C K Prahalad- Guru of Poverty and Profit

Contributed by: Chandni Tolaney, PGDM BD (2012 - 2014), WeSchool. 

A professor at the University of Michigan, Prahalad was considered one of the world's top 10 management thinkers. His theory about the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, is followed by many corporations in emerging markets. He was also the first Indian-born thinker to claim the title.

He was renowned as the co-author of "Core Competence of the Corporation”Prahalad's theory affected many Indian and developing world retail outlets. It was Prahalad's proposition that businesses stop thinking of the poor as victims and instead start seeing them as value-demanding consumers that drove companies such as Hindustan Lever and Godrej to come out with ultra-small sachets of everything from shampoo to gutka sparking off a retail revolution.

Indeed, his 2004 book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, became a New York Times bestseller and catapulted him to a rock star among management thinkers although he was already a storied business guru by then. It was a journey CK began in the modest Tamil Nadu town, one of nine children of a Sanskrit scholar and judge.

The story goes that Prahalad learned his first management lesson; ironically it seems now, at Union Carbide, which he joined in 1960 when he was only 19 after completing his BSc in Physics from Loyola College in Madras. This was inspired by noticing that old gloves were given out to workers, this Prahalad soon went on to Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (where he also met his wife Gayatri), calling the Union Carbide experience a "major inflection point" in his life where he "learned about the extraordinary wisdom of ordinary people."

Prahalad went to Harvard Business School in 1972, writing a doctoral thesis on multinational management in just two-and-a-half years before returning to IIM-A. But socialist India was not the place at that time for a man bubbling with fresh and provocative ideas. He returned to the US, eventually joining the faculty at the Stephen Ross Scholl of Business, where he made a brilliant reputation, and holding the position of the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate

Strategy at the time of his death.

In recent years, he was fascinated by the potential of the internet as a force of creative destruction. Pushing corporates "to do more with less," he campaigned for standardized cell phone chargers (why does every manufacturer have different chargers for different phones?) and sustainable transport solutions.

On April 16, 2010, Prahalad died of a previously undiagnosed lung illness in San Diego, California. He was sixty-eight at the time of his death, but he left a large body of work behind.