A doyen and an original thinker in the field of Business Management and IT, C.K.Prahlad died last month.

He was the guy who coined the term Core Competence.

http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2010/04/ck_prahalad.html

C.K. Prahalad
8:03 PM Saturday April 17, 2010
by Adi Ignatius | Comments (34)


I first met C.K. Prahalad, whom we lost on April 16th at too young an age, in July 2008. I was the deputy managing editor of Time magazine, and had organized a discussion in New York City to debate \"creative capitalism\" — Bill Gates' idea for spreading the benefits of capitalism to the billions who have been left out.

When I'd asked Gates whom he most wanted with him on the panel, the answer had come back at once: C.K. Prahalad, the brilliant strategy thinker at the University of Michigan.

It's little wonder why. C.K. had created a remarkable body of work, from his celebrated May 1990 HBR article (with Gary Hamel) that coined the term \"core competencies,\" to his groundbreaking 2004 book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, which identified how the world's poor could be a valuable market. The Thinkers 50 List, published annually by the (U.K.) Times, more than once rated C.K. as the world's most influential management thinker.

Beyond his scholarship, C.K. could be counted on in any discussion to provide wise, assured, and often blunt insight. During the talk on creative capitalism, C.K. found an opportunity to chide his hosts: \"This movement will not go forward if the media does not play its part,\" he said. \"The stories from the poor countries need not be only stories of poverty and corruption.\"

We took his harangue as a worthy challenge.

Several months later, when I was interviewing for the position of editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review, C.K. was one of the first people I called. What did he think about the magazine, about current coverage of management issues? C.K. was generous with his time and straightforward with his views, offering praise for HBR where it was due and pointing out what he saw as its shortcomings. C.K. urged me to compete for the job, adding that he would be a willing sounding board if I landed it. I'm sorry that I won't have more opportunities to benefit from his wisdom.

I met C.K. for the final time just last month, in Boston. We sat at a restaurant in the Westin Copley Hotel, eating sandwiches and discussing our latest passions. C.K. had recently co-written an important piece for HBR on how sustainability has become the most important driver of business innovation. He had several projects in the pipeline including what turned out to be his final column for HBR, an explanation of why companies so often fail to deal with their most obvious challenges, which we'll publish in our June issue.

C.K. also expressed enthusiasm about a book he was co-writing for HBR Press with HBR editor at large Anand Raman, on how some of the best management ideas these days are coming from India and the other emerging markets, and are reshaping management theory.

I asked how he could be so prolific, writing intelligently about so many subjects. His secret, he said, was to collaborate whenever possible with a strong partner. \"I work hard and I work quickly,\" he said. \"But once I'm done with a project, I like to move on to a new one, and leave it to my collaborators to deal with the legacy of the last one.\"

That kind of energy and breadth inspired me to select C.K. as our pioneer columnist when we introduced opinion pieces in the re-launched HBR magazine in January 2010. No one, we thought, better combined gravitas with a willingness to pursue new ideas.

The column format was a challenge for someone used to writing long-form pieces, and required C.K. to develop a new skill set. (As Blaise Pascal once famously put it: \"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.\"

But C.K. aced it. His debut column was drawn from a lecture he first delivered to his students in 1977, outlining the duties of the \"responsible manager.\" It laid out C.K.'s thoughts so succinctly that he made it his annual last lecture for the next 33 years — without changing a word. Indeed, it's a timeless call for managers to be the best they can. \"Leadership,\" he concluded, \"is about self-awareness, recognizing your failings, and developing modesty, humility, and humanity.\"

These were the values that C.K. lived by. We at HBR feel very lucky to have been able to cross paths with him so many times during his extraordinary journey

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Sunny Leone a true Canadian DESI now back in India !.