Hermann Simon

Short Biography

Business Professor, Management Consultant and Author

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Hermann Simon’s career has followed three paths: as a management consultant, as an author and as a business professor. His books have been translated into 25 languages and are widely read among managers. An ongoing online survey votes him the most influential management thinker after Peter Drucker.

Business Professor

Hermann Simon is also a professor of business and has worked extensively in the field of marketing. Until 1995 he was a professor of business administration and marketing at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Simon’s academic career began very early: After completing his studies, he started his Ph.D. under the supervision of Horst Albach. Professor Albach significantly influenced his professional development, especially regarding the bridge between theory and practice. Between 1978 and 1980 Simon received a post-doctoral scholarship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) and was also a visiting fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during that time. Since then he has been a regular contributor to journals like "Management Science", "Harvard Business Review", "MIT Sloan Management Review" and Journal of Marketing Research. His academic career led him to numerous guest professorships at international universities: Simon was a visiting professor at the Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies in 1979, at the Keio University in Tokyo in 1983 and at Stanford University in 1984. He also taught at INSEAD in Fontainebleau (1980–1985), at Harvard Business School (1988–1989) and London Business School (1991–2002). Between 1984 and 1986, Professor Simon was the head of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), and between 1985 and 1988 he was the research director of the European School of Management and Technology (formerly the Universitätsseminar der Wirtschaft, or USW) at the Schloss Gracht in Cologne.

While working as an economics professor, his research largely centered on bridging the gap between theory and practice and his approach to research was empirical and decision-oriented. Numerous theoretical concepts were practically applied in his pioneering projects (calculation of expected market reactions, non-linear pricing, product life cycles, bundling).

During his time as the director at the USW (the largest German institute for management training in the mid-1980s), Simon decided to enter the professional business world. In 1985, he founded the management consultancy UNIC, which later became Simon-Kucher & Partners Strategy & Marketing Consultants, together with his former Ph.D. students, Dr. Eckhard Kucher and Dr. Karl-Heinz Sebastian. In 1995 Professor Simon left his university career to dedicate himself full-time to the consulting business as the chairman of Simon-Kucher & Partners.

Management Consultant

Hermann Simon was CEO of Simon-Kucher & Partners Strategy & Marketing Consultant|Consultants from 1995 till 2009. The company, of which he has been chairman since 2009, employs 700 professionals and operates worldwide with offices in Amsterdam, Beijing, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Cologne, Copenhagen, Dubai, Frankfurt, Istanbul, London, Luxembourg, Madrid, Milan, Munich, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Vienna, Warsaw and Zurich.

His consulting firm focuses on strategy, marketing, pricing and sales. Bloomberg BusinessWeek described Simon-Kucher & Partners as a "world leader in giving advice to companies on how to price their products" and The Economist wrote: “Simon-Kucher is the world’s leading pricing consultancy”.

Professor Simon has served as the board member for numerous joint-stock companies as well as boards of trustees. His perception of the German corporate landscape draws strongly from this background. He acknowledges the expertise of German companies in technology and products, but asserts that they still show weaknesses in terms of marketing, customer orientation and service. Compared to companies in the USA, German companies perform poorly in terms of market capitalization. Consequently, Professor Simon sees a great danger of German companies being “colonized”.

Author

Hermann Simon’s books are widely read among managers and have been translated into 25 languages. In March 2011, Professor Simon and co-author Martin Fassnacht were awarded the 2010 Georg-Bergler-Prize for Preismanagement. Carrying with it a €20000 prize, the Georg-Bergler-Prize is the most highly endowed award for European marketing textbooks. In 2006, Simon published Manage for Profit, Not for Market Share, which takes a critical look at the widespread focus on volume and market share and calls for a conscious shift of focus towards profit. Simon’s most well-known publications include Think (2004), Power Pricing (1997), Hidden Champions (1996), Hidden Champions of the 21st Century (2009) and Preismanagement (3rd edition 2009). Additional publications include Das große Handbuch der Strategieinstrumente (2002), Das große Handbuch der Strategiekonzepte (2000) and Simon for Managers (2000). Professor Simon has coined a number of phrases which are commonly used in management theory and practice, including “price management”, “hidden champions”, “Servicewüste” and “investor marketing”. Since 1988, Simon has regularly authored a column for the German monthly Manager Magazin. In addition, he is a member of the editorial boards of numerous business journals, including the International Journal of Research in Marketing, Management Science, Recherche et Applications en Marketing, Décisions Marketing, European Management Journal as well as several German journals.

Miscellaneous

Professor Simon was greatly influenced by his long-time friend Peter Drucker, with whom he corresponded for many years and whom he often visited at his home near Los Angeles. Their last scheduled meeting, however, never took place. It was scheduled for November 12, 2005 ─ the day before Drucker died.

Very politically active as a student, Simon is now more critical of politicians. He believes they do not have the necessary competence, particularly concerning economic issues. Furthermore, he deplores the lack of communication between economists and politicians. Simon feels very connected with his place of birth, the Eifel region, and has published the book Kinder der Eifel in 2008.

Books

Selected Articles

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