Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad, one of India's best-known management exports and a distinguished professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, died Friday in San Diego after a brief illness. He was 68 years old.
Mr. Prahalad, a world authority on management thinking, was most famous for his unconventional thinking on the "bottom-of-the-pyramid" approach. He followed this up with a book of the same name in 2004. In his book, "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits," Mr. Prahalad proposes that businesses should start looking at the billions of poor all over the world as value-demanding consumers and not just as those on the fringes of society who can ill afford to buy products. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller.
Born in Chennai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu in 1941, Mr. Prahalad was one of nine children of a Sanskrit scholar and judge. He joined Union Carbide in 1960 soon after completing his bachelors in Physics from Loyola College in Madras. He then did his post graduation at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, completing his studies there in 1966, and went on to do a PhD on multinational management at the Harvard Business School in 1972.
Mr. Prahlad's theory is believed to have affected many Indian and developing world retail outlets, for instance driving consumer-goods companies like Godrej and Hindustan Lever to come up with small-sized sachets of products like shampoo that could be sold as individual portions.
In 2009, the government of India conferred upon him the Padma Bhushan, one of India's highest civilian awards.
Mr. Prahalad's repertoire includes consulting for some of the world's leading companies, such as AT&T, Citigroup, Kodak, Oracle, Philips and Unilever. Besides "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid," his other books include "Competing for the Future" with Gary Hamel, "The Future of Competition" with Venkat Ramaswamy and "The New Age of Innovation" with M.S. Krishnan
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