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The second in a series based on conversation with Greg Miller, CEO of the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies that owns the Utah Jazz.

If you ask most NBA fans to name their dream job, they'll probably say something like "to be like Mike."

But if you ask the 2010 version of Michael Jordan himself, the answer -- at least in terms of how he has voted with his dollars -- is clearly that he'd most like to be an NBA owner (which he now is in Charlotte).

But is Michael Jordan's dream job a good gig?

It's tough to get straight answers from owners, who, understandably, aren't crazy about opening their books.

The common thinking is that outside of the NBA's biggest markets, owners may well have to dip into their own pockets now and again, but by the time they sell the team they will have made a killing. Not to mention, a lot of the payoff of owning an NBA team is non-financial:

• For those passionate about hoops, it's a chance to interact daily with legends of the game -- both the players on your team, and the people who run front offices and the like. (To 29 majority owners, it's a chance to rub elbows with Michael Jordan as a peer, which is about as much as anyone gets to "be like Mike.")
• Owning a team also does amazing things for an owner's profile in the business world. There is hardly any investment more showy than a sports team. That reality drives media mentions and radically alters an owner's public profile. Mikhail Prokhorov, for instance, has long been seen as one of the handful of Russian billionaires with ties to the Kremlin. He recently said that part of the reason to buy the Nets is so that people around the business world will come to know him as the guy who owns the Nets -- which is a great way to be known in a lot of circles.
• It's also just a really exciting business. Think about it! I don't care what kind of business you run. If your team wins a Game 7 with a buzzer beater, that's about as exciting as work can be in this world.

I ask Greg Miller, CEO of the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies why his family owns the Jazz. Is it because they are so passionate about basketball, or because it's a good long-term investment? Maybe a little of both?

His answer: "Neither."

The Jazz, you see, are a different kind of NBA team, with a different business approach.

Miller explains that when his father bought into the Jazz in 1979 it was "almost entirely altruistic." If the Jazz couldn't find an owner determined to keep the team local, Miller believed the city that had been so good to him and his business -- Salt Lake City -- would never get another NBA team. He wanted to save the city from that loss. "He decided to take the risk," says the younger Miller, "as a gift to the community."

Immediately upon taking over, Miller went about applying some of the principles that were successful in his other businesses. That included doing just about everything possible to make the business self-supporting, which is an ongoing challenge. But it's still not like the Millers invested in the Jazz to make a buck. Not even close. "It's really a community asset," Greg Miller explains, "that our family is charged with running."

It's hard for sports fans, who live and die with every win and loss, to sympathize with the idea of the people who make the decisions having priorities that come before basketball. Miller attends nearly every home game, and establishes his hoops bona fides with tales of sitting in the nosebleed seats of Denver's McNichols arena when he was a child. But to Miller and the Jazz, the team's on-court success is one of many priorities, and as an investment or income source it underperforms compared to almost everything else the Miller family does.

Tough though that may be to hear, it may also be smart. Spending without limit to win was the Knicks' undoing, and the Jazz have been one of the NBA's winningest franchises, while more or less keeping an even keel on the business side. They are poised to make serious noise again in this year's playoffs.

"Some years we make money," says Miller of the Jazz, "and some years we lose money. ... We're in a fairly small market. We don't have the luxury of paying whatever we wish. Every nickel counts. We have a strong season ticket base, and very strong relationships with our corporate sponsors. We have no fat in the organization. We're very lean, and very efficient. But we have to work with the resources that are available to us. We can not deficit spend. We can not put our other businesses in jeopardy. We have an obligation to those employees. There's nothing I'd like more than an NBA championship. Everybody would love nothing more than to see the Jazz succeed, but we don't want it bad enough to put those employees at risk."

Miller doesn't even sign up for the idea that NBA owners reap massive profits when they sell. He's aware that the team would sell for a lot more today than what his dad bought it for, but that's no proof team ownership is a good investment. "Almost anything we did with our money," he says "would get a better return on investment." Miller also points out that to realize any of that value, they'd have to sell the team, which he doesn't see happening -- he hopes to pass the Jazz down to the next generation of Millers one day.

Owning the Jazz does benefit the other companies in the family portfolio, however. "It open doors to us," explains Miller. "Being the owners of the Jazz gives us access to decision-makers. I'm confident that if we weren't involved with the Jazz, some of those wheels would turn much slower."

The other day, I spent 12 minutes watching the video that greets new employees when they begin work at the Larry H. Miller group of companies. It's unremarkable as a corporate video -- some suits, some strategic thinking, some rallying of the troops. But about five minutes in I suddenly realized: Holy cow! They haven't even mentioned the Jazz yet!

