My Inspiration : C. K. Prahalad

C.K. Prahalad is no more with us. The world lost a management thinker, the world lost a guru, I lost an inspiration.

C.K. Prahalad was a man who left his footprints in time far beyond his life span. An inspiration that will continue to motivate people long after he has left the room. I was very fortunate to be associated with him; even more fortunate to be honored by a foreword he has written for my forthcoming book. To receive his wholehearted recommendation is a privilege and a legacy I will always live with. The Thinkers 50 List published annually by UK Times more than once rated C.K. Prahalad as the world's most influential management thinker. He shook up the status quo every single time, simply because he looked beyond the obvious.

He coined a term core competencies. In his celebrated book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid", he showed how companies could provide inexpensive beneficial products for low income people and still make money for their shareholders, a concept which is very very relevant in the markets today. The key was breaking the mould of existing thinking about the base of the pyramid. I often sought his permission to paraphrase his term The fortune lies at the bottom of the pyramid to describe my own organization philosophy of employees first, customer second. Just as in The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, the amazon story, the fortune pyramid eradicating poverty, C.K. Prahalad has championed the concept of co-creation and revolutionized the way we think about the bottom of the pyramid.

I believe that we need to do something very similar in leadership. We need to look at the bottom of the pyramid, not at the man who occupies the cabin next to the C-suite, but the young man or woman representing your firm at the customer site, the leader waiting to be discovered. All this originated from C.K. Prahalad. I believe that C.K. Prahalad was not just a management guru or a business thinker, but a philosopher, in the purest sense of the term, a truth seeker. In the words of Marshall Goldsmith "Prahalad lived a life that mattered". What a beautiful statement. He didn't just have grand ideas about saving the world that would never get implemented, he actually got things done. C.K. helped other thinkers develop; he helped people like me, who had no ideas to develop our own thinking. He went out of his way to help his professional peers become better. C.K. was a great champion of entrepreneurs Among the causes he gave his time and energy towas TiE, which is one of the world's largest organizations that support entrepreneurship.

I have personally learned a lot from C.K. over many years, he has been an inspiration to the entire IT industry. He taught us globalization. He personally taught me and inspired me to think beyond the obvious. C.K., I will live with the thought that you wrote the foreword for my book, you are my inspiration, and you will always be an inspiration in the minds and hearts of billions and billions of people who will read your thoughts again and again. Godspeed