Professor Hermann Simon is a legend to those of us who work in the management consulting industry. Launched in 1985, his global firm, Simon-Kucher & Partners, is the world’s leader in pricing strategy, a $500 million+ privately held company. Prof. Simon led the company as CEO until 2009, when its revenues had grown to about $100 million, and he continued to play an influential role for many years after as chairman. And he has continued to write, especially about the topic of pricing, the field (as he says in the book) that “became my calling and my life’s work. Price would become my lifelong companion.”
But this book, “Many Worlds, One Life” (his autobiography), will appeal as well to readers far outside that sector. It’s in part because Prof. Simon’s career is far-ranging and his interests are eclectic: history, politics, the military, business, academia, and more. It’s also because he is a highly engaging and skilled writer, willing to be self-critical and wonder what could have happened had he taken different paths in his illustrious life.
The first audience that will find this book appealing is, of course, the thousands of executives who have used the advice of the firm. Leaders hungry for even deeper insights on pricing strategy – Prof. Simon’s career “major,” so to say – will get plenty more insights from this book.
Another audience is small and midsized businesses, especially family-owned firms (referred to in Prof. Simon’s native country of Germany as the “Mittelstand”). He has called them the “Hidden Champions” for years, because they fall outside the spotlight that has shined on publicly held companies with multibillions of dollars in revenue, and which are regularly featured in Fortune, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
A third set of readers who should find this book of great interest is university students and professors. How Prof. Simon navigated the worlds of academia and business to the benefit of both is fascinating. (You can have the best of each.) He also provides his views on, and recounts his interactions with, some of the most influential management professors of the last 50 years: Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, Ted Levitt, and Philip Kotler, to name just a few. For those of us (like me) who continue our quest to understand the people behind the biggest management concepts of the last few decades, Prof. Simon’s recollections are gold.
And World War II history buffs (also like me) will find his recollections of life in post-war Germany riveting. (He was born two years after World War II ended and grew up on a farm in the Eifel Mountains of western Germany. As a member of the German Air Force in 1968, he had a first-hand look at the atomic weapons that German planes were supposed to carry to help keep the Soviet Union’s expansion plans in check.)
The book is organized in largely chronological order, beginning with his childhood, then his German Air Force years, then academia, then business. The reader will learn about how, two years after his military service, he enrolled at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Bonn. After his interest in the subjects of politics and social issues waned, he decided his focus should be on economics. But after deciding to get a master’s degree, he was not sure whether to continue pursuing economics or business/management. He explains why he chose the latter, working as a graduate assistant under a management professor named Horst Albach. As Simon writes, it was the right fork in the road for him to take.
Prof. Simon then explains how another turn in the road – down the pricing lane-- would come later, when in the 1980s he helped Prof. Albach prepare testimony as an expert witness on behalf of the UK drug company Wellcome (now part of Glaxo). With this experience in hand, Prof. Simon chose as his Ph.D. dissertation the subject on which he would launch a hugely successful consulting firm: pricing strategies for innovative products and services.
Prof. Simon tells us how that expertise became crucial to the consulting firm Simon-Kucher he launched in 1985. (The pharma industry remains its largest practice today.) He co-founded Simon-Kucher with two of his doctoral students. He would soon turn conventional wisdom about pricing on its head. Prof. Simon shifted the topic of pricing from being considered a tactical consideration into a strategic issue. Companies of all sizes, in every industry, have been following he and his colleagues’ advice ever since. Simon-Kucher has become known for helping companies rethink the way they develop new products and services: e.g., designing innovations around a price that customers are willing to pay, rather than determining a price on which they can make a profit just before shipping new products out the door.
Prof. Simon’s book is replete with observations on people, management principles, and how to live an honorable and satisfying life. One of them is this: “For me, the most decisive personality trait is the ability to live independently from the applause of the masses.” As you read this book, you’ll understand the questions, trials and tribulations, and successes and setbacks of a man who carved his own way, with great impact on the 1,800 employed by Simon-Kucher today around the world, and more broadly in the executive suites of businesses everywhere.
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Top reviews from other countries
Abhinav Hooda
An inspiring book with many life lessons
Reviewed in India on February 20, 2023Peter Althaus
Toller überblick über Entwicklung von Beratung und Managementausbildung
Reviewed in Germany on March 21, 2022