Herman’s core areas of engagement are in the practical aspects of Digital Transformation, Strategic and Combinatorial Innovation and Agile Leadership. He has delivered hundreds of keynotes on this topic both physically and as online webinars.

An innovative business thinker, Herman has an unusual mix of Business, Technology, Leadership and Creative skills that position him uniquely for roles to lead the march to the new Digital Economy. A naturally innovative thinker, he has led and guided many disruptive businesses in the ongoing convergence of Technology and Business for over 20 years. As an inspiring public speaker, Herman is in high demand for conferences and internal corporate strategy events.

With a Degree in Engineering, a Post Graduate qualification in Industrial Engineering and a MBA, Herman serves as a Professor at the Graduate School of Business at UCT and adjunct faculty at Duke University, University of Johannesburg and at The Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg.

He has worked, facilitated and spoken around the world and has served as the Chairman of the Solution Space, an Incubation laboratory at the University of Cape Town. He also sits on the Advisory board for the Faculty of Engineering at Wits.

As Managing Director in the Siemens Company in 1996, Herman and his team led a large scale turn-around of the Industry Division responsible for Sub-Saharan Africa (13 countries) until 2000.

He then joined Standard Bank as the Director of Online Services, leading the group’s foray into Internet Banking. It was one of the world’s first national rollouts of smart cards and they continued to pioneer Fintech innovations.

There followed senior executive roles at Vodacom and MTN, the latter of which entailed serving on 7 boards as well as in advisory capacities in multiple industry level initiatives.

Herman is deeply engaged in Digital Transformation and is currently engaged in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia working with the Digital Academy of Saudi telecom where he help to guide the prepare the future digital leaders of the firm for their coming strategic battles. He is also assisting firms in Japan and India in a similar manner. His current  clients include Philips in Holland, Airtel in India, HSBC in Singapore, ARM in the UK and many more.

In order to deliver new business development, change and large scale IT developments – as well as tactical IT start-up initiatives – his three distinct capabilities in the Digital World can be listed as follows:

• Creating digital means for customers to interact with the firm via new channels and devices
• Digitising the internal processes of the firm
• Creating digitised products and services and disruptive business models

Herman has served on over 10 boards and board committees in his career and has chaired a number of them. His current Board posts are detailed below:

Adcorp: Risk and Audit Committee and the Investment committee. He chairs the technology committee.

Telkom: Risk and Investment committee. He was appointed to drive the revenue diversification programme of the firm.

African Bank Ltd and African Bank Holdings:

PASA (payment association of South Africa): Independent councillor.

Interests

He contributes extensively as a thought leader at multiple forums including having over 100 000 followers on LinkedIn; Herman’s posts are read over 50 Million times a year.