His ridiculous “Please-can-I-be-your-VP?-I-take-it-back-I-really-hate-you” act with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump aside, Mark Cuban has always been a pretty slick operator. Now he’s proved it again with a world-class move in connection with the Dallas Mavericks’ Terdema Ussery/sexual harassment scandal. I mean, hiring Cynthia “Cynt” Marshall to be the Mavs’ interim CEO was a stroke of pure genius.
Marshall, most recently AT&T’s senior vice president and chief diversity officer, is a master communicator, steeped in and adept at the corporate language of gender and racial politics. She was on the cover of D CEO magazine addressing those issues back in June of 2016, and she was also the runaway hit speaker during the publication’s first Women’s Leadership Symposium that same month at the Hilton Anatole hotel.
There, she capped the morning-long program with her sometimes poignant, sometimes roaringly funny comments about women sticking together, with advice like sometimes you have to “hook a sister up,” all while (literally) wearing a tiara on her head. If Cuban is lucky—and he emerges from the Mavs’ “independent” investigation unscathed—Marshall’s credible, hard-won charisma just might help pull his chestnuts out of the fire.
