Ck Prahalad Quotes

I have no doubt that the elimination of poverty and deprivation is possible by 2020.

When the poor at the BOP are treated as consumers, they can reap the benefits of respect, choice, and self-esteem and have an opportunity to climb out of the poverty trap.

Humility in success and courage in failure are hallmarks of a good leader.

We confuse rituals with principles, and focus on results, not goals.

CK told Gary that he was far more interested in making a difference than making a career.

Intensity comes naturally to people who are highly goal-focussed and set to achieve their goals through a very high standard of integrity and meticulousness.

After every session with him, you come away with a lot of confidence, a lot of faith in yourself, a lot of energy. This has an indirect effect on your organization. He was not elitist. He didn’t talk you down. He is someone who puts you at ease and you soon start talking to him as his equal.

Democratization of commerce is based on everyone having the right to exercise their roles as micro consumers, micro producers, micro entrepreneurs, micro investors, and micro innovators. Access to information removes the first impediment to building this brave, new world. Information asymmetry has always been at the heart of poverty.

Don’t follow best practices, instead go on and create the Next Practice.

The world respects accomplishment. If you don’t do what you are supposed to do don’t expect respect from what’s been done by your ancestors.CK

CK’s famous line was ‘you can break rules but don’t break obligations.

Ideal opportunity is a rare thing and people get old waiting for it.

dominant logic, core competence, strategic intent, future of competition, bottom of the pyramid.

who

Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere’.

India is so chaotic and hard that companies must strive to make it here because most emerging markets look exactly like this. They don’t look like disciplined China, they look like chaotic India. Africa, most of South America, most South East Asian countries like Vietnam, all are just like us. And therefore companies can ill afford to ignore India.

In 2014, some 60,000 women entrepreneurs cover a population of a hundred million deep in rural India where there is poor road and media connectivity. These women doubled their household income in no time. Women started to gain social respectability and for Unilever it was competitive advantage in distribution. “What a tremendous win-win he helped us create.

Mr. Banga remembers this episode well. “We started the session. All the directors stood up and presented their individual business plans and then I handed the floor to CK. It’s amazing how quickly he got all the wives into the discussion and within 10 minutes there were a couple of home truths on the table.” The wives were brutally honest. They said Unilever’s product quality did not deserve the price premium. Executives got to see how bitter home truths really are.

His common line to entrepreneurs and students was how opportunities have a way of showing up in funny ways and it was up to them to seize it and make the most of it. Ideal opportunity is a rare thing and people get old waiting for it.

CK told his children: “Let the world judge for who you are. You have to make things happen on your terms.

– no getting away with sloppy effort and that there was no alternative to hard work.

It also involves: “How to talk to people constantly, motivate them, how to get them to see the tasks on hand and how to reduce the frictional losses in pulling people together from multiple cultures, that becomes a dominant theme. So it’s not the great man view of leadership, it is somebody who gets you to be as good as you can be.

So when others saw poverty, where others saw lack of hygiene, he actually came back with a different picture. He said there are multiple wage earners living in each room, they are not paying taxes and they have huge disposable income. Let’s send our salesmen there.

Good bosses are those who build and lead high performance teams but a few also choose to play the role of mentors especially if they spot a bright talent.

When impact becomes the driving force, usually, a lot of less useful and time-consuming stuff, and even people, find a way of getting out of your way.

You should never think you know everything’.

Leaders must lead. You cannot lead unless you are future oriented; leadership is about the future; it’s about the point of view of the future, and it’s about hope. The first thing is we must have a distinct point of view, not about our current affairs, but how the world can be ten years from now. That is the first principle of a good leader.

You have to prove in India that you can do well by doing good.

This demands that India must acquire enough economic strength, technological vitality and moral leadership. Just economic strength and technological maturity is not enough.

The way the wireless cellular phone industry worked in India gave the idea a big booster shot.  For the first time in human history, four billion of the six billion people were connected.

Morality is an integral part of leadership.

Football teams, like businesses, don’t win only because of the strategy or the equipment they wear or because of the size and girth of their leaders; they also win because of their coaches giving them courage, direction and the inspiration to go out onto the field in the first place. I think we don’t give enough credit to fuzzy things; the abstract contribution of our business coaches.

if you can succeed in India, you can succeed everywhere’.

You got to see where the value lies. You got to position yourself rightly and that can come to you only if you have deep domain knowledge.

Never think of resources as your strength or lack of it as weakness. If you are doing it intelligently, it’s not a problem’.

organization’s potential can be unleashed only by creating a mindset of stretch and creating passion among ordinary people. “He had a terrific belief in the power of the ordinary worker.

Mr. Banga says CK saw opportunities where many others saw problems.

I recollect one evening he walked into my home in Mumbai having spent the entire day in one of the world’s largest slums, Dharavi. I thought he is going to come and tell me how terrible it was, how grim and dirty. He walked in with the same radiant smile we have seen in all his pictures and he told me what a great market potential and you are not exploiting it.

entrepreneurship was the cure to many social and economic problems in society.

