Speakers and Chairs Bios

Hermann Simon is chairman of Simon-Kucher & Partners Strategy & Marketing Consultants with offices in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Barcelona, Beijing, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Cologne, Copenhagen, Dubai, Frankfurt, Istanbul, London, Luxembourg, Madrid, Milan, Munich, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Santiago de Chile, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, Vienna, Warsaw and Zurich. Simon is an expert in strategy, marketing and pricing. He has an extensive global range of clients. In the German language area he was voted the most influential management thinker after the late Peter Drucker.

Before committing himself entirely to management consulting, Simon was a professor of business administration and marketing at the Universities of Mainz (1989-1995) and Bielefeld (1979-1989). He was also a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, Stanford, London Business School, INSEAD, Keio University in Tokyo and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1995 to 2009 he was CEO of Simon-Kucher & Partners.

Professor Simon has published over 30 books in 25 languages, including the worldwide bestsellers Hidden Champions (Boston 1996, cover story of BusinessWeek in 2004) and Power Pricing (New York 1997), as well as Manage for Profit, Not for Market Share (Boston 2006). His book Hidden Champions of the 21st Century, Success Strategies of Unknown World Market Leaders (New York 2009) investigates the strategies of little known market leaders. His newest book Confessions of the Pricing Man was published by Springer, New York, in the fall of 2015.

Simon was and 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. Since 1988, he regularly writes columns for the business monthly Manager Magazin. As a board member of numerous foundations and corporations, Professor Simon has gained substantial experience in corporate governance. From 1984 to 1986 he was the president of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC). Simon is co-founder of the first Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) listed on the German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt, which acquired Exceet Group S.E. in July 2011.

A native of Germany, he studied economics and business administration at the universities of Bonn and Cologne. He received his diploma (1973) and his doctorate (1976) from the University of Bonn. Simon has received numerous international awards and holds honorary doctorates from IEDC Business School of Bled (Slovenia), from the University of Siegen (Germany) and from Kozminski University Warsaw (Poland). He is a honorary professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.