Think about that. The mission is to get Larry H. Miller employees fired up. They talk about the merits of the free market economy. They talk about a family vacation at Lake Powell in April 1979. They talk about why they support "the local high school football team." Only after several minutes do they mention the massive professional sports enterprise they own to the delight of millions.

There might be other businesses in this world that use the Jazz to motivate employees more than this company does.

It's a funny thing for an owner to be in the position of moderating fan passion. Most stoke it. I have seen Wyc Grousbeck showing pulse-pounding Kevin Garnett highlights set to loud music. We have all seen the countless ways Mark Cuban has come to fire up people about the Dallas Mavericks (he sits by their bench, he trains in their locker room, he screams at their referees).

Greg Miller, on the other hand, told me a story about when he was young. His dad invited him to attend a Jazz game, before the family had any thought of buying the team. Greg wanted to hang out with his friends instead, and declined. His dad explained that the seats were in the second row, and they might never get to sit that close again. Only then did Greg agree to go.

It wasn't even the point of the story, but afterwards it struck me: The guy who runs the Jazz has a story about turning down a free ticket to a Jazz game. That's probably smart and right and healthy once in a while. Even die-hards should have other important things on their calendars. But a lot of people would kill for that ticket!

The Jazz have proven that, with solid level-headed long-term decisions, an NBA team can perform at a high-level with ownership that makes the team conform to bigger business strategies. But can Jazz fans understand the idea of an owner who has priorities bigger than basketball? We'll dig into that topic more in the third and final post of the series.

Despite the improvisational flair of the team's name, the Utah Jazz lead the league in doing things the same way, again and again. Most teams bend with the whims of their billionaire owners -- coaches, executives and players rotate through at a dizzying rate. Long-time Jazz owner Larry H. Miller's only whim since buying the team in 1979, on the other hand, seemed to be finding things that works and to stick with them. Whether it was John Stockton and Karl Malone running the same pick and roll for nearly two decades, Jerry Sloan patrolling the sidelines since 1988, or a roster still built, despite several bumps in the road over the last five years, around Deron Williams, Carlos Boozer and Andrei Kirilenko.

Through it all, next week the Jazz will enter the playoffs on the short list of teams with a real chance to win this year's title.

Key basketball employees at most NBA teams are on the "hot seat" every day. The threat of unemployment is a key motivator League-wide. But not in Utah. Consider what Larry Miller said in 2001 when he gave vice president of basketball operations Kevin O'Connor a contract extension: "I fully expect that Kevin and Jerry [Sloan] will be with the team as long as they choose to be. I figure that they are both good for another 20 years."

It's an old-school approach that may well cost the Jazz opportunities -- how many brilliant coaches, executives and players have they missed through the years? Critics will note that the team has yet to win a title, and that doing so is a one-in-thirty proposition that surely favors the bold.

On the other hand, since inception, the Jazz franchise has the fifth-best winning percentage of any NBA team, despite operating in one of the smallest markets with a management edict to be more or less financially self-sufficient. How much of that is attributable to people like O'Connor and Sloan knowing they have job security, and being able to think long-term? Sloan doesn't have to acquiesce to players who won't run his system -- political battles with him all end the same way, and it's unthinkable a player could get him fired. Knowing that, is it any wonder why the Jazz share the ball beautifully?

Similarly, O'Connor is widely viewed as one of the NBA's savvier executives. In 2005, for instance, through deft talent evaluation and trading, and without a top-five pick, the Jazz nabbed Williams, one of the very best point guards of his generation. But how much of that savvy was learned on the job? Four years earlier, Miller had extended O'Connor's contract when his noteworthy acquisitions were John Amaechi, John Crotty, John Starks, Donyell Marshall, DeShawn Stevenson and Jarron Collins -- a list that wouldn't have helped his job security on many teams.

The win totals fluctuate, but nothing about Utah's process was ever going to change as long as Larry H. Miller was at the helm -- a reign that ended in February 2009 when he succumbed to complications of diabetes. Years before his death, Miller named his son Greg chief executive of the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies (which owns the Jazz).

Now that Greg Miller is calling the shots without his dad around, will things stay the same for the Jazz? In a lengthy conversation about his management style, Greg Miller doesn't sound like someone eager to depart from the past.

"The recipe for success," Miller explains, "is executing fundamentals as well as they can be executed. It's a natural law that success or victory has to come as a result. I've seen dozens, or hundreds of examples of that being so, in all of our businesses, and I don't want to turn away from that now.

"And what if I did change how we did things, and we took ten steps backwards? Then we'd lose credibility, not to mention, I'd look like an idiot."

