What Subroto Bagchi says about Dr. C.K. Prahalad

Dr. C.K. Prahlad, we cannot get him back but we can keep him alive by taking his message and personal example to continue unabated towards creating India@75, the way he would have loved to see! Says, Subroto Bagchi, Vice Chairman and Gardener at MindTree Ltd.

“If you were a painter, how should you price your painting?” CK Prahalad would thunder in his trademark, booming, voice to room full of software industry leaders. In the next moment, he was giving them a good bashing for not understanding the essence of what he called value minus pricing. The way the software industry priced its output in the 1990s was akin to a painter charging for the oil and the canvas, and then some more for the labour, all at actual. “Going by that logic, how much do you think should be the price of an MF Hussain painting? You need to respect your own work if you expect the world to take note of it. What you are doing today is cost+ pricing; what you need to shift to, is value minus pricing.” Those were the days of Y2K and he went from company to company, industry associations to media interviews, urging Indian companies to go up the value chain. Looking back, he was asking midgets to behave like giants. But today, many of the very same midgets have transformed themselves into giants!

I met him many times after – his was a crusade like no one else’s: he wanted to see his motherland at par with the developed countries of the world that he straddled with the ease of an eagle. Wherever he went, from boardrooms in the US to think tanks in Europe or in his own country, he would ask people to do two things: to look at why something could not be done very differently and two, raise their expectations from their own selves ten, hundred, and sometimes, a thousand times. I have been personally, deeply, impacted by not just his message but the way he would take groups of disbelieving men and women, whipping them into rising above themselves with credible, compelling argument born out of a fine mind and at the end, making them aspire for the higher ground! He invariably did it with the sharpness of a sword, never let his audience feel wounded, instead he let them feel that the future, a higher, meaningful, impactful version of the future, was their entitlement.

When MindTree was launched in 1999, I met him at a small gathering. I walked up to him to personally tell about the fact that some of us had quit our comfortable corporate jobs and were raising venture capital to build a company. “What took you so long, I was wondering,” he quipped. In front of this giant, good was not good enough.

In the last one year, I have run into him a number of times. First we met at a sustainability think-tank at Nyenrode University in Amsterdam and then more recently, at a CII event in Kolkata where his wife Gayathri was with him. At Nyenrode, he spoke about sustainability with the same ease with which he has been teaching management strategy at class and boardrooms in the same unwavering way as he did two decades ago. At Kolkata, CK was asking a roomful of Bengali corporate bhadraloks as to why the path ahead for revival of Bengal was entrepreneurship and why the time was now. Knowing that only a God could change West Bengal, I was baffled at his messianic zeal. Then it occurred to me, more the disbelievers in some place, greater the need to preach there. Harder the ground, higher the need for the plough! To CK, Kolkata was where he was needed. As I listened to him speak: there was no change in the way he presented his teasers to the audience, there was no change in the way he confronted them, the only thing different now was his view of the next decade or two. CK saw the future like no one did. He was gifted by the Goddess of Learning with the ability to connect the dots, going forward. Most people can do it, only looking backwards.

CK was in Kolkata as part of a larger mission. He had helped CII craft the vision for India at 75! Only the other day, he had presented a document capturing the dreams and desires of people from a cross-section across the length and the breadth of the country to build a nation that would be full of opportunities for every Indian, a nation that would see education, health and infrastructure and concern for the environment

I have personally come to accept life; and in it, accept death. It does not cause me hurt or anguish.

At least, not for people who have given so much more to life than they have taken out of it.

We cannot get him back but we can keep him alive by taking his message and personal example to continue unabated towards creating India@75, the way he would have loved to see!

That said, Mother India, being a Mother, would grieve her loved son forever. For a mother, it is just never time.

Subroto Bagchi is Vice Chairman and Gardener at MindTree Ltd.

http://www.mindtree.com/subrotobagchi/in-memorium/

For my readers I have this much to add:

 

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad (August 8, 1941 – April 16, 2010) was a globally known figure who was consulted by the top management of many of the world's foremost companies. His research specialized in corporate strategy and the role of top management in large, diversified, multinational corporations.

 

At Harvard Business School, Prahalad wrote a doctoral thesis on multinational management in just two and a half years, graduating with a D.B.A. degree in 1975.

 

After graduating from Harvard, Prahalad returned to India. He taught at his alma-mater the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, but soon returned to the United States. He was appointed to position of the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business in the University of Michigan.

On April 16, 2010, Prahalad died of a previously undiagnosed lung illness in San Diego.

In the earlier days of Prahalad's fame as established management guru, in the beginning of the 90's, he advised Philips' Jan Timmer on the restructuring of this electronic corporation, then on the brink of collapse. With the resulting, succesful, 2-3 year long Operation Centurion he also frequently stood for the Philips management troops.

C. K. Prahalad is the co-author of a number of well known works in corporate strategy including The Core Competence of the Corporation (with Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, May–June, 1990). He authored several international bestsellers, including: Competing for the Future (with Gary Hamel), 1994; The Future of Competition (with Venkat Ramaswamy), 2004; and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits Wharton School Publishing, 2004. His new book with co-author M. S. Krishnan is called The New Age of Innovation.

He was co-founder and became CEO of Praja Inc. ("Praja" from a Sanskrit word "Praja" which means "citizen" or "common people"). The goals of the company ranged from allowing common people to access information without restriction (this theme is related to the "bottom of pyramid" or BOP philosophy) to providing a testbed for various management ideas. The company eventually laid off 1/3rd of its workforce and was sold to TIBCO. At the time of his passing, he was still on the board of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs.

Prahalad has been among top ten management thinkers in every major survey for over ten years. Business Week said of him: "a brilliant teacher at the University of Michigan, he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today." He was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. He was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 2000.

In 2009, he was awarded Pravasi Bharatiya Sammaan

In 2009 he was conferred Padma Bhushan 'third in the hierarchy of civilian awards' by the Government of India.

In 2009 he was named the world's most influential business thinker on the [Thinkers50.com] list, published by The Times.