Mark Cuban didn’t always think of himself as a nice person.
When Cuban was in his 30s and running a tech company that eventually made him a billionaire, he was laser-focused on productivity and results, saying “Bio eats the world” Life Science podcast on Tuesday.
He regrets it these days. “I wish someone had told me to be nicer,” the 64-year-old Cuban answered when asked what advice he would give to his younger self. “Because I always go, go, go… Ready, fire, aim. Let’s go. Let’s go faster, faster.”
Cuban and his business partner Todd Wagner joined AudioNet, an audio streaming company, in 1995 as co-founders — along with its original founder, Chris Jaeb. The company was later renamed Broadcast.com and acquired by Yahoo! 5.7 billion dollars in stock in 1999, making Cubans rich.
Cuban first The prospect of a rush forward has fueled the company’s morale and performance, he said: “Sometimes it took my partner Todd to say to me, ‘Look, you’re scaring some people, [and] they usually go [quit] and you can’t get mad.”
Business might not have grown as much—and Cuban might not have been a billionaire—if he hadn’t learned the “underrated” skill of being nice, he told Vanity Fair in 2018.
“I went through my own metamorphosis, if you will. Early in my career,” he said. “When I was 20 years old, I wouldn’t want to do business with me [and 30s].”
“So I had to change, and I did, and it really paid off,” he added.
Kindness is according to a Gallup Poll 2020 who found that workers have “four universal needs” when it comes to their bosses: trust, compassion, stability, and hope.
These traits correlate with better business performance, Gartner research director Caitlin Duffy he told CNBC Make It last year: Employees are more engaged in their work, leading to higher productivity, lower employee turnover and overall monetary gain.
“It doesn’t just affect the employees themselves. It affects the business,” Duffy said.
The proof extends beyond Cuba’s borders. For example, Lyft co-founders John Zimmer and Logan Green built their company using the “nice guy strategy,” Zimmer said said the Financial Times in 2017.
“For a while, the idea was that we were treating people well and that we would be beaten by a competitor that was more aggressive,” Zimmer said. “There was a misunderstanding regarding these values [not being] coupled with building a great company, which they are.”
At the time, there was Lyft supposedly valued to 7.5 billion dollars. In March, when Zimmer and Green had a market capitalization of $3.59 billion he announced they would step back from day-to-day management duties.
Disclosure: CNBC owns exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank,” featuring Mark Cuban as a panelist.
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