Coimbatore Krishnan Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the University of Michigan, is a globally recognized business consultant whose client list includes AT&T, Cargill, Citicorp, Oracle, TRW and Unilever. His research focuses chiefly on next practices, corporate strategy and the role of top management in diversified multinational corporations. His current work addresses a complex emerging market, the world's poor and the innovative business models that will help end world poverty. This article is about the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. ...

Recently Professor C. K. Prahalad earned the third spot on Suntop Media's 2005 "Thinkers 50" list, just behind Harvard strategy specialist, Michael Porter, and Microsoft founder, Bill Gates. Michael E. Porter (born 1947) is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School where he leads the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. ... This article is about one of the founders of Microsoft. ...

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. The Sanskrit language ( , ) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 22 official languages of India. ... Chennai (Tamil: சென்னை, formerly known as Madras , is the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu and is Indias fourth largest metropolitan city. ... Union Carbide Corporation, headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut, is a United States chemical manufacturer, now a subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company. ...

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. IIM Ahmedabad // Overview IIM Ahmedabad, also known as IIMA, was the first of the string of IIMs to be established in India. ... Harvard University campus (old map) Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is an accredited private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... This article is about the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. ...

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. Wharton School Publishing is a publishing house, a division of Wharton School and Pearson Education, that is highly respected in academic publishing. ...

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. TIBCO Software Inc. ...

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. BusinessWeek is a business magazine published by McGraw-Hill. ...

See also

• Bottom of the Pyramid
• Core competency

In economics, the bottom of the pyramid is the largest, but poorest socio-economic group. ... A companys core competency is the one thing that it can do better than its competitors. ...

External links

• Faculty page at the University of Michigan
• Business Week Article on his ideas
• Can C.K. Prahalad Pass the Test?, Fast Company, August 2001
• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
• How strategy guru C.K. Prahalad is changing the way CEOs think
• The Indus Entrepreneurs
• Home page of TIBCO, the company that bought Praja
• C.K. Prahalad, Business and Keynote Speaker, Leading Authority on Corporate Strategy