Lunchtime Links: As Mark Cuban Goes, So Goes the World?

Sometimes, a guy who speaks his mind is exactly the person who needs to step up.

He doesn’t whitewash it. He doesn’t couch his true feelings behind buzzwords. He just lets you know what’s going on, takes a stance, and rolls with it.

In the case of Mark Cuban and Facebook, maybe he said what needed to be said. That and more in today’s Lunchtime Links:

Facebook’s richest hater: As any referee in the NBA will tell you, don’t get Mark Cuban mad or he’ll be up in your face. The billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner has his sights on taking his business away from Facebook, according to ReadWrite  (opens in a new tab). Cuban expressed frustration a few weeks ago that he had to spend $3,000 to send a Facebook post that reached more than 1 million Mavericks fans. So now he’s moving his 70 companies, including the basketball team, Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures, to other sites, such as Tumblr or Twitter. “We are moving far more aggressively into Twitter and reducing any and all emphasis on Facebook,” Cuban told the site. “We won’t abandon Facebook, we will still use it, but our priority is to add followers that our brands can reach on non-Facebook platforms first.” Maybe Associations Now‘s Joe Rominiecki was right about treating freeloaders with care (opens in a new tab).

Don’t get too businesslike: Riffing off a slide from a recent conference he attended, Idea Architects’ Jeffrey Cufaude offers a piece of very valuable advice  (opens in a new tab): “As associations emulate business strategy and tactics with their products and services, they risk damaging the one thing that makes them truly unique: the member relationship,” he explains. In other words, the relationship shouldn’t become purely business, because that’s how they’ll treat it too.

100 million boxes dropped: Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, recently told Forbes  (opens in a new tab) that the widely used cloud service just hit a major milestone — it just reached 100 million users, putting the company in elite territory reached in recent months by Google+  (opens in a new tab) and Instagram  (opens in a new tab). On top of that, those users save 1 billion files with the service each day. One interesting detail: 96 percent of the company’s users don’t pay, but those who do, pay enough that the company is on track to reach $240 million in sales.

Neutralize the naysayers: Talley Management Group’s Joe Sapp says he has been running into issues with arbitrary limitations on his team that blocked innovative thinking. “Too often it seemed that we had these lines drawn in the sand preventing our teams from offering up input on how to improve a process or service outside of their area of expertise,” he explains. “Like the thought that innovation does not need to be some big, new product, it can be a better way to deliver a service or product; this type of innovation can happen at all levels within your team and across divisions.” Inspired by a FastCompany piece, Sapp offers up a thought process  (opens in a new tab) to limit what he refers to as “innovation wet blankets.”

See anything cool online today? Let us know in the comments.

(photo by Keith Allison/Flickr)