Brian Burke

Why organisations work with Brian Burke

• He has run four NHL franchises and acted as the league’s chief disciplinarian, so the material on accountability, conduct, and hard personnel calls is drawn from decisions he actually made, not cases he studied.
• He built the Anaheim Ducks team that won the 2007 Stanley Cup and the U.S. squad that took Olympic silver in 2010, giving him a credible answer to how standards and culture translate into results.
• He co-founded the You Can Play Project after the death of his son Brendan, an inclusion initiative that became the operating standard for LGBTQ+ acceptance across professional sport.
• As first Executive Director of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association, he has worked on institution-building inside a league designed from scratch, not just running established franchises.
• Harvard Law School training and five years as NHL Executive Vice President mean he speaks to the legal, governance, and reputational dimensions of leadership with specific authority.

Biography highlights

• Juris Doctor, Harvard Law School, 1981
• Captain of Providence Friars men’s ice hockey, NCAA (1976-77)
• NHL Executive Vice President and Director of Hockey Operations, 1993-1998
• General manager of Hartford Whalers, Vancouver Canucks, Anaheim Ducks (Stanley Cup, 2007), and Toronto Maple Leafs
• General manager, United States men’s Olympic hockey team, Vancouver 2010 (silver medal)
• Co-founder, You Can Play Project (2012)
• Inductee, U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, Class of 2023
• Author, “Burke’s Law: A Life in Hockey” (Viking, 2020), with Stephen Brunt
• Executive Director, Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association (2024)

Biography

The Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup in 2007 under a front office that had been rebuilt almost from scratch. Brian Burke was the general manager who rebuilt it. That pattern, inherit a struggling operation, set hard standards, make uncomfortable personnel decisions, has defined four decades of his career across Hartford, Vancouver, Anaheim, Toronto, Calgary, and Pittsburgh.

Before any of that, he trained as a lawyer. Burke took a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1981, then spent five years inside the NHL league office as Executive Vice President and the chief disciplinarian for on-ice conduct. The legal training shows up in how he talks about leadership: precise about process, unsentimental about accountability, aware that every decision by a senior executive is a decision the organisation will have to defend.

The work changed after his son Brendan, who was openly gay, died in a 2010 car accident. With his son Patrick, Burke launched the You Can Play Project in 2012 to end homophobia in sport. The initiative has since become the reference standard for LGBTQ+ inclusion across professional leagues, and the experience gave Burke an unusually direct perspective on how cultural change happens inside organisations built around a narrow definition of toughness.

His 2020 memoir “Burke’s Law: A Life in Hockey,” co-authored with Stephen Brunt, was a number one Canadian bestseller. In 2023 he was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2024 he took on the first executive directorship of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players’ Association, a mandate to build institutional foundations for a league being designed in real time.

Key speaking topics

• Leadership in high-performance sport
• Culture, conduct, and accountability inside elite organisations
• Inclusion and the You Can Play Project
• Decision-making under public scrutiny
• Building and running championship teams
• Governance and discipline in professional leagues
• Resilience and personal loss

Ideal for

• Boards and executive teams setting conduct and accountability standards
• CHROs and chief culture officers working on inclusion in tradition-bound organisations
• Leaders running high-profile operations where decisions are reviewed in public
• Sports and entertainment businesses, and organisations that work closely with them

Audience outcomes

• A concrete read on how senior leaders hold conduct standards when the easy move is to look the other way
• Specific examples of what it took to build a Stanley Cup-winning organisation and an Olympic medal-winning team
• A direct account of how the You Can Play Project changed LGBTQ+ inclusion across professional sport
• A sharper sense of how legal, reputational, and competitive considerations collide in senior personnel decisions
• Perspective from a leader who has made high-consequence calls under sustained public pressure and can explain the reasoning