Our alumnus Professor Dr Dr h.c. mult. Hermann Simon is the founder of the management consulting firm Simon-Kucher. He has made a name for himself internationally as an expert in strategy, marketing and pricing, and is regarded as one of the most influential management thinkers of our time in the German-speaking world.
Hermann Simon studied Economics and Business Administration at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne and at the University of Bonn, where he obtained his habilitation in 1979. He subsequently taught Business Administration at the universities of Bielefeld and Mainz, and served as president of the European Marketing Academy. In addition, international visiting professorships took him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Keiō University in Tokyo, Harvard Business School and Stanford University, among others. During this time, he coined the term ‘Hidden Champions’, which he defined in his 1996 book ‘Hidden champions: lessons from 500 of the world's best unknown companies’, which he updated in his 2021 released book ‘Hidden Champions in the Chinese Century’.
After leaving academia in 1995 to focus entirely on management consulting, he served for many years as CEO of Simon-Kucher before becoming Honorary Chairman in 2018. Hermann Simon is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which, ‘Simon sagt! Was im Management wirklich zählt’ (‘Simon Says! What Really Matters in Management’), was published in 2025 and offers a retrospective on 50 years of management expertise.
In our alumni interview, we spoke to him about the concept of ‘hidden champions’ in the global age, how he built Simon-Kucher into a leading international consulting firm, and why he advises young people not to listen to their parents when choosing a career.