Sidney Harman - Career

Career

After graduating with a physics degree Sidney's first job was at the David Bogen Company as an engineer. His boss was Bernard Kardon, and roughly thirteen years later each invested $5,000 to make the Festival D1000, the world's first integrated hi-fi receiver. Harman and Kardon founded Harman Kardon in 1953. He was known for the quality of working life programs that he initiated at the company’s plants, especially for the program at Bolivar, Tennessee, which had some short-lived success and has become a model for such activities in American industry and a principal case study at business schools in the United States and abroad. Harman had written on productivity, quality of working life and economic policy, and was co-author, with Daniel Yankelovich, of Starting With the People, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1988.

In the 1970s, Sidney Harman accepted an appointment in the Carter administration as undersecretary of the Department of Commerce. When Harman took office in 1976, he sold his company to conglomerate Beatrice Foods to avoid a conflict of interest. Beatrice promptly sold many portions of the company, including the original Harman Kardon division, and by 1980 only 60% of the original company remained.

After he left government in 1978, he created Harman International Industries and reacquired a number of businesses he sold to Beatrice. The company continued its growth plan with a string of acquisitions throughout the 1980s that pushed Harman International's sales from about $80 million in 1981 to more than $200 million by 1986, and then to more than $500 million by 1989.