He hated loose talk but enjoyed good humour. Dressing appropriately was very important to him since it showed how much one was serious about a task. Intensity comes naturally to people who are highly goal-focussed and set to achieve their goals through a very high standard of integrity and meticulousness.

In life you have to pick sides; you can’t play all positions and be respected. There is something called morality and respect for the Western society, I am picking my side.

People seek fairness – not favours.

They want to be heard. They often don’t even mind if decisions don’t go their way as long as the process is fair and transparent.

Banga was taken aback when CK persuaded him to invite the wives of the members attending the company’s annual strategy conference.

CK told them:“Everybody will be nice to you when you are doing well, remember the people who were nice to you when you were not.

That kind of stamina comes only if you really believe that you are doing God’s work. I learnt from him that making a difference requires a courageous heart, a contrarian spirit, a compassionate soul and that any professional qualification, even intellectual brilliance, will not be a substitute for those things.

Leaders must lead. You cannot lead unless you are future oriented; leadership is about the future; it’s about the point of view of the future, and it’s about hope.

The reason I am saying this is when talent becomes the critical resource for running companies and is distributed around the world, inter cultural competence, inter personal competence, the capacity to get people from different parts of the world from China, India, Germany, UK, US and Brazil all to work together requires the ability of a good sheep dog.

focussed on next practices, not best practices.

We need to deal with corruption head on. If you don’t, you cannot have a widespread entrepreneurial culture. Corruption must be treated as treason against the nation.We must focus on individual rights -- not group rights, principles -- not rituals. We confuse rituals with principles, and focus on results, not goals.

The first thing is we must have a distinct point of view, not about our current affairs, but how the world can be ten years from now.

Wherever we have failed it has always been a failure of leadership and because we didn’t trust one another enough. But every time we have had clarity of thought, and true effort behind its execution, India showed it can deliver.

BoP markets also started to become extraordinary sources of innovation. For example, Safaricom offered mobile cash allowing poor Kenyans, who did not have access to banks, to transfer money from A to B by text messaging. By 2009, seven million consumers were involved in this. Filipino maids working in Singapore were sending money home through an SMS message. From simple money transfers, this technology is being extended for application in public health, education and even entertainment like video downloads for a few cents.

Governments are using this platform to transfer subsidies directly to the poor who do not have bank accounts. This is also helping cut down leakages significantly which have dogged the subsidy mechanism in poor countries.

The key insight was that when serving the BoP, the firm does not start from the cost to determine the price; rather it has to start from what price the BoP consumers are willing to pay and work backwards to the cost at which the firm has to produce.

Muthuraman says CK made Tata Steel think of steel not as a commodity but as a service – a radical approach to how the value of a commodity is enhanced. This led to changes in the way

What does it really take for someone to make a difference? The first and most fundamental quality is courage,

Courage involved not worrying about whether what you say or do will affect your career.

what was good for humanity could ultimately be good for business as well.

the underlying idea that a worst written paper still has a better chance of getting published than the best unwritten one.

A sheep dog has to follow certain rules – it is always behind; it can bark a lot but can’t bite; it cannot lose any sheep; and it should know where it is going.

Unilever Sustainable Living Plan’ (USLP) in 2010. USLP is Unilever’s ambitious initiative to “decouple our growth from our environmental impact, while at the same time increasing our positive social impact.” Its 2020 goal is to “improve health and well-being, reduce environmental impact and source 100% of our agricultural raw materials sustainably and enhance the livelihoods of people across our value chain.

Doing Well by Doing Good

on the verge of doing useful things like preventing drivers from jumping the signal, jamming mobile phones if the driver wants to speak while driving, the engine refusing to start if the driver is drunk beyond a limit, and much more.

Prahalad challenges readers to re-evaluate their pre-conceived notions about the commercial opportunities in serving the relatively poor nations of the world. The Bottom of the Pyramid highlights the way to commercial success and societal improvement.

We have more than 50 percent global market share of all outsourcing, 70 percent IT-enabled service and one-third market share of business process outsourcing (BPO). We have a target $300 billion dollars for 2020. Som Mittal, Nasscom President

India is a country where universality and inclusiveness are widely practised. We have one of the best advantages very few countries have, including China. Just the sheer diversity of religion, language, practices and ethnicity ... and if we can learn to live in peace, if we can accommodate each other, then we can build a model for the world on how to cope with diversity.

It was important for him that you should have clarity in your point of view and then you build tolerance for other people’s point of view.

When the poor are converted into consumers, they get more than access to products and services. They acquire the dignity of attention and choices from the private sector that were previously reserved for the middle-class and rich.

BOP consumer problems cannot be solved with old technologies.

C. K. Prahalad ". . .he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today." BusinessWeek

The services offered by eSeva allow citizens to experience streamlined services, not just once in their lifetimes (as in buying or selling land and property) but frequently (as in paying electricity and water bills every month).

The problem of poverty must force us to innovate, not claim "rights to impose our solutions.

cases certainly can be found of large firms and multinational corporations (MNCs) that may have undermined the efforts of the poor to build their livelihoods, the greatest harm they might have done to the poor is to ignore them altogether.