Sidney Harman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dr. Sidney Harman, currently chairman of Harman International Industries, Inc., has been active in education, government, and industry. He served for three years as president of Friends World College, a worldwide, experimental Quaker College, and is the founder and an active member of the Program on Technology, Public Policy, and Human Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Dr. Harman is chairman of the Program Committee of the Board of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and a member of the Board of the Carter Center of Emory University. Dr. Harman served as the Deputy Secretary of Commerce of the United States in 1977 and 1978.

A pioneer of the high-fidelity industry, Dr. Harman founded the well-known harman/kardon, Inc., in 1952. He is widely known for the Quality of Working Life programs he initiated at the company’s plants, especially for the program at Bolivar, Tennessee, which has become a model for such activities in American industry and a principal case study at business schools in the United States and abroad. Dr. Harman has written extensively on productivity, quality of working life, and economic policy, and is co-author, with Daniel Yankelovich, of Starting With the People, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1988.

Dr. Harman has served as a trustee of the Martin Luther King Center for Social Change, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, and the National Symphony Orchestra. He is chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of the Public Agenda Foundation; chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Business Executives for National Security; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Council on Competitiveness; and a member of the Board of the Leadership Institute of the University of Southern California. He is married to Jane Harman, a congresswoman from California.

In addition to the many programs he serves and has founded, Dr. Harman is a philanthropist and a member of Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company Board of Trustees. The Company’s new Harman Center for the Arts is named for his family with a performance space, Sidney Harman Hall, named for him.