PERSON
C. K. Prahalad
The Indian-American management strategist who taught corporations that their deepest advantage lies in collective learning rather than product lines—and whose frameworks for core competence, the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, and next practices arrived precisely at the moment when AI made them most urgently necessary.
C. K. Prahalad was the strategist of the invisible assets. Born in Coimbatore in 1941 and trained in physics before turning to business, he spent his career demonstrating that the dominant logic of corporate strategy—organize around products, optimize the business unit, reduce costs, manage for the quarter—was precisely the logic that would destroy any organization that followed it faithfully through a technological transition. His 1990 paper with Gary Hamel on
core competence reoriented how the world understood competitive advantage: the asset that matters is not the product but the
collective learning of the organization, the capacity to coordinate diverse skills and integrate multiple streams of technology that cannot be hired, purchased, or replicated. His 2004 book on
the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid reoriented how the world understood poverty: four billion low-income people are not objects of charity but entrepreneurs, value-conscious consumers, and sources of frugal