Mark Cuban, Jay Leno, and Risk-Taking
Mark Cuban has a fabulous post over on Blog Maverick this week with his take on the NBC-Jay Leno fracas. His position: NBC did the right thing, and everyone else is focused on the wrong thing. I don’t know a thing about the TV business, but Cuban’s ideas make tremendous sense to me from a big-picture perspective. His point is that NBC was in hurting and, instead of playing it safe, they tried something new and risky that could have saved them millions of dollars and redefined primetime TV the way CBS did when it launched Survivor in primetime 10 years ago. It bothers him that NBC is now being vilified for trying it, and for fixing it when it didn’t work. Money quote from Cuban:
I have a saying, “No Balls, No Babies.” It was told to me by a blackjack dealer when I asked if I should double down on an 11. The message was simple. If you don’t take the risks, you don’t get the rewards. …
In today’s corporate world, if you don’t take the risks, you don’t get skewered on blogs, on cable news, in the newspaper. Public condemnation appears to be a far worse consequence than financial success is a reward. That’s a huge problem for our country.
Gotta admit, I hadn’t thought about the situation this way, but he makes an awfully good point. And I’ll probably be quoting “no balls, no babies” for the next 20 years.
