Simon-Kucher founder among Thinkers50 hall of fame inductees

Simon-Kucher & Partners founder Professor Hermann Simon has been inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Shanghai.

Hermann Simon, the founder of international strategy consultancy Simon-Kucher & Partners, has been inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame at a recent ceremony in Shanghai – joining business management luminaries such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter Drucker and CK Prahalad. Simon was honoured alongside fellow new Hall of Fame entrants Vijay Govindarajan, Bill Fischer, Don Tapscott, Bain’s Chris Zook and Innosight founder Clayton Christensen.

“These six thinkers have all made a profound contribution to how we understand management and how it is practiced globally,” said Stuart Crainer, who co-founded the Thinkers50 platform in 2001 to celebrate the world’s brightest business management thought leaders. In 2009, the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame was introduced. “To be inducted into the Hall of Fame someone must have had a long-term impact on the way people think about and practice management.”

Today the firm’s honorary chairman, Simon founded Simon-Kucher & Partners in 1985 – with the strategy firm now recognised as one of the world’s leading consultancies for pricing, sales and marketing, pulling in revenues in excess of €300 million via operations spanning five continents, including its new office launched last year in Shanghai. In Weifang, close to the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame host city Qingdao, Simon has a business school named in his honour.

Receiving his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1976, Simon has lectured on business and marketing at many of the world’s leading institutes, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, INSEAD, and London Business School, and has authored upwards of 40 books; ‘Hidden Champions,’ and ‘Manage for Profit, Not for Market Share’ receiving worldwide recognition. His latest, ‘Price Management: Strategy, Analysis, Decision, Implementation’, was released at the end of last year.

The Hall of Fame is an offshoot of the biennial Thinkers50 list of the top current business minds, on which Simon featured in 25th place in the most recent edition. Topping that list was former former Rotman School of Management dean and ex-Monitor director Roger Martin, followed by blockchain pioneer Don Tapscott and disruptive innovation guru Clayton Christensen – both of who join Simon as hall of fame inductees, as does Bain & Company stalwart Chris Zook.

A previous winner in 2013 and 2011 (followed in 2015 by Monitor – now Deloitte – co-founder and fellow hall of famer Michael Porter), Christensen is currently a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and co-founder of strategy and innovation consultancy Innosight, which has outlets in Singapore, the US and Switzerland. Christensen originally started out as a consultant and project manager at Boston Consulting Group.

Zook, meanwhile, first joined Bain almost 40 years ago following a doctorate at Harvard and M.Phil. in economics from Oxford, going on to co-head the firm’s Global Strategy practice for some 20 years. Currently an advisory partner between Bain’s Boston and Amsterdam offices, Zook has authored numerous best-selling books on sustainable growth, as well as being a prolific contributor to other business publications and especially the Harvard Business Review.

“The business world is fickle and has a short memory,” states the Thinkers50 site on its Hall of Fame. “Brilliant tools and techniques are put to work and then taken for granted as they are incorporated into business life. (It) means that the names of the giants of thinking who originated the most innovative business ideas and inspired best practice are often overlooked or forgotten… We salute the distinguished thinkers whose contributions to management thinking have made it what it is today.”