Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad
(1941-2010), who was rated twice in a row as the most influential
management thought leader by Thinkers 50 listing of the world's top business
management gurus, passed away on April 16, 2010 in San Diego, California.
All through his life, he tried to make corporates more competitive
and through them make the world a better place to live in.
In his sudden demise, the world of strategy has lost one of the most
"perceptive, innovative, and influential
strategic thinkers" of all-time. As against
the usual practice, of the academicians, of spinning extension and analog
theories around their already proposed fundamental premise, CKP never
published two articles on the same topic. He
simply opened up so many new lines of enquiry—of seminal
nature—throwing open new avenues of research activity
for the rest to pursue.
Prahalad, a known maverick, had first come out with his big
management idea, `core competence'—a competency
resulting from an organization's ability to combine different technologies,
learning and relationships that enables it to transcend products and
markets, which not only drives a firm's strategy and
business but also, and most importantly, remains difficult to replicate by the
competitors— in a 1990 article published in the HBR, jointly with Gary Hamel, his student.
It simply asked firms to pause and question themselves as to what their
core business proposition is.
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