To be successful in business, study successful business people. This sounds simple, but sometimes we forget to follow this golden rule. Today, Gillian unwittingly reminded me of this rule.

Gillian pointed me to a recent Mark Cuban posting - Some Thoughts on the NBA - on his blog "Blog Maverick". Mark owns the Dallas Mavericks and is one of the 400 richest people in the world according to Forbes Magazine (Mark is worth a cool $1.8 billion due to his huge success with Broadcast.com). Knowing that I have a strong negative bias about the consistency in performance of NBA referees, Gillian referred me to Mark's posting as he was opining my sentiments. I was amazed at the nugget of wisdom in Mark's editorial, although not for the reason Gillian intended.

A basic belief of Mark is that employers / managers should put their employees in a position to succeed. What a powerful concept. Mark wrote:

...as in any business, there are things that can be done to put people in a position to succeed. When I got to the Mavs, I talked about putting the players in a position to succeed by hiring more coaches. After all, if we have a multi-million dollar investment in a player, it only made sense to me to provide that player with whatever individual instruction that was necessary to make them better. To put them in a position to succeed.

What are you doing to put your employees in positions to succeed?

Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive