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Mark Roesler delivered the commencement address to the graduates of the Indiana University Kelley Graduate School of Business on Sunday, May 10, 2009.

The Kelley School of Business is world renowned as is consistently rated as one of the top business schools in the country. Roesler graduated from the Kelley School of Business with his MBA in 1982 and came back to the school to deliver the commencement address. Roesler spoke about “Dreams” and challenged the graduates to “Never, ever stop dreaming”. Roesler went on to say that “with dreams, any challenges can be overcome”.

Mark addressing the graduating class.

Mark is pictured with kids and wife, Stacy

It was just over a quarter century ago when I graduated from the Kelley School of Business with my MBA and from our law school here. I don’t remember who addressed my commencement, so I hope I say something inspirational so 25 years from now, even if you do not remember me, you will remember some of the ideas we share over the next 15 minutes.

Today we live in a society where education must prepare students for JOBS that don’t exist today…… often with TECNOLOGY that hasn’t been invented. And to solve PROBLEMS that we don’t even know are problems!

The paths that unfold in our lives and in the business world will be filled with unpredictable opportunities and challenges. In order to face this uncertain future, I challenge you to DREAM!

Dreams are motivating and imaginative visions of the future that can stimulate your mind, will and emotions to accomplish a goal.

Imagination and fantasy are the foundation of dreams. Albert Einstein, a dreamer and a thinker, understood the value of imagination. He said quote “when I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”

Everyone can and does dream, but to turn those dreams into reality and to reach up to that next level, but you must do 3 things:

1. Believe in your Dream
2. Engage in the hard work to make your Dream Happen and
3. never, ever Stop Dreaming

I have always characterized myself as a dreamer.

I grew up in a small town with only a few thousand people in rural Indiana. My dad was a postman and my mom a secretary in a plumbing business. They instilled in me a sense of pride in achievement. They wanted me to excel and wanted me to have lofty dreams. They convinced me that I could do anything if I got a good education, had a good work ethic and could dream.

During my time in high school, I started carrying a little yellow piece of paper that I had found from the Book of Proverbs. It was a passage that read “Without dreams, people perish. With dreams, people flourish”. To me, that was my guiding principal that led me to excel from those early years.

After graduating valedictorian of my small high school, I started a roofing business with my cousin. We worked in the summer – between our years in college. We were successful by our “small town” standards, and eight years later after I had completed my MBA and Law degree, we grew from a small town success into our small county success. But my mother said, “You’re too tall, Mark � you have a high center of gravity, as you get older and fall off that roof, you are not going to keep getting back up like you do now. She wanted me to pursue a safer line of work, like something in the corporate world that utilized my MBA and JD.

I did graduate in mid-year…. December….so I thought I could get a corporate job at least for a few months. Afterall our “busy time” for roofing was the summer.

I then met a gentleman named Dr. Beurt SerVaas. He was a medical doctor, a world renowned business man and president of the city county council in Indianapolis for 3 decades. He was a former high level military officer and later a CIA operative in World War 2. If there is anyone who knew the power of dreaming � it was him.

One of his businesses was controlling the copyrights to over 300 of the famous Norman Rockwell / Saturday Evening Post covers. A few short years earlier in 1976, as our country celebrated its bicentennial, his company began allowing others to use those copyrights on various products. That business became a multimillion dollar organization whereby various collectibles were sold all over the country bearing those famous Rockwell illustrations. I began doing some intellectual property work involving licensing of those copyrights and found the work very gratifying.

Then I saw that Graceland was opening back up shortly after Elvis Presley had died. We had the expertise in licensing various companies to do collectibles and I could see a possible connection here.

I convinced Dr. SerVaas that I had a dream to try to use this licensing expertise with a deceased personality like Elvis Presley. So we established a company that I partially owned and then later purchased.

My dream was very simple……the families of a deceased celebrity should have the same rights as a living celebrity.

But the problem was that deceased celebrities didn’t have any legally established rights to their images in 1982. Companies were using their images however they wanted and the families could not control or stop the unauthorized use.

I set out on a mission to find ways to protect these rights because it simply was not equitable…at least in my mind….. that upon the death of someone like Elvis Presley, James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, that suddenly their families could no longer control all of that good will that the celebrity had created during his or her lifetime. The estates of Presley, Dean, and Monroe joined the other estates of such icons of the past century as Humphrey Bogart, Babe Ruth, Malcolm X, Princess Diana and soon became my clients. They all believed in my dream of developing a way to protect and establish the intellectual property rights of their loved ones.

I realized that my dream was real ….. But just as with any Dream, you have to MAKE THE DREAM HAPPEN. And that almost always takes a lot of hard work.

You have to dream HARDER than the next person. Let me give you an example about one of my clients. She lived in an orphanage as a child ……..she said quote, “I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, ‘There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.’” And she did dream the hardest, and it wasn’t long before she changed her hair color from brunette to blonde and her name from Norma Jean Baker to Marilyn Monroe. She became the most iconic movie star in history.

Even though I was passionate for my dream, it was especially difficult because there seemed to be so much I needed to learn. For example, with my first two clients of Elvis Presley and James Dean, I discovered at the outset that they were actually more popular internationally than they were here in the United States. Of course, I had never even been to Hollywood, let alone out of the country.

After these hurdles were crossed, I had to address a major use of James Dean in Japan. You see, Levi Jeans had just introduced a major campaign in Japan called “Heroes Wear Levis”. Japan was a very homogeneous society…no one wore jeans….. especially the young people. But James Dean was a hero in Japan because he represented a “rebellious youth” who yearned for identity. He was the perfect example to sell the nation’s youth on denim wear. And that he did. He graced the subways, the stores, print ads and television commercials and was as big as any living celebrity.

I had to go and meet with Levi Strauss Japan and convince them that the Dean family really did control the rights to James Dean who had been deceased for over a quarter of a century. Since the family “controlled” those rights, Levi Strauss had to not only give the family “control over how they used James Dean”, but they had to also pay them for the use.

The president of Levi � Japan reluctantly agreed to meet with me. Our tense Tokyo lunch meeting was over a cuisine of raw fish, which was new to me and I had to excuse myself during that lunch to …. Well ….. get sick. After that lunch a fortuitous thing happened …… I decided to eat at McDonalds from then on.

That actually helped me come up with a way of establishing a fee for this use by Levis. I realized that the “big Mac” was 4 times what it was over here. Therefore, I thought I would just come up with what we were charging over here for the use of James Dean and then multiply it by 4.

By applying the “Big Mac” factor we ultimately ended up with a multiyear program with Levis – Japan for almost 1 Billion Yen…..well that is about $10 million. That was the start of how we really became a factor in the entertainment world.

It is a bit ironic that James Dean was so responsible for helping me realize my dream. 60 years ago, about 60 miles from where we sit today, James Dean also graduated, from high school in Fairmount, Indiana, a town of 2,000 people. He too was a huge dreamer…..as a teenager, he wanted to be a movie star. I have one of his quotes on my office wall …..”Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.”

He did die at the young age of 24 � only one movie of his had been released…”East of Eden”. Rebel without a Cause was just ready to be released and his third movie, Giant, he had not even finished filming. But by the time of his death, he was the biggest movie star in the world. He had another quote…..and it was “If a Man can bridge the gap between life and death….i mean live on after he died, then he was a great man”.

Well James Dean has been gone for over one half a century. We are no longer doing business with Levis in Japan. Instead we are working with the # 1 Jean company in Japan, Lee Jeans. It just so happens that James Dean actually wore Lee Jeans in both Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. Today a new advertising campaign is being done in Japan that centers around 2 Hollywood stars, James Dean and Brad Pitt….both of whom now endorse Lee Jeans. And James Dean just secured another multi million dollar Yen contract for that campaign.

And back to Elvis Presley. We represented his estate for most of the 80s. We set up the infrastructure for them to continue to develop his intellectual property rights. They sold out a few years ago to a public company for over $100 million just for those rights.

And remember Dr. SerVaas…….i just celebrated his 90th birthday with him 3 days ago…..he is still dreaming too…..he announced at his birthday party that he is still making 25 year plans.

It doesn’t matter where you start. As a matter of fact, you better just accept that you are going to start at the bottom. You can be a farm boy from Indiana or an orphan from California. But you can move from the bottom to the top in a short period of time. James Dean was the biggest male icon in the world at 24 and Marilyn Monroe was the biggest female star by the age of 27.

And you can never, ever stop dreaming. I look at where I am …..only half way up the mountain. We only represent 250 of the greatest entertainment, sports, music and historical clients in the world. I dream of representing many times more clients than that. I wake up every day dreaming about new opportunities and challenges.

In closing, I am reminded about one of the greatest minds of our times….. that imaginative Nobel Prize winning thinker that we talked about at the beginning……Albert Einstein …. he said “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, … “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

You know, a Goal is just a Dream with a Deadline.

Dreams are powerful things.

They will keep you focused.

They will help you persevere and

They will attract others who will want to join you in your dream.

So I wish you all the greatest of success and happiness in the next chapter of your lives and I challenge you to never, ever stop dreaming. And to those future opportunities that don’t yet exist …… Remember no matter what happens in the future, you can confront anything if you KNOW HOW TO DREAM.

Mark Roesler addresses the attendees of the AIPLA ( American Intellectual Property Law Association) on the topic of “The Evolution of the Right of Publicity” in San Diego on May 14th.