”
He applied lessons learned in his failures as he started Broadcast.com, an audio and video portal, which he later sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock. His failures also helped him succeed when he bought and turned around the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise and co-founded HDNet, an all high-definition television network. And these are just a few of his successful ventures that have landed him at No. 144 on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans and No. 400 on the World Billionaires lists as well as a guest venture capitalist “shark” on ABC’s “Shark Tank” reality TV show.
“I don’t care if you’re working a counter at McDonald’s or as a bartender like I did or as a doorman like I did, when it fails, whatever it may be, you’re going to learn,” he says. “You’ve got to take that positive orientation to it and develop your skills.”
Cuban has refined many skills over the years as he’s built his businesses, and he’s learned a lot. But in particular, he’s learned how to look at opportunities, how to know himself and how to be ruthlessly focused.

Look at opportunities

If someone wants to pitch Cuban an idea, he’s open to it, but he’s not going to take a meeting for it. Instead, he wants to keep the details short, sweet and to the point.

“What I tell people is, ‘Anything you’re going to tell me in a meeting or a sales pitch, put it in an e-mail, and I’ll read it, and you know, give me as much technical information or business details as you can,’ because that takes all the personality out of it,” he says. “It lets me deal with just the facts or the details, and once I have a feel for the details, then we can deal with the personalities and the people involved.”
Cuban can quickly — often within seconds — recognize if a pitch is something he’s interested in or not. He starts with whether it’s an industry he wants to be in. He knows he wants to steer clear of websites driven by advertising, he’s not interested in being part of the next cool fashion trend, and it’s safe to say that his early experiences in the restaurant industry are just one reason he doesn’t want to open a restaurant of his own. Instead, he tends to stick to technology and play to his own strengths.
He says that just looking at the industry is about 90 percent of it. Beyond that, he looks for any red flags.
“The more people try to sell you on the size of a market, that’s usually a first red flag,” Cuban says. “If someone says, ‘This is a billion-dollar market, and all we’ve got to do is get one-half of 1 percent, and we’ll be making X, Y, Z,’ that’s someone usually selling themselves.”
Another red flag is if someone also says that the company is going to be better than an established player — like someone saying the company is going to be a better Facebook than Facebook. Also, he looks at how people react when he brings up competitors. If they start saying what those folks can’t do instead of talking about what gives this opportunity a unique competitive advantage, that’s a good indicator to him, as well.
“What people fail to grasp is once you introduce something, whoever the competitors are, they’re going to introduce the exact same thing,” he says. “It’s pretty much impossible to protect ideas like that when you’re already in an industry, so just trying to be faster, better, cheaper, just one-upping somebody, that’s also a red flag. When I see someone trying to be a one-upper, I’m usually turning away.”
The last element he looks at is whether there is a product or a feature.
“You look at things like location-based services — Gowalla, Foursquare and the like — and then you look at Facebook adding places or Google adding places, and you have to ask yourself, ‘Even though Foursquare and Gowalla pretty much wrote that business, are they features of somebody else’s products like a Facebook, or can they operate as a stand-alone business?’” he says. “That’s also a decision point you have to make.”
Cuban says you have to be patient and recognize that timing is part of an opportunity, as well. That’s what he’s done with the model he has now — releasing movies simultaneously for home viewing and in theaters and sometimes even prior to theatrical release — with Landmark Theatres, HDNet and Magnolia Pictures. He had to own all of those different elements, and people had to be open to it if he was to succeed, and it’s catching on now that the market is ripe for it.
“You can’t just automatically walk in and start a business every year or always have the right idea at the right time,” he says. “But you have to recognize when you have a unique opportunity and be able to pounce on it. There’s not always going to be an idea. There’s not always something. You just have to be willing to say, ‘OK, this is the lull period, but I keep on working, and I keep on learning, and if things change, there will be a unique opportunity, and when it comes, I’ll pounce on it.’”

Know yourself

Before Cuban ever made any money, he says he had so much “piss and vinegar” in him that he’d do anything necessary to win, but as his businesses have changed over the years, he realizes that this once-prevalent personality trait isn’t one of his strong suits anymore.

