CK Prahalad An Academician Par Excellence

The accolades and personal reminiscences that flooded the email circuits and
newspapers at the demise of CK Prahalad reminded me of the untimely passing of
Dewang Mehta a decade ago. Every person who spoke of Prahalad remembered him for
some personal touch that defined the man, so much so that each seemed to believe
that he enjoyed a special one-to-one relationship with the great man. My
favorite recollection is chatting with him in the wee hours, waiting for a
British Airways flight to land in Mumbai. I had asked him how he managed to do
so many longhaul flights in his teaching, advisory and consulting commitments
across borders. At that time he had just smiled, but when I caught him at a
Bengaluru TiE event some years later, he looked at me quizzically and said, And
I thought you disapproved of all my travels!

In many ways, his love for India and willingness to literally travel the
extra mile to participate in high impact initiatives was typical of Prahalad.
Look at the number of initiatives in this decade which have his imprintthe TiE
movement which he treated as his own; the India at 75 report published by CII
and Young Indians which has his visionary thinking embodied in every suggestion
and action; and of course, his interactions with Nasscom, with many CEOs and
collectively in a scintillating workshop he did over a decade agoeach
intervention bore the stamp of excellence.

His contributions to management and leadership thinking have been truly
significant. In my early days of trying to lead a laggard in computer trainingAPTECHfor
the top slot, I remember being greatly influenced by his seminal work with Gary
Hamel, Competing for the future, where he argued the virtues of looking at
opportunity share rather than just market share. If young entrepreneurs would
only take a leaf from his book, they would build world-beating companies in
information security, cloud computing, mobile gaming, and a host of emerging
opportunity areas, rather than trying to chip away at the market share of
dominant incumbents in application development and ERP implementations.

His lectures and writings on innovation are still being digested by business
leaders and students around the world. His another pathbreaking work on
discovering wealth at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) has opened new doors for
business success in hitherto undiscovered and unexploited parts of the country.
The success of many micro finance start-ups today and the renewed interest in
finding solutions for SMBs in every corner of the country owe a lot to the
research of leading thinkers like Prahalad.

Somebody rightly said the day after he died that if there was a Nobel Prize
given for outstanding management and business thinking, CK Prahlad would surely
be the most deserving recipient. There are many more academicians we are all
proud of and it is heartening to find so many thinkers assuming leadership
roles, not just in the corporate sector but leading technology and business
schools in the Western world as well. But Prahalad will long be remembered as
one of our pathbreaking success stories.

A final thought on CK Prahalad as one great chapter in Indian academic
brilliance comes to an end. Some people meeting him for the first time would be
a little disconcerted at his brusque response to long winded comments and
questions. Like every intelligent and articulate professional leader, Prahald
did not tolerate mediocrity in any form and would prefer to cut an irrelevant
conversation short and move on to more meaningful things. With many of us trying
to do too much in too little time, this may be one more lesson that should be
learnt to expand the effectiveness and success of individuals and firms in our
industry!

Ganesh natarajan

The author is Vice Chairman & MD of Zensar Technologies. He can be reached at
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in