CK Prahalad, the oracle whose wisdom still echoes in Indian boardrooms
From failed steel to soul: Vinay Rai’s dubious reset and redemption During a period when Apple was struggling after Steve Jobs' departure and John Sculley's leadership setbacks, Prahalad still regarded the company as a visionary force. He believed that Apple's recovery, which would indeed occur a few years later, would be driven by its core strength: user-friendliness.
As he explained in a Business Today magazine interview, “You can unwrap an Apple Macintosh and be operational in a few minutes, whereas you need a few hours to fix a VCR." It was part of Prahalad's ground-breaking theory on the core competencies of an organization, which first appeared in the Harvard Business Review in June 1990, in collaboration with Gary Hamel. They described core competencies as a bundle of skills and technologies that represent collective learning across individual skill sets and organizational units.
Despite his rockstar-like status in India, where CEOs flocked to his annual events (one year, 30 of the top Indian CEOs skipped their annual pilgrimage to Davos to attend his talk), Prahalad's advice wasn't widely heeded. Many emerging business groups pursued unrelated diversifications.
The consequences of these choices became apparent throughout the 2000s, and well before his untimely death in 2010, it was clear that the struggles of groups like Videocon, Unitech, Lanco, GVK, and Essar were linked to these unfocused expansions. More here | The curious case of Pawan Sachdeva: The shoe magnate who took on Gautam Adani Another of Prahalad’s significant contributions, developed alongside Stuart Hart, was the concept of the "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid." This idea has deeply influenced India's consumer economy.
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