Dr. C. K.

Prahalad a sketch on his life and works

During the last hundred years a number of management thinkers have greatly influenced the corporate world and the policy makers at national as well as international level worldwide. Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad, popularly known as C. K. Prahalad or CK in short was one of these stalwarts. He was born on 8th August, 1941 in the textile city of Coimbatore in Tamilnadu State. He was the ninth of eleven children born to a Kannada speaking family. His father was a well-known Sanskrit scholar and a judge in the court in present day Chennai.

Prahalad obtained Graduation Degree in Physics from Loyola College under the University of Madras at the age of 19 and immediately thereafter joined the Battery Plant of Union Carbide as an Industrial Engineer. It seems as irony now; but Prahalad had once revealed that his first learning in management was in Union Carbide! The story goes like this: young Prahalad one day noticed that many temporary workers of the plant were using discarded partially torn hand gloves because the procedure in practice during that time was to issue new hand gloves on the basis of seniority only! Prahalad argued to his Superior that the procedure was not right and instead priority in issue of hand gloves should go to workers who handle hazardous materials. The Manager not only accepted Prahalads argument but also encouraged him to learn the subject Management by providing him books on the subject. Apart from this incident young Prahalad must have observed and learnt many other aspects of management during his days in Union Carbide; in his own words experience in Union Carbide was a major inflection point in his life where he learned about extraordinary wisdom of ordinary people. In an interview, Prahalad introspected about his days in Union Carbide as follows: Industrial engineering in India at that time was a problem-solving discipline, very much in the tradition of Frederick Taylor. The unit of analysis was work, and the people were secondary. But I was intellectually curious, so I read every book I could lay my hands on and then, over time, tried to apply some of the ideas everything from value engineering to modeling work processes with synthetic data. I was very fortunate to have, as a boss, a Harvard MBA. He had been one of the first Indians to be a Baker Scholar [the top academic honor at Harvard Business School]. He was the plant manager. I was

just a trainee, but for some reason Divakaran liked me, and he would give me books to read. He had a very simple rule: When I returned a book to him, I had to tell him whether it applied in India or not. I think he was trying to get me to think independently, and not accept ideas as valid simply because they came from the United States. The first book was The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor [McGraw-Hill, 1960], the book that introduced Theory X and Theory Y. It sparked my interest in the general question, what motivates people? I reflected on how we might apply this concept in our plant, which had communist labor unions. I was already fascinated by the way work and people are interrelated. I knew how to conduct time and motion studies and break work down into its constituent parts. I was reasonably good at it. But I saw that when we broke down the work, it changed interactions among people and more importantly, the skill levels that were required of individuals. This forced me to stop looking at a company or a factory as the unit of analysis, as industrial engineers did. Instead, I started looking at people and teams. .

Prahalad was in Union Carbide for about four years. After leaving Union Carbide, he joined the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad completing the Post Graduate Diploma Course in Management in the year 1965. In the late 1960s, he worked for a company called India Pistons. Teaching was Prahalads passion. So during spare time, he taught courses on management at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (now Chennai); on Saturdays he tutored at the All India Management Association and ran computer simulation games on production planning. He also worked over the weekends in the Christian Medical College and Hospital, Vellore scheduling outpatients using some operations research tools and technology management. In 1972 1973 he joined Harvard Business School, wrote a doctoral thesis on Multinational Management in just two and a half years, earning the Doctor of Business Administration degree in 1975.

The young Harvard Graduate had the mind to serve his motherland and so he joined the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, his alma mater. Unfortunately, the Socialist India of that period was not ready to accept the man bubbling with provocative and unconventional management ideas. So, he soon returned to the United States of America, the Land that produced many of the eminent management Gurus of the 20th Century. He joined the Stephen M. Ross

School of Business under University of Michigan, where he advanced to the top tenured appointment as a full professor. In 2005, Prahalad earned the University's highest distinction the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy that he held till the time of his untimely death.

C. K. Prahalad drew attention of the corporate world to the "fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" wherein he proposed that businesses should stop thinking of the poor as victims and instead start seeing them as value-demanding consumers. His proposition brought paradigm shift to the way business is conducted in many corporations in emerging markets around the world. Prahalads book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, published in 2004 by Wharton School Publishing was a New York Times bestseller.

C. K. Prahalad was also famous as the father of the concepts of Core Competency. The concept was propounded in an article titled Core Competence of the Corporation co-authored with Gary Hamel in the Harvard Business Review, issue: MayJune 1990 which came to be one of the most frequently re-printed articles published by the Harvard Business Review. Core competency implies the collective learning in the organization, especially how to coordinate diverse production skills and integrate multiple streams of technologies. Core competencies are complex sets of resources and capabilities that link different businesses in a diversified firm through managerial and technical know-how, experience and wisdom. Apart from the book and the article stated above, C. K. Prahalad authored several international best-sellers on corporate strategy. Some of these are: Competing for the Future co-authored with Gary Hamel in 1994; The Future of Competition: Co-creating Unique Value with Customers coauthored with Venkat Ramaswamy in 2004; and the last book The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value through Global Networks co-authored with M. S. Krishnan published in April 2008.

In his life time, Prahalad won many accolades for his achievements. During the year 2009, he was awarded Pravasi Bharatiya Sammaan by the Pravasi Bharatiya Sanmilan, was conferred Padma Bhushan by the Government of India, was named the world's most influential business

thinker by The Times and was awarded the Herbert Simon Award by the Rajk Lszl College for Advanced Studies of Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary. 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 the year 2000. He was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. Prahalad has been among top ten management thinkers in every major survey during the last decade of his life. 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." Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad died on 16th April 2010 at the age of sixty eight of a previously undiagnosed illness of the lungs in San Diego, California. He left a large body of work behind. India lost one of her worthy sons and the world a great management Guru. Sanjeeb Kakati skakati@sify.com