In this piece from Corporate Counsel Business Journal, two academics, Rick Burton, the David B. Falk Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University, and Norm O’Reilly, dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Maine, discuss their book, Business the NHL Way: Lessons from the Fastest Game on Ice. Their goal, O’Reilly says, was to look at the National Hockey League and see what they could learn from a sport that’s had “unbridled business success” and share their insights with the broader business world. “One of the things that makes Norm and me interesting as academicians, and also as authors,” says Burton, “is that we’ve actually lived out in the business world that we write about. Norm is a partner in a thriving agency in Canada called T1, and I was the commissioner of a professional basketball league in Australia as well as the chief marketing officer of the US Olympic Committee for the Beijing Summer Olympics.” That’s why, they say, their work is akin to Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ bestsellers about data analytics and baseball, and allowed them to draw general business lesson from topics such as the permissive stance toward violence on the ice to the high percentage of veteran players compared with other sports. “In the NHL,” the authors say, “it’s common to see players between the age of 35 and 40 still on rosters, which is considered really old by pro sports standards. . . . We also reference the movie, “The Intern,” starring Robert De Niro, about a retired businessman who becomes a senior intern, to drive home the point that experience and wisdom may be of value.” Read more at CCBJ.
Lessons from the Bruising Business of Hockey
