CK Prahalad: The Inclusive Visionary

But the one book that really set him apart from the others was ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit’. The book offered a radical new way for companies to look at doing business with the poor. The book, which is into its fifth anniversary edition now, scorched bestseller charts as companies like Hindustan Unilever implemented his concepts. Till date, everyone concurs that this is Prahalad’s most influential piece of work. “Amongst his many contributions, he will be singled out for his work on the bottom of the pyramid. Who would have thought that you could fight poverty profitably?” asks Bala Balachandran, Professor Emeritus of Accounting Information & Management, Kellogg School of Management, and an old friend of Prahalad’s.

A lot of students flocked to Ross only because of Prahalad — his course was always oversubscribed. Blair Miller, a Ross MBA and currently Fellows Manager at Acumen Fund, always wanted to work in the social sector but as she points out, in a business school the trend is more in favour of corporates. “When you are in B-school, you are told to go to a McKinsey or some such company. For people like me, there was a certain comfort in having him there,” says Miller. She recalls her first meeting with Prahalad in her first year when she told him that she came to Ross specifically to study BoP business models. That let loose a barrage of questions. Prahalad asked her everything from her background to her experience in the field. He was critical of people who did lip service in that area. When she met him again next year — after finishing a summer project in micro health insurance in India — she won his admiration.

Unlike other thinkers in his league, Prahalad did not let his superstar status go to his head. Naren Bakshi, founder of companies like Versata and JumpStart, served on the global board of trustees for TiE for five years. During one of the interactions with entrepreneurs, Prahalad walked up to Bakshi and said, “Naren, remember I am just a professor. I am just talking theory, you guys know a lot more.” Says Bakshi, “He knew his limits. He recognised that intellectually there is a difference between practice and theory.” That same humility helped him deal with the most spectacular failure of his life.

In 1982, Prahalad met Ramesh Jain who was a professor in Michigan University’s engineering school. Some years later Jain moved to University of California at San Diego. One day Prahalad stopped by his lab. Impressed with the work he was doing, he said, “You and I have to start a high-tech company on this idea.” This would be Jain’s third start-up and Prahalad’s first. A couple of days later he called Jain and said, “I have a name for our company — Praja.”

Jain, who became CEO, was the tech whiz and Prahalad the business guy. He took a year’s leave from Michigan and moved to San Diego where he was a very active executive chairman working with the team on product ideas and marketing strategies. Praja created a product that was like a dashboard for execs — which in simple terms allowed the management of a multinational company to see what was happening in various locations and figure out what the problems were. “CK’s biggest strength was that he was a very critical thinker,” says Jain recalling those early brainstorming sessions. “He could look at a problem and understand what that problem was and how to solve it. These ideas could be intellectually very bold.”

But Prahalad’s biggest strength — of big bold thinking — couldn’t help Praja. When the executive dashboard was to be launched, Prahalad wanted to do it simultaneously in South America, Europe and US. “But we were a small start-up — we just didn’t have the resources to do that,” says Jain. Prahalad’s stature did open many doors — so the small start-up was suddenly dealing with big potential clients like GM.

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