He is famous as the father of the concepts of Core competency and BoP - Bottom of the pyramid.
Early life
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[citation needed]. 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.
Professorship and teaching
After graduating from Harvard, Prahalad returned to his master's degree alma mater, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. But he soon returned to the United States, when in 1977, he was hired by the University of Michigan's School of Business Administration, where he advanced to the top tenured appointment as a full professor. In 2005, Prahalad earned the university's highest distinction, Distinguished University Professor.On April 16, 2010, Prahalad died of a previously undiagnosed lung illness in San Diego, California. He was sixty eight years old at the time of his death, but he left a large body of work behind.
Achievements
Writings, interests, and business experience
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, 2–3 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, May–June 1990) which continues to be one of the most frequently re-printed articles published by the Harvard Business Review. 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 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 .
- In 2009, he was awarded the Herbert Simon Award by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies ( Corvinus University of Budapest).
