Prahalad has been among top ten management thinkers in every major survey for over ten years.

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad (August 8, 1941 – April 16, 2010) was the Professor of
Corporate Strategy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business in the University of Michigan.

He is famous as the father of the concepts of core competency and the fortune at the bottom of
the pyramid.

EARLY LIFE

Prahalad was the ninth of eleven children born in 1941 in to a Kannada speaking family in
Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. His father was a well-known Sanskrit scholar and judge in Chennai.

EDUCATON

At 19, he joined Union Carbide, he was recruited by the manager of the local Union Carbide
battery plant after completing his B.Sc degree in Physics from Loyola College, Chennai, part of
the University of Madras. He worked there for four years.

Four years later, he did his post graduate work in management at the Indian Institute of
Management Ahmedabad.

At Harvard Business School, Prahalad wrote a doctoral thesis on multinational management in

just two and a half years, graduating with a D.B.A. degree in 1975.

ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT

After graduating from Harvard, Prahalad returned to the Indian Institute of Management
Ahmedabad. But he soon returned to the United States, when in 1977, he was hired by the
Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he advanced to the top
tenured appointment as a full professor. In 2005, Prahalad earned the university's highest
distinction, Distinguished University Professor.

On April 16, 2010, Prahalad died of a previously undiagnosed lung illness in San Diego,
California.[2]. He was sixty nine years old when he passed away but he left a large body of work
behind.

WRITINGS, INTERESTS, AND BUSINESS EXPERIENCE

In the earlier days of Prahalad's fame as established management guru, in the beginning of the
90's, he advised Philips' Jan Timmer on the restructuring of this electronic corporation, then on
the brink of collapse. With the resulting, successful, 2-3 year long Operation Centurion he also
frequently stood for the Philips management troops.
C. K. Prahalad is the co-author of a number of well known works in corporate strategy including
The Core Competence of the Corporation (with Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, May–
June, 1990) which continues to be one of the most frequently re-printed articles published by the
Harvard Business Review.

He authored several international bestsellers, including: Competing for the Future (with Gary
Hamel), 1994;

The Future of Competition (with Venkat Ramaswamy), 2004; and

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits Wharton School
Publishing, 2004.

His last book, co-authored by M. S. Krishnan and published in April 2008, is called The New
Age of Innovation.

Prahalad 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. At the time of his
passing, he was still on the board of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs.

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 was a member of the Blue Ribbon
Commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. He was the first recipient
of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration
presented by the President of India in 2000.

HONORS AND AWARDS

 In 2009, he was awarded Pravasi Bharatiya Sammaan [6]

 In 2009 he was conferred Padma Bhushan 'third in the hierarchy of civilian awards' by
the Government of India.

 In 2009 he was named the world's most influential business thinker on the
[Thinkers50.com] list, published by The Times .[7]

 In 2009, he was awarded the Herbert Simon-award by The Rajk László College for
Advanced Studies ( Corvinus University of Budapest).