C. K. Prahalad

Early life

Prahalad is one of nine children. His father was a well-known Sanskrit scholar and judge in Madras, India (now Chennai). When he was 19, Prahalad was recruited by the manager of the local Union Carbide battery plant. He worked there for four years. Prahalad calls his Union Carbide experience a major inflection point in his life.

Prahalad then went to the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), where he fell in love with a student at a nearby university. After five years spent trying to win their families' approval, the couple married and left for Harvard University. There Prahalad wrote a PhD thesis on multinational management in just two and a half years. The couple then returned to India, where he taught at the IIMA. But his ideas on global business were under constant attack from nationalists in India. He decided to return to the United States, as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

Writings, interests, and business experience

C.K. Prahalad is the author of a number of well known works in corporate strategy including The Core Competence of the Corporation (Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1990). He is also an author of the international bestsellers "Competing for the Future"(with Gary Hamel), 1994, and "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits," Wharton School Publishing, 2004. He is writing a book related to global resource leverage with M.S. krishnan.

His latest interests are in the area of serving the poor's needs profitably, referred by him as the "bottom of the pyramid". He is on the board of Tie, The Indus Entrepreneurs and coined the phrases "bottom of the pyramid" and "strategic intent."

He 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 1/3rd of its workforce and was sold to TIBCO. C.K. Prahalad put this down to bad timing but said he learnt a lot from it.

Prahalad has been a top ten management thinker 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 is a member of the blue ribbon commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. He is the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 2000.

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