But that doesn't mean there won't always be pressure to evolve.

In the days to come on TrueHoop, Miller will share thoughts about running an NBA team the same way as ever in a changing world. Challenges, believe it or not, even include Twitter.

UPDATE: A follow-up, about the business of owning a small-market NBA team.

Which would it be?

People ask me that a surprising amount. It's a silly question: I have the best job I could imagine, and nobody in the NBA wants to hire me to do anything interesting anyway.

But I have come up with the right answer: Owner!

That's the NBA job I want. Your mission is to be involved, but not too involved. To hire the right people and trust them. (By the way, one way to demonstrate your trust is to go on amazing and long vacations.) To be strategic. To be judicious at most times, but occasionally daring as all get-out.

It's also always nice to get to make big decisions unencumbered, which in the NBA only owners and David Stern get to do.

And more than anything, you have to be passionate about the team, and express that passion in appropriate ways to fans, sponsors and basketball staff.

I'm telling you, I would be good at this.

But, alas, no one has yet offered me that job, nor the billions required to force my way in. But if you want to know which NBA job I covet, that's it.

But let's be clear: That job is no bed of roses.

Because along with all that responsibility and power come unbelievably big bills. Unless you're an owner in New York, L.A. or Chicago, it's wicked expensive to run a team. I mean, honestly, I kind of hate, for instance, how much my gym membership costs. It's a great gym and get a lot out of it. An NBA team is like that, only instead of $200 a month for the family plan, it's like you have to pay to construct the entire gym from scratch every week. All the land. All the bulldozers, the foundation, the framers, the sheetrockers, electricians ... the whole deal. And then when it's all done you just sign it over to your injured power forward and start again the next week.

And sometimes you get that money back.

Other times, not so much.

So, consider the Miller family that now runs the Utah Jazz. The team was mainly the passion of their father, who recently passed away. Larry H. Miller's son Greg, who is the CEO of the team, is a guy with a lot of passions. He's really into the Toyota dealership his dad bought that started the family empire. He's into the racetrack the family owns. He's into adventures with his kids, and biking. And, yes, he's also into the Utah Jazz. He swears he is.

But what a tough time to be at the helm of that deal. They are working with a business model where the team has to be more or less economically self-sufficient, and therefore, as you can read at the link above, they have long determined not to spend above the luxury tax line, which makes sense especially as they in a minuscule market by NBA standards.

And, on top of all that, they got kind quadruple-bamboozled last summer. They had opportunities to cut some costs, but sensing a bad economy Kyle Korver, Carlos Boozer and Mehmet Okur all passed up the glory of free agency to opt in to their Jazz contracts. Then the conniving Blazers signed one of their best young players, Paul Millsap, to a front-loaded whopper of a free agent deal that the Jazz had to swallow hard to match. In addition, Matt Harpring -- a key contributor -- was lost to career-threatening injuries.

All that came after giving huge money to Andrei Kirilenko only to determine that, amazing though he may be, he's the kind of guy who needs to play alongside several other highly paid players.

That put them on course to become huge tax payers, around $12 million, even as the team arguably regressed in skill.

That's so much over the luxury tax line that they traded away a promising young guard in Eric Maynor (he had the play of the day last night for Oklahoma City) for a deck chair and a plate of cheese fries, just to shed salary.

Oh, and did I mention that the team has been really disappointing lately? Even though they have more or less the same squad that made the Western Conference Finals a couple of years ago, now they're around .500 and have lost three straight and six of the last ten.

Tough time to be an owner.

And here's where I am convinced that all most fans really want to hear is that you're not looking at the team for profits. You're looking to win. And you will keep putting money into the project, dammit. The owners who don't feel like that? They tend to be quiet and out of sight. (Notice how many owners are quiet and out of sight?)

Anyway, today marks the launch of a blog by Greg Miller. And in his first post about the Jazz, he walks a tough line. Fans are desperate for good news. Will that Carlos Boozer situation finally be resolved with a trade? Is there help on the way? Can you save us, dear owner, by waving your magic wand loaded with cash?

In his blog post, Miller says, essentially, that the team will not be spending its way out of trouble. My summary of his main points:

• I love the Jazz.
• We're spending a lot of money already.
• We're trying to make trades, but trades are hard to make.
• We will not take on long-term bad contracts.
• We see the team as an asset. (This is important -- means it is not just an expensive hobby.)
• We're telling you we're not throwing in the towel. (Isn't that assumed?)

You feeling inspired, Jazz fans?

Looking at things from Greg Miller's point of view, today's one day I'm OK being a blogger, instead of an owner. And if I were Greg? Maybe it's time for one of those killer vacations.