Sidney Harman has been active in Education, Government and Industry.

His doctoral thesis was titled Business and Education - New Experiments, New Hope. (The Union Institute, 1973)

He was for three years President of Friends World College, a worldwide experimental Quaker college.

He 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, Harvard University. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the same institution.

Dr. Harman is Chairman of the Program Committee of the Board of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. There he directed a program on the study of Bureaucracy and Governance, and was co-director of a multi-year international project entitled, Jobs in the 1980s and 1990s.

He is Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Public Agenda Foundation, the public opinion research and education organization.

Dr. Harman is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Carter Center of Emory University.

He served as the Deputy Secretary of Commerce of the United States in 1977 and 1978.

As Deputy Secretary, he organized and administered the government's program to revitalize the ailing U.S. shoe industry - a successful tripartite effort by labor, management and government.

Sidney Harman was one of the handful of pioneers who began the high-fidelity industry when he founded the well-known Harman-Kardon, Inc. in 1952. Harman-Kardon is now a division of the Harman Consumer Group of Harman International Industries. Dr. Harman is Executive Chairman of Harman International, a Fortune 500 company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Dr. Harman is widely known for the Quality of Working Life programs he initiated at the company's plants and especially so for the program at Bolivar, Tennessee (begun in 1969), 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.

His programs have resulted in major improvements in worker commitment, compensation and productivity.

Dr. Harman has written extensively on Productivity, Quality of Working Life and Economic Policy in Newsweek magazine, The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, etc.

He is the co-author, with Daniel Yankelovich, of Starting With The People, published by Houghton Mifflin in June 1988, and the author of Mind Your Own Business, published by Currency/Doubleday in October 2003.

He has been featured on CBS News, NBC News and the BBC.

He and his work have been written about in many newspaper and magazine articles (including The Economist, Barrons, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review) and in a number of widely read books, which include: Michael Maccoby's The Gamesman, The Leader and his more recent The Productive Narcissist; Daniel Zwerling's Democracy at Work; Justin Jerome's Education Out of Anarchy; and Ronald Muller's The Revitalizing of America.

He has been 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 BENS (Business Executives for National Security). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Council on Competitiveness. He is also a member of the Board of the Leadership Institute of the University of Southern California.

Dr. Harman is a Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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