Durable guru

With the exception of the late Peter Drucker, the grand old man of management thinking, gurus typically have a short shelf life. Most can boast the discovery of one or two fundamental new truths about management before flaming out into irrelevance as the context of business changes. The maverick Tom Peters is a good example of this genre. C K Prahalad doesn't rank in the Drucker pantheon yet, but in terms of durability and relevance he comes close. That is probably why Prof. Prahalad consistently finds himself among the leaders in global rankings of gurus and remains one of the world's most sought-after management speakers. Last week, for instance, Dr Prahalad was voted first in a list of the world's 50 most influential management thinkers, ahead of hands-on entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Richard Branson.

Indians have reason to be particularly proud of Dr Prahalad, who is a professor at the University of Michigan's Stephen M Ross School of Business. This is not only because he is the first management thinker of Indian origin to claim the title but also because he has deep roots in this country. Unlike other Indians in the list, "CK", as he is better known, has cut his teeth on Indian experience, having worked in Union Carbide and taught in the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Dr Prahalad's talent as a teacher is readily evident to anybody who has attended one of his presentations, which usually keep his audiences spell-bound as he communicates deep insights with a rare clarity. The depth and rigor of his thinking can be gauged from his influence on management practice today. Whether it is core competence, competing for the future or focusing on the bottom of the pyramid, Dr Prahalad has certainly established a dominance in management thinking. It is to his credit that he has managed to achieve this without transforming himself into a curio "" a common failing among successful management specialists. Instead, Dr Prahalad has displayed a constant facility for original thought. Take the case of core competence. In essence it suggests that companies should identify and do what they're best at. With hindsight, this appears to be an obvious truth but that is often the case with breakthrough thinking. Certainly, in the late eighties, when diversification was considered a favoured way to spread risk, core competence was daringly contrarian, and nowhere more so than in India, where licence raj constrictions and restrictions on monopolies made diversification the received wisdom of the day. It is an interesting point that some of the great wealth-creating companies, post-1991, have been those that adopted the principle of core competence "" Bharti and Ranbaxy are among them.

Then again, Dr Prahalad was among the first to recognise the brilliance of the business model followed by Mumbai's dabbawallahs, the decades-old food delivery service that is the city's lunchtime lifeline. Prahalad was the first to conduct a Six Sigma study of the dabbawallahs to find that their score ranked on par with the best Japanese corporations. It is to his credit that the dabbawallahs today have extended their business to management consultancy "" and their clients include companies in businesses as complex as automobiles and steel.

Many of Dr Prahalad's concepts are open to criticism. Core competence, for example, has been criticised by Krishna Palepu of Harvard Business School as being unduly deterministic. His subsequent thesis that companies must co-create value with customers is simplistic, since that's basically what the best corporations do all the time. And his bottom of the pyramid argument may well have earned him fame more for its political correctness than its universal workability. None of this is, however, is to undermine Dr Prahalad's contribution to contemporary management thinking.