Can Comcast Be As Mighty As Google?

As the man in charge of reviving TV and movie giant NBCUniversal, Comcast’s­ Steve Burke just might be the most important person at the most important company in Philadelphia. It’s the job he’s been preparing for all his life—and if he succeeds, he could lift the cable company we love to hate into the lofty ranks of Apple and Google.

If the stakes in the NBCUni deal are high for Comcast, they may be even higher for Burke himself. In many ways, his entire life—from the conversations he heard at his family’s dinner table, to his Harvard ­business-school education, to his apprenticeship at Disney, to his friendships with corporate titans like Warren Buffet—seems to have been building to this moment.

“Steve understands that this is the job he was born to do,” says his close friend, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. “This is the job that brings together everything he learned since he was a kid.”

IN PERSON, 53-YEAR-OLD STEVE BURKE is spectacularly fit, trim at the midsection, with a full head of black hair flecked with gray and the handsome, lined face of a character actor. He wears conservative, well-tailored­ suits. His black leather shoes don’t look as expensive as he can afford. (His Comcast compensation for 2010 was $34.7 million.) And even when he’s at ease, he stands ramrod straight, hands on his hips, elbows out, a satisfied smile playing across his lips, like Superman observing a peaceful Metropolis from the top of some tall building—­his résumé fanning out behind him like a cape.

Burke’s career, pre-Comcast, is a list of success stories at General Foods, ABC and especially Disney, where he convinced CEO Michael Eisner to let him run with a concept he called “Disney Stores.” Safe to say, that worked out. Next assignment? Paris, where he learned French in just a few years and rendered a profitable enterprise out of the money-losing boondoggle of Euro Disney.

Old and current colleagues generally describe Burke as a model boss who connects to them on a human level—trying to find some concordance between their jobs and their dreams. He pushes past the distancing effects of jargon and PowerPoint. “Let’s talk like human beings,” he’ll say. If he writes an e-mail to an employee before 8 a.m., he hits SEND later, to avoid intimidating the recipient. When he speaks, he is concise and on point, favoring short declarative sentences. When he listens, he does so with an almost disconcerting avidity, making a steeple with his fingers that he peers over, eyes intent as a raptor’s, as if he would go on listening and staring even if a fire started on his desk.

The overall effect is the corporate equivalent of Jason Bourne—good-looking,­ smooth, finely honed and trained to a purpose. But where Bourne, in the Robert Ludlum thriller series, has gone rogue, the Burke Identity is that of a Company Man. And he has a very telling ambition for the meetings he conducts: He wants the people­ involved to speak about any business-­related­ subject with the same kind of freedom kids have at the family dinner table, confident they’ll still be part of the corporate clan tomorrow.

“It’s not about being nice,” says Bob Callahan, a media investment adviser who worked with Burke at ABC. “In meetings, that’s the time to vet ideas. If you’re not honest during that process, it can hurt you. What if there’s a problem you should have caught sooner?”

All true. But in any narrative of Steve Burke’s life, that dinner-table analogy holds deeper layers. Because it was at his own family dinner table that he first started on the path toward his current job.

His father, Dan Burke, was a funny but tough-minded businessman who worked as the number-two guy to Tom Murphy at a broadcasting company called Capital Cities. There, in 1986, legendary investment strategist Warren Buffett, an early backer, helped fund a historic “reverse” merger in which the smallish Cap Cities bought ABC, a national network many times its size. “I did it because of the people involved,” recalls Buffett. “Tom and Dan were a true partnership. You could take them at their word.”

According to Buffett, the team of Murphy and Burke ran their increasingly large and successful company “like a family,” where employees spoke up, trust was essential, and business was fun. Dan Burke had a special stamp that read BULLSHIT, which he plastered on important documents. He started annual corporate meetings by delivering essentially the same speech every year, proclaiming the need for “decentralization” and his own irrelevance.

Steve Burke, the firstborn of Dan’s four children, grew up in Rye, New York, talking business with his dad. While his younger siblings ate obliviously, he learned the difference between a ratings point and a share. In his teen years, he adjourned to his room and read the annual corporate reports produced by Cap Cities and Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway. He attended his father’s speeches, wishing he could be his father. And mentors surrounded him. His uncle, CEO at Johnson & Johnson, whisked him away on skiing trips. His aunt was a high-level executive at Avon. Buffett was a family friend. Big business deals were discussed in cookout smoke and over plates of peas. Burke learned that success didn’t necessitate sacrificing time with family. And he thought of his father as his hero. When he got married, Dan Burke served as his best man.

“Our father was very involved in our lives,” says William Burke, one of Steve’s younger brothers. “He set standards for us, and he let us know when we didn’t live up to them. It wasn’t like there was a lot of pressure. But he wanted to see us accomplish something.” In his early 20s, after earning his undergraduate degree at Colgate, Steve Burke considered enrolling in Harvard’s Divinity School but chose business instead. He might not have perceived a huge difference between the two. His father had raised him to see industry as a Noble Pursuit. He graduated­ with an MBA in 1982, taking his place alongside classmates who included General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and JPMorgan’s­ Dimon, who recalls something that happened outside class as most indicative of Burke’s character. “One day Steve just said to me, ‘I’m gonna run the Boston Marathon,’” Dimon recalls. “I’d never even seen him run to class.”

Burke explained his training schedule for a race just months away. Dimon figured that was the last he would ever hear about Burke and marathons. But Burke “didn’t just finish,” says Dimon. “He smoked it! He went from nothing to running at an elite level.”

Burke ran the marathon in two hours and 39 minutes, a little more than six minutes­ per mile. “He once told me, ‘If it’s boring and repetitive and involves moving in a straight line, I’m pretty good at it,’” recalls Frank Burke, Steve’s other younger brother. “I think it speaks to the level of determination he has, which sets him apart.”