The death of management guru C K Prahlad has been a big blow to the country. While most consumer durable and FMCG firms were content to look at expensive goods/services for the middle and upper classes, it was Prahlad who opened their eyes to what he called the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. This is the market represented by the one-rupee shampoo sachets, for example. I was present at a conference where Prahlad spoke to industrialists about the follies of doing business the traditional way. He showed a picture of a small farmer with a cow and said, in the West, this would not be the picture of a modern dairy farm — the modern dairy farm would have hundreds of acres of land, thousands of cattle, automatic milking machines, and so on. Perhaps, he said, they would like to think of Amul, which used thousands of one-cow farmers like the one in the picture and, by using common collection/testing/storage methods, developed a successful dairy model that could rival the ones in the West. Prahlad’s biggest lesson, contrary to what most think, was not about the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, it was about the need to think differently.
Rajiv Singh, New Delhi
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