C. K.

Prahalad

Prahalad on Nov 8, 2009, at World Economic Forum's India Economic Summit 2009 8 August 1941 Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India

Born:

Died:

16 April 2010 (aged 68) San Diego, California, U.S.

Nationality: Citizenship:

Indian American India

Alma mater:

Loyola College, Chennai IIM Ahmedabad Harvard Business School

Occupation: Religion:

Professor Hindu Gayatri Murali Krishna, Deepa

Spouse:

Children:

Early life
C. K Prahalad was the ninth of eleven children born in 1941 in to a Kannada speaking family in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. His father was a well-known Sanskrit scholar and judge in Chennai. At 19, he joined Union Carbide, he was recruited by the manager of the local Union Carbide battery plant after completing his B.Sc degree in Physics from Loyola College, Chennai, part of the University of Madras. He worked there for four years. Prahalad called his Union Carbide experience a major inflection point in his life. Four years later, he did his post graduate work in management at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. At Harvard Business School, Prahalad wrote a doctoral thesis on multinational management in just two and a half years, graduating with a D.B.A. degree in 1975

Achievements
In the earlier days of Prahalad's fame as established management guru, in the beginning of the 90's, he advised Philips' Jan Timmer on the restructuring of this electronic corporation, then on the brink of collapse. With the resulting, successful, 23 year long Operation Centurion he also frequently stood for the Philips management troops. C. K. Prahalad is the co-author of a number of well-known works in corporate strategy including The Core Competence of the Corporation (with Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, MayJune 1990) which continues to be one of the most frequently re-printed articles published by the Harvard Business Review.[5] He authored several international bestsellers, including: Competing for the Future (with Gary Hamel), 1994; The Future of Competition (with Venkat Ramaswamy), 2004; and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits Wharton School Publishing, 2004. His last book, co-authored by M. S. Krishnan and published in April 2008, is called The New Age of Innovation. Prahalad was co-founder and became CEO of Praja Inc. ("Praja" from a Sanskrit word "Praja" which means "citizen" or "common people"). The goals of the company ranged from allowing common people to access information without restriction (this theme is related to the "bottom of pyramid" or BOP philosophy) to providing a testbed for various management ideas. The company eventually laid off 1/3 of its workforce and was sold to TIBCO. At the time of his passing, he was still on the board of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs. Prahalad has been among top ten management thinkers in every major survey for over ten years. Business Week said of him: "a brilliant teacher at the University of Michigan, he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today." He was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. He was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 2000.

Honors and awards

 In 2009, he was awarded Pravasi Bharatiya Sammaan [6]  In 2009 he was conferred Padma Bhushan 'third in the hierarchy of civilian awards' by the Government of India.  In 2009 he was named the world's most influential business thinker on the [Thinkers50.com] list, published by The Times .[7]  In 2009, he was awarded the Herbert Simon Award by the Rajk Lszl College for Advanced Studies (Corvinus University of Budapest).

Book Review: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition C.K. Prahalad Wharton School Publishing (2009) As Prahalad explains in his Preface, he wrote this book to suggest and explain a new approach by which to solve the social and economic problems of 80% of humanity. His approach would mobilize the resources, scale, and scope of multinational corporations (MNCs) their investment capacity in a co-creative partnership with localized nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in order to formulate and then implement unique solutions to the problems of 4 billion people who live on less than $2 a day at the bottom of the pyramid to which the books title refers. The process must start with respect for Bottom of Pyramid consumers as individuals. The process of co-creation assumes that consumers are equally important joint problem-solvers.New and creative approaches are needed to convert poverty into an opportunity for all concerned. That is a challenge. Prahalad carefully organizes his material within three Parts. First, he provides a framework for the active engagement of the private sector and suggests a basis for a profitable winwin engagement. He identifies all manner of adjustments, accommodations, and (yes) sacrifices each of the players MNCs, NGOs, and the poor themselves must be willing to make to ensure the success of the process. Next, he carefully and eloquently examines 12 case studies that involve a wide variety of businesses, each an exemplar of innovative practices, where the BOP [bottom of the pyramid] is becoming an active market and bringing benefits far beyond just products to consumers. All of the companies share the same concern: They want to change the face of poverty by bringing to bear a combination of high-technology solutions, private enterprise, market-based solutions, and

involvement of multiple organizations. As for Part III, it is provided as a CD which consists of 35 minutes of video success stories filmed on location in the BOP in India, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela. Of special note is the fact that the various stories are told almost entirely from the perspective of BOP consumers, the so-called poor. As Prahalad points out, they get products and services at an affordable price, but more important, they get recognition, respect, and fair treatment. Building self-esteem and entrepreneurial drive at the BOP is probably the most enduring contribution that the private sector can make. As this books subtitle correctly suggests, the ultimate objective is to eradicate poverty through profitsinitiating and then sustaining what will be in fact, a win-win-win engagement of MNCs, NGOs, and the poor themselves. Although Prahalad has a compelling vision, he has neither illusions nor delusions about the difficulty of fulfilling that vision when undertaking the new approach he recommends in this book. His vision is bold, indeed of global proportions. However, his feet are planted firmly on the ground at the bottom of an enormous pyramid, one whose complexities are exceeded only by the unprecedented entrepreneurial opportunities it offers to help solve the social and economic problems of 80% of humanity. Given the importance and the urgency of the various issues that Prahalad explores so brilliantly in this book, there seem to be no acceptable alternatives to the approach he proposes.