“It used to be picking up the check and closing the deal was the ultimate, and now one, ‘I love you, Daddy; can we go get some ice cream?’ conquers all,” he says.
And it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it would be if he didn’t recognize it.
“I always thought, ‘I’ll just dive in,’” he says. “It’s like working out. There’s multiple kinds of workouts. Sometimes you tell yourself you’re going to go to the gym and get a great workout, and then you realize that you remember why you need a trainer — you need someone to push you. When you have the piss and vinegar, you don’t need anyone to push you. You just dive in, and you get the best possible business workout.”
He now looks for people with that piss and vinegar in them or in their company so he can complement them. Additionally, Cuban has always been a “big-picture geek” that understood sales, marketing and technology, but when it comes to the administrative side of making all the little things work, that’s where he’s had to find people to help him. He says it’s critical to make sure you’re grounded in reality about your abilities.
“You have to be brutally honest with yourself,” he says. “You (can’t) lie to yourself. You have to know what you’re good at and what you’re bad at. You can’t all of a sudden be a home-run hitter. You can’t be a dunker if you can’t dunk, right? It’s that simple. …You better figure out what you’re good at and be great at it.”
One easy way to tell if you’re being honest with yourself is your success record.
“[It’s] just wanting to win,” he says. “It’s not an ego thing. It’s very binary. Is there money in the bank or not? Are you successful or are you not? It’s very simple. The people who lie to themselves typically end up with more problems.”
If you can recognize your strongest skills and those of the people around you, then you can win in business.
“It’s about winning,” Cuban says. “Your ego gets rewarded a whole lot more by winning in terms of your business success and the success of your company than you do by winning an argument or a battle or just trying to prove to people that you’re good at everything. When someone tries to tell me they’re good at everything, I know they’re lying.”

Have a ruthless focus

When Cuban became the Dallas Mavericks’ owner, he walked into a losing franchise that struggled to fill seats, and he didn’t say, “I’m the new owner; do what I say.” Instead, he put his desk in the middle of the sales bullpen, put a copy of the phone book and old sales leads on his desk, and he started calling people along with everyone else.

“I said, ‘Look, we’re speeding up, and either you’re on the train or off the train,’” he says. “‘If you keep up, you stay on. If you don’t, we’ll still be friends, but you know, you’re going to fall off the train, and we’re going to figure out how to move forward without you.’”
To succeed, you have to be completely focused on what it is you want to do.
“You have to go in and be very specific about what your goals are, what you’re willing to accept and what you won’t accept,” he says.
The first thing he clarified to his employees was that they were not in the basketball business — they were in the entertainment business.
“We were going to be more like a great wedding than a good high school basketball game,” Cuban says. “A great wedding, you remember Aunt Susie getting drunk and dancing with Cousin Billy, who you hated, but it was fun to watch. What makes a good wedding fun is everyone getting together and yelling and screaming and having fun.
“When you remember the first sporting event you went to, you don’t remember the score or the date. You remember who you were with and what you did with that person.”
He then had to be clear regarding what they needed to achieve. The old arena had 17,700 seats, and there were 41 home games plus playoffs, so he put up signs saying “17,700 times 41 — that’s our goal. That’s how many we have to sell.” He asked them how they were going to get there and said nothing else mattered. He promised the team and coaches that he’d do everything in his power to give them the resources they needed to get the losing franchise winning.
As a result, games became electric with entertainment, which brought people in, and he hired new coaches to help the team win.
“I made it quite clear what we were trying to accomplish,” he says. “There was no ambiguity at all.”
In these situations, he says it’s important for you as the leader to set those goals and not rely on a group of people to do that.
“You have to know exactly what your goal is, and you have to know how you’re going to get there,” he says. “Where companies fail miserably is they try to create goals by committee. You can’t have committee leadership. If you don’t know, you’re preparing yourself to fail.”
Communication also plays a key role in setting goals and staying focused on them.
“Good leadership is being able to explain how you’re going to kick your competition’s ass and being able to explain to everybody how they’re going to participate in doing that,” he says. “Otherwise, what are you doing there?”
He says you also have to adjust your communication depending on the type of people you have in your organization.
“Are you dealing with 18-year-olds, 25-year-olds, 40-year-olds?” he asks. “Are you in a very competitive business that moves quickly? You have to match the circumstances and the context and adjust accordingly. If my business is where I trust people and things are going well, then all I need is a weekly report via e-mail. That’s it. Just tell me what’s going on — bad news first — and then we’ll deal with it. If I’m in a situation where things aren’t going well, then I’m going to be up your ass. It just depends. It’s when you try to do it the same way every time, that’s when you run into problems.”
His intense focus paid off — the Mavericks have become a winning franchise and reached the playoffs now in each of the full seasons since he bought them, and fans are packing the arena to wildly cheer alongside the animated Cuban.
“Ideas are the easy part,” he says. “It’s the execution of the idea that becomes the difficult part.”

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.