Prahalad: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

The father of core competence. The champion of the bottom of the pyramid. The world's hottest teacher of corporate strategy. The foremost preacher of adopting sustainability for business innovation. It is difficult to enumerate the many contributions of C.K. Prahalad to management. His next big project was to co-author a book with Business Today's former Editor Anand P. Raman (currently Editor at Large at Harvard Business Review) on how some of the best management ideas of the day are coming out of India and other emerging markets. Here's a pick of the words of wisdom that Prahalad shared with BT in the past two decades, followed by a column on what he would have done next and an exclusive reprint of his last published HBR article.

The Meaning of Core Competence:
A core competence represents a bundle of skills that are not widely available in an industry. It is not easily copied, is capable of being applied across several existing and new businesses, and provides clear benefits to customers… top managers are often experimenting, but the few who hope to usher their firms to the ranks of global companies have no choice but to focus on building competencies that support their business portfolios.
BUSINESS TODAY, AUGUST 7, 1994

Competing for the Future:
Thinking about the future is not the role of just the CEO. It is the obligation and responsibility of everyone. This is a non-elitist view of strategy-making… all successful companies become successful because they have a way to cope with their problems. Some of them create solutions that are elegant and capture the imagination of the customers. But the problem is that in that very success lies the roots of failure. For, people get too sloppy and keep saying that the solution is working; it isn't broke, so don't tamper with it. What we are saying is that the forgetting curve may be as important as the learning curve.
BUSINESS TODAY, MARCH 7, 1996

Talent, CEO & Humility:
Indian companies need to come to terms with how to attract, retain and motivate top talent. It is phrased too much in salary terms today. There has to be some more commitment, some national pride, something beyond just money… the CEO's role has to evolve in the sense of going away from detail to premises of management, speaking about the value of the company in public, being sufficiently knowledgeable about the company. And acquiring some humility.
BUSINESS TODAY, MARCH 7, 1996

Creating Micromultinationals:
Exploit the domestic market to understand how to be innovative, how to use new technology, how to get very low cost. Without that you cannot survive here (India). So, if you can do it for the poor, you can make money with the rich. But if you do it for the rich, you can't make money with the poor. That is simple. So, I'm very clear in my head. If you can succeed in the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) here and you hone your skills, you can be successful everywhere.
BUSINESS TODAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2003

Poor as the Source of Innovation:
I believe that the best way to eradicate poverty is through profit. I have identified four basic building blocks for BOP businesses. We need innovative technologies (not last generation technologies from the developed countries). We need to invent solutions… and they should be scalable. The price-performance relationship must be dramatically different in BOP markets. The question for managers… by addressing the needs of the 750 million Indians at the BOP, can we serve the five billion poor around the world? Paradoxically, the very poor of India may hold the key to making India a source of innovation. BUSINESS TODAY, JANUARY 18, 2004

Grassroot Innovation:
... If co-creation is taking roots, if bottom of the pyramid is becoming a reality, on top of it you have connectivity which eliminates asymmetry of information, digitisation, which reduces dramatically the costs so that hi-tech is no longer the privilege of only the rich, if industry boundaries are cracking up, and then social networks are emerging, it must have something to do with value creation. And it must change the very locus and the sources of innovation because, today instead of a small group of people sitting and thinking about innovation, you can have three billion people not only being micro-producers and micro-consumers, but micro-innovators. BUSINESS TODAY, MAY 18, 2008

India@75:
I believe that India has the potential in shaping the emerging world order. This demands that India must acquire enough economic strength, technological vitality and moral leadership to do so.

India's six big opportunities in the next 15 years:

• Has the potential to turn its population into a distinct advantage... build a base of 200 million college graduates… 500 million certified and skilled technicians.
• Can become the home for at least 30 of the Fortune 100 firms.
• Can account for 10 per cent of global trade.
• Can become a source of global innovations-new businesses, new technologies and new business models.
• Can have 10 Nobel prize winners.
• Can become a benchmark on how to leverage diversity. How to achieve it
• Focus on the future and not on the past, or on the trajectory of the past.
• Aspirations must exceed resources.
• Imagination is more important than analysis.
• Inclusive growth.
• Build world-class products and services at a new price-performance level to convert India's demographic liability (large and poor population) into a demographic dividend.
• Harness the benefits of modern technology.
• Sustainable economic development.
• Good governance.

BUSINESS TODAY, AUGUST 24, 2008