Can C.K. Prahalad Pass the Test?

"What is the next challenge in life?"

One of the few decorations in Prahalad's sparse office is a beautifully illustrated old map -- a gift from friend and collaborator Gary Hamel. "Can you tell me what country that is, Jennifer?" booms Prahalad, always the professor. I'm stumped, as I tend to be continuously with this man. He smiles broadly and turns the map around. Then I see that it is a map of India, tilted at a 90-degree angle. This, I realize, is Prahalad in a nutshell. Turn an idea sideways. It's the theme of his life. It's how you get from potato to Praja.

One of nine children of a well-known Madras judge and Sanskrit scholar who wrote and edited 40 books, Prahalad (that's his first name, actually; C.K. stands for Coimbatore Krishnarao, the names of his town and of his father, respectively) was born to study. But early in his career, he managed people. A brilliant student of physics, he was recruited by the manager of the local Union Carbide battery plant. He promised his father he'd try it for a year, then return to school to get his PhD.

Only 19 at the time, Prahalad turned the factory sideways. One day, after noticing that many temporary workers were using old or torn gloves (managers doled out new gloves according to seniority), Prahalad had a thought: Why not distribute new gloves to the workers who handled the most dangerous stuff instead? Impressed, Prahalad's boss decided to mentor the young upstart, often bringing him management books to read and quizzing him about them later. Prahalad calls his Union Carbide experience a major inflection point in his life, and he still cherishes the gold chain that his workers bought for him when he left -- four years later. "I learned about the extraordinary wisdom of ordinary people," he says.

Prahalad then went to the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), where he fell in love with Gayatri, a young psychology student at a nearby university. After five years spent trying to win their families' approval (the union went against tradition), the couple married and left for Harvard, where Prahalad wrote a PhD thesis on multinational management in just two and a half years. They then returned to India, where he taught at the IIM. But this was the 1970s, and the fervently nationalistic India had little use for a globally oriented thinker. With his ideas under constant political attack, Prahalad decided he had no choice but to return to the United States. The Prahalads arrived in Ann Arbor with $18.

Maybe because he had nothing to lose, Prahalad didn't play it safe. He became known on the Michigan campus as a maverick who avoided publishing in the traditional journals in favor of venues that he thought would have more of an impact. He ruffled feathers. As an assistant professor, he was approached by a major company with an invitation to consult -- an opportunity that every young business academic yearns for, especially if he has two young kids. He agreed, but he demanded $1,000 a day. Shocked, the client withdrew the offer. Gayatri was horrified. "We need the money," she gasped. But for Prahalad, it was a matter of getting the respect that he felt he deserved. A month and a half later, another company sought his services. This time, he asked for $3,000 a day. And he got it.

In 1981, Prahalad met Gary Hamel, then a young student in international business. Their relationship, which would become a remarkable, decade-long collaboration, was much like Felix and Oscar on intellectual crack. Prahalad preferred a full-bodied cabernet and a good book in his study to working a crowd. Hamel was the voluble one, and the two became known around the university for knockdown, drag-out intellectual-sparring sessions that lasted long into dinner.

Much of their most influential work appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Their May 1990 article, "The Core Competence of the Corporation," became one of HBR's most widely reprinted pieces ever. A subsequent book, Competing for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), was heralded as one of the great business books of the 1990s. The work lifted both men into the top ranks of business thinkers, earning them millions in royalties and speaking fees.

Soon after, Prahalad had his potato epiphany. The timing coincided, more or less, with an invitation from his friend Jain, an entrepreneur and former Michigan professor who, at the time, was teaching at the University of California at San Diego. Jain, who was experimenting with sports television, asked Prahalad to look at his artificial-intelligence technology. The software allowed viewers to watch the Super Bowl from any perspective, even those not actually filmed by the network's cameras. Prahalad had no interest in sports, but the experience enthralled him. "The technology eliminated the tyranny of the few over the many," he says.