C.K. Prahalad turned the spotlight of management thinking to the poor and the Third World
In October 2007 a series of wildfires broke out across California, endangering the lives of its inhabitants. A state of emergency was declared and the authorities started evacuating people. But even as the fires raged dangerously close to his neighbourhood, it was business as usual for one San Diego resident. He quietly packed his bag and took a flight out to Houston and then to Atlanta. He had more pressing business to attend to than bother about his house burning down. The man was C.K. Prahalad. And he was going to speak at the TiE chapters (a global non-profit entrepreneurship organisation) in Atlanta and Houston, something he always did for free — even paying his own hotel and travel expenses. His close friend and TiE Global CEO Suren Dutia told Prahalad that he could have always addressed TiE later. Prahalad said, “Suren, I had made a commitment. I have to keep my word.” That was C.K. Prahalad for you. Commitment meant more than his own well-being.
But the one book that really set him apart from the others was ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit’. The book offered a radical new way for companies to look at doing business with the poor. The book, which is into its fifth anniversary edition now, scorched bestseller charts as companies like Hindustan Unilever implemented his concepts. Till date, everyone concurs that this is Prahalad’s most influential piece of work. “Amongst his many contributions, he will be singled out for his work on the bottom of the pyramid. Who would have thought that you could fight poverty profitably?” asks Bala Balachandran, Professor Emeritus of Accounting Information & Management, Kellogg School of Management, and an old friend of Prahalad’s.
Praja had barely taken off when the Internet went bust. Prahalad and Jain tried to salvage the situation by putting in more of their personal money. But the companies weren’t biting — Praja’s product cost between $200,000-$300,000. No one was willing to invest that kind of money. Part of the skepticism from the clients’ side came from whether Praja would still be around a few years from now. “It was such an expensive software. Normally these companies would have partly invested in us but they didn’t because of the Internet bust,” says Jain. “When nothing worked we decided to move on.”
(This story appears in the 21 May, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)