A peek into the mind of CK Prahalad

C.K. Prahalad was the Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan Business School specializing in corporate strategy and international business. A globally recognized business guru,  he consulted for the top management of many of the world’s foremost companies, such as Ahlstrom, AT&T, Cargill, Citicorp, Eastman Chemical, Oracle, Phillips, Quantum, Revlon, Steelcase and Unilever.





CK Prahalad's rankings in the Thinkers 50 list of most influential business thinkers:

• 2009        1
• 2007        1
• 2005        3
• 2003       12
• 2001        8

Books authored / co-authored by CK Prahalad:

• Multinational Mission: Balancing Local Demands and Global Vision (1987)
• Competing for the Future (1994)
• The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers (2004)
• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profit (2004)
• New Age of Innovation (2008)
• The Multinational Mission: Balancing Local Demands and Global Vision (1999)
• Strategic Flexibility: Managing in a Turbulent environment (1999)
• The Boundaryless Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organizational Structure (1995)

CK Prahalad quotes:

"If your aspirations are not greater than your resources, you’re not an entrepreneur." (strategy + business)

"Any company that cannot imagine the future won't be around to enjoy it." (Competing for the Future)

"Honesty and humility on the part of top management may be the first prerequisite of revitalization in a company". (Harvard Business Review)

"An organization’s capacity to improve existing skills and learn new ones is the most defensible competitive advantage of all." (with Gary Hamel in Harvard Business Review)

"If you want new ideas, you have to push yourself in the periphery."

"Executives are constrained not by resources, but by their imagination."

"The urgent drives out the important, the future goes largely unexplored; and the capacity to act, rather than the capacity to think and imagine, becomes the sole measure of leadership.” (Competing for the Future)

"Assume responsibility for outcomes as well as for the processes and people you work with. How you achieve results will shape the kind of person you become." (with Gary Hamel in Harvard Business Review)

"An incumbent’s greatest vulnerability is its belief in accepted practice." (with Gary Hamel in Harvard Business Review)

The perspective on outsourcing must shift from a focus on cost arbitrage to one encompassing a global search for resources and methodologies for leveraging resources. (with M.S. Krishnan in Optimize Magazine)

"CIOs should ask themselves two questions: "How well can we convert business ideas into business processes?" and "How flexible are my systems to translate BP into IT?" Those who make this transition will be the facilitators of their companies' success. If not, they will be the bottleneck. The choice is clear: CIOs must be the bridge in the logic chain between strategy and operational excellence." (Optimize Magazine) 

"In many companies, business unit managers are rewarded solely on the basis of their performance against return on investment targets. Unfortunately, that often leads to denominator management because executives soon discover that reductions in investment and head count—the denominator—“improve” the financial ratios by which they are measured more easily than growth in the numerator: revenues. It also fosters a hair-trigger sensitivity to industry downturns that can be very costly. Managers who are quick to reduce investment and dismiss workers find it takes much longer to regain lost skills and catch up on investment when the industry turns upward again." (With Gary Hamel in Harvard Business Review) 

"Beset by new competitive reality, firms typically start to focus on better asset management (reduction of working capital) as well as in reduction of investment requirements by selective outsourcing. However, vitality in the medium to longer term comes not from asset reduction but from resource leverage."

"I see nothing but opportunities. If India can leverage its diversity and harmonize the talents available than 30 of the Fortune 500 companies will emerge from India." (Acceptance speech for the Global Indian of they year award 2004)

"Every one of my research projects started the same way: recognizing that the established theory did not explain a certain phenomenon. We had to stay constantly focused on weak signals. Each weak signal was a contradictory phenomenon that was not happening across the board. You could very easily say, “Dismiss it, this is an outlier, so we don’t have to worry about it.” But the outliers and weak signals were the places to find a different way to think about the problem." (strategy + business)

“Strategy is about stretching limited resources to fit ambitious aspirations” (Competing for the Future)

“The essence of strategy lies in creating tomorrow’s competitive advantages faster than competitors can mimic the ones you possess today.”