It’s rare when you can get an executive to talk about the excesses of executive pay. But then, Mark Cuban isn’t your prototypical chief executive.

Cuban is the billionaire owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, and an entrepreneur who made a huge chunk of money when he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.9 billion in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom.

A lot of people view Cuban as nothing more than a rich kid with a big mouth, but if you listen closely, you’ll find that he frequently has insightful and intelligent things to say. For example, he recently wrote on his own blog about executive pay (a blog post that was picked up and published last weekend in The Dallas Morning News).

Since I occasionally write about executive pay packages, and especially the notion that CEO pay is out of control, I was intrigued not only by what Cuban had to say, but how blunt he was in saying it.

“There is a game played by CEOs with the corporate issuance of lottery tickets, otherwise known as stock,” he says. “No matter what you call it, every CEO asks for equity, knowing that the only goal is to hit the jackpot. [And] every CEO hired looks to grab as much equity equivalents as he can and do everything he can to get that stock price up while periodically liquidating the stock and stuffing the cash in his bank account.”

He adds: “The problem is that there is a huge disconnect between the CEO and shareholders doing well and those who work for the company doing well. … Yes, it’s true that CEOs [sometimes] see the value of their holdings shrink. But unlike lottery tickets, whose value goes to zero when you don’t hit the numbers, CEO equity positions retain their upside. History has shown that if they go far enough underwater, they will get repriced and/or reissued—all in the name of keeping the CEO happy. So while CEOs may get ‘less rich’ for a while, the game is stacked to get them happy really fast when the upturn comes.”

Cuban goes on to say that there is a disconnect in most companies because the employees—the workforce—generally get compensated in cash while the executives “live in the equity/lottery ticket zone.” When things go bad in a business, those in the cash zone always take the first hit. People, places and things that consume cash are the first things to go because cash expenses immediately reduce earnings. If you or anyone like you consumes cash, unless someone upstairs thinks you generate a straight-to-the-bottom-line return, you are about to become a corporate ghost. You’ll be memorialized as a cut to increase earnings and mentioned in a press release that Wall Street will cheer and use to push up the stock price.”

So, does Cuban have an answer to the excesses of executive pay? Yes, and it is surprisingly simple: “The only way to change this is to put CEOs in the cash zone. Make companies generate 100 percent of their compensation in cash that will be 100 percent expensable in the quarter paid.”

He goes on to say, “That’s not to say the CEOs can’t own stock. Hell, yes, they can own stock. But make them buy it on the open market or as part of a program that’s available to every company employee on the same terms. They are getting paid enough, and if they believe in their ability to run the company, they can put their money where their mouth is.”

Mark Cuban may be known as a bigmouth, but I can’t help but think that sometimes the most sensible solutions to a complex problem come from the most unexpected places.