21106A1058 / Harsh Potphode

“Amar Bose, Pioneer of High-End Audio”

You could say Bose Corp owes its massive success in high-end audio to a serious
case of buyer’s remorse. The company is one of the leading brands in audio and has
been making speakers, headphones and audio equipment based on deep research
into acoustics for just over a half a century. In the 1960s, the company devised an
entirely new way of designing speakers. Later, it introduced the world’s first
commercial noise-cancelling headphones, and it became the first company to design
bespoke audio systems for cars. Bose headphones are worn today by professional
pilots and have been worn by space shuttle astronauts. Its car audio systems have
been factory-installed in luxury brands such as Maserati and Maybach. Founder
Amar Gopal Bose didn’t set out to sell speaker systems and headphones. He began
his career as an academic engineer at MIT in the late 1950s, licensing power
conversion and amplification technology to the U.S. military and government
agencies such as NASA.
Amar Gopal Bose was an American entrepreneur and academic. An electrical engineer
and sound engineer, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for
over 45 years. He was also the founder and chairman of Bose Corporation. Bose died on
July 12,2013 at the age of 83 in Wayland, Massachusetts.

Bose was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a Bengali Hindu father, Noni Gopal

Bose and an American mother of French and German ancestry, Charlotte Mechlin.
His father was an Indian freedom revolutionary who having been imprisoned for his
political activities, fled Bengal in the 1920s in order to avoid further persecution by
the British colonial police. His mother, Charlotte (1895-1973), was an American
schoolteacher of French and German ancestry.
Bose first displayed his entrepreneurial skills and his interest in electronics at age
thirteen when, during the World War II years, he enlisted school friends as co-
workers in a small home business repairing model trains and home radios, to
supplement his family's income.
After graduating from Abington Senior High School in Abington, Pennsylvania, Bose
enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with a BS
(Bachelor of Science) in Electrical Engineering in the early 1950s. Bose spent a year
at Philips Natuurkundig Laboratory in Eindhoven, Netherlands.and a year as a
Fulbright research student in New Delhi, India,. He completed his PhD in Electrical
Engineering from MIT, writing a thesis on non-linear systems under the supervision
of Norbert Wiener and Yuk-Wing Lee.
Career:
Following graduation, Amar Bose became an assistant professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his early years as a professor, Bose
bought a high-end stereo speaker system in 1956 and he was disappointed to find
that speakers with impressive technical specifications failed to reproduce the realism
of a live performance. This would eventually motivate his extensive speaker
technology research, concentrating on key weaknesses in the high-end speaker
systems available at the time. His research on acoustics led him to develop a stereo
loudspeaker that would reproduce, in a domestic setting, the dominantly reflected
sound field that characterises the listening space of the audience in a concert hall.
His focus on psychoacoustics later became a hallmark of his company's audio
products.
For initial capital to fund his company in 1964, Bose turned to angel investors,
including his MIT thesis advisor and professor, Yuk-Wing Lee. Bose was awarded
significant patents in two fields that continue to be important to the Bose Corporation.
These patents were in the area of loudspeaker design and non-linear, two-state
modulated, Class-D power processing.
Bose was striving to create the next generation of speakers. By 1968, he introduced
the 901 Direct / Reflecting speaker system which helped to establish him as the
market leader in the audio components market.
In the 1980s, Bose developed an electromagnetic replacement for automotive shock
absorbers, intended to radically improve the performance of automotive suspension
systems, absorbing bumps and road shock while controlling car body motions and
sway
He continued his pioneering research in this field and invented the Bose Wave radio
and the Bose noise-cancelling headphones. These inventions were so successful
that they were adopted by pilots in both the military and commercial sectors.
Bose was very passionate about research and designed a software program that
enabled acoustic engineers to simulate the sound from any seat in a large hall. The
Staples Centre in Los Angeles, the Sistine Chapel and several other spaces used
this sound system.
Even though Bose was more interested in revolutionising the acoustics and speaker
systems more than making money, profits flowed to his company because of the
high - quality products they produced. By the 1980s, automobile companies like
Mercedes and Porsche began installing Bose audio systems in their vehicles.
. In 2007, Amar Bose was listed in Forbes 400 as the 271st richest man in the world,
with a net worth of $1.8 billion. In 2009, he was no longer on the billionaires list, but
returned to the list in 2011, with a net worth of $1 billion. The company Bose founded
employed 11,700 people worldwide as of 2016 and produces products for home, car,
and professional audio, as well as conducting basic research in acoustics and other
fields. Bose never took his company public, and since the company is privately held
Bose was able to pursue risky long-term research.
Legacy and Teachings inspired me:
In addition to running his company, Bose remained a professor at MIT until 2001. He
earned the Baker Teaching Award in 1963–64, and further teaching awards over the
years. The Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching (1989), and later the Junior Bose
Award (1995) were established in his honour, to recognise outstanding teaching in
the MIT School of Engineering. Former students have stated that his classes helped
them gain life skills and problem-solving skills that have served them throughout their
careers.
Bose was the advisor to MIT professor Alan V.Oppenheim who is well-known for his
work on digital signal processing and his books on signals and systems. Oppenheim
dedicated one of his books to Bose and described him with: "What I learned from
him about teaching, research, and life over the many decades of our relationship
affected me in ways too numerous to describe. He set the highest standards in
everything that he did, and his accomplishments as a teacher, an inventor, and an
entrepreneur are legendary”.

Dr Amar Bose, Bose Corporation’s Founder, has given to MIT the majority of the
stock of Bose Corporation in the form of non-voting shares.  MIT will receive annual
cash dividends on those shares when dividends are paid by Bose Corporation; those
cash dividends will be used by MIT to sustain and advance MIT’s education
Under the terms of the gift, MIT cannot sell its Bose shares and will not participate in
the management or governance of the company. Bose Corporation will remain a
private and independent company, and operate as it always has, with no change in
strategy or leadership.

Positive Qualities:
1) creative and imaginative – coming up with new and innovative ideas for the
new noise-cancelling headphones and setting the bar high in the segment of
Audio system proves it.

2) Visionary – Amar Bose had a vision of making the Bose Corporation one of the
best corporation producing Audio System make it provide best quality in the
segment.

3) Decisiveness – Effective leader has to learn how to make sound decisions

quickly, Amar Bose has made right decisions at right time for his Bose
company in his early stage for his company and still his set of values are
followed in the company till now.

4) Hardworking – Amar Bose had faced lot of losses and failed quite a times in
his earlier stage as leader but still he didn’t stopped working hard to achieve
his vision and Organisation goals of the company that’s shows his dedication
towards the corporation.

5) Enthusiastic – If you want people to follow you, then you have to lead them
with enthusiasm, Amar Bose treated everyone fairly in Bose corporation and
his employees always respected him. They always were motivated to work
with Amar Bose and get guidance from him.