The Godfather of Entrepreneurship

Talk to Rudy Lamone for even a few minutes, and you’ll immediately be struck by one thing: Rudy knows everybody. Everybody. But not everybody who knows Rudy knows how he got to be one of the most respected entrepreneurship leaders in the country and one of the most loved leaders in Smith School history.

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Rudy Lamone’s family immigrated to the U.S. from the province of Abruzzi, Italy, in the early 1900s. They were a family with a knack for business and a bent toward new ventures. His aunt and cousin ran corner grocery stores, his brother ran restaurants, and his cousin opened up a women’s sportswear business. That’s where Rudy cut his teeth. “I would go to New York to buy women’s clothes,” he relates with a chuckle.

Their combination of hard work and moxie paid for all the children in Rudy’s extended family to go to college. “That was the fire that lit my interest in entrepreneurship,” he says.

But when Rudy was teenager, anything business-related took a back seat to anything music-related. Rudy was a gifted saxophone player determined to make music his career. He lied about his age to play in Pittsburgh clubs, burning the end of a cork to create fake beard stubble on his face, and made sure to always enter clubs through the poorly-lit back entrances.

He spent the next four years on tour with a succession of big bands and eventually the Rudy Lamone Band, which provided backup for major acts on tour. In due course he landed in North Carolina, spent three years in the Army at Fort Bragg (and in the 440th Army Band), and then finally settled down to an undergraduate education at the ripe old age of 26 at the University of North Carolina.

When Rudy came to the University of Maryland as a newly-minted PhD, he found a tiny but surprisingly impressive group of young professors and a mentor in then-dean Charles Taff, who was determined to make the business department great. “Coming here turned out to be a great decision on my part,” says Lamone. “It changed my life.”

At the time, the business department lived in the School of Business and Public Administration, a conglomeration of academic disciplines that included business, economics, journalism, political science and geography.

“We couldn’t become well-known unless we were really a school,” says Rudy. He and a few other faculty argued their case to the administration of the university, and in 1972 the business department became its own school for the first time. And when it came time to look for a dean for the new school, Rudy’s name rose to the top of the list.

Money was the biggest challenge Rudy faced—a problem successive Smith School deans have continued to address. But Rudy also had to contend with the fact that the university had maintained little to no contact with business alumni over the years. “Without alumni support, we’re nothing,” he says. “It took us a long time to realize that! That became part of my mission. One of the first things I did was to hire an alumni director.”

When Rudy went to a university administrator to ask for a list of prominent alumni, the administrator came back with a red box filled with index cards. Rudy took it, and his little red box became legend. Rudy worked his red box to drum up recruiting partners as well as financial support for the school and its students.

Rudy has always taken a personal interest in Smith School students. One of the things he enjoyed most during his tenure as dean was helping create and support student clubs and organizations, including a number of fraternities. He also spent a great deal of time coaching and mentoring students. “My kids,” Rudy remembers them fondly. Many of Rudy’s students have gone on to extraordinarily successful careers (and you can be sure their contact information has found its way into the modern equivalent of Rudy’s little red box!).

Over the years, Rudy has witnessed the realization of a number of his dreams. The Dingman Center is nationally recognized as a leading incubator of opportunities for nascent businesses, not just in the state of Maryland, but around the world. Rudy cofounded, with colleagues from the University of Indiana and the University of Southern California, an organization of academic entrepreneurship centers that allows faculty to share ideas and best practices. That organization, the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, today includes more than 200 universities and colleges in the U.S. and abroad and hosts an annual conference.

And Rudy recently realized a long-time dream as the Smith School opened a campus in the heart of downtown Baltimore. But what he has always loved best is the opportunity to meet and work with student entrepreneurs.

“The biggest pleasure in my life has been being around high-energy students who want to be entrepreneurs,” says Rudy. “I love all my students, but the entrepreneurship students are very special to me. They’re a very different breed, and every year I get a whole new crop. Even now that I’m retired, somehow they find me. That’s my real joy, seeing some kids that I’ve mentored, create something.”