Continue learning and creating, entrepreneur says
Imagine President-elect Obama, just hours before his inauguration ceremony, instructing his driver to take a detour from Capitol Hill to a friend’s home in Georgetown.
It seems unlikely that the Secret Service would abide such a plan, but 75 years ago, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was about to be inaugurated for the first time, he paid a visit to retired Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
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| Sidney Harman |
“Why, Mr. President, to improve my mind,” Holmes responded.
Sidney Harman, Ph.D., told this story during an Oct. 30 talk at USC Law to illustrate what he said is the greatest lesson for students to learn: “There is no better juice in life than the encouragement of, and continued practicing of, the mind.”
Harman would know. An entrepreneur who founded Harman International Industries—previously Harman Kardon—he was deputy secretary of commerce during the Carter administration and served as president of a small college. He remains active in education and philanthropy.
Recounting several stories from his own life, Harman imparted advice to students.
Harman spoke of two lawyers he knew in Chicago years ago. Both were talented attorneys, but one was a “poet” and the other a “plumber,” Harman said. The “plumber” lawyer clung desperately to the details of the statutes. The “poet,” however, moved past the minutiae.
“When he talked with me about the law, he did it not as a sheriff, but as someone who understood the necessary rule of law and would move beyond it,” Harman said.
Harman learned from this lawyer that a sense of good judgment is not inherited, but earned through “working the mind” by reading and writing.
Although reading and writing are often overlooked in the business world and treated mechanically by lawyers, without the insight gained through these activities, law students may find themselves more similar to the plumber than the poet, Harman said.
“You need to transcend law,” Harman said. “Find innovative solutions. Write in a way that exercises your imagination and gives life to judgment.”
Harman also recounted the “Shoe Crisis of 1977,” which he dealt with while working in the Department of Commerce. American shoe manufacturers were getting squeezed out of the marketplace by foreign competitors for a variety of reasons. Some made great shoes but had no concept of bookkeeping; others kept great records but were lousy marketers. None of them had the total package.
Shoe company executives were summoned to Washington to meet with Harman and a panel of government employees who had relevant expertise. The government was going to teach the executives how to run a business.
When the shoe companies’ lawyers heard about this idea, however, they declared it restraint of trade.
Rather than give up on the idea, the Commerce Department brought in lawyers from the Department of Justice, who sat in on the session and made sure the proceedings were all within the law. Despite the corporate lawyers’ assumptions that the competitors would collude and break the law, they ended up having a legal, positive, and beneficial session, Harman said.
The moral of the story?
“As lawyers, I would hope that you would think of such ethical conduct not as a matter of restraint imposed by law, but as something that arises out of healthy, intelligent, moral minds,” Harman said.
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