Influential Teachers

May 10, 2010 - The world has lost one of the most influential teachers of our time.  CK Prahalad, the renowned management professor and author passed away after a brief illness on April 16. If you haven’t heard of CK, the only thing you need to know comes from the biennial survey of “the most influential business thinkers” by the Times of London.  Earlier this year, for the second time in a row, he was ranked #1 on the list ahead of such all-stars as Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Porter, Richard Branson and Phillip Kotler among others.

I had the good fortune to take CK’s class during my time at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.  Even though he was a widely sought after expert and frequently writing a book, he still took time to teach in the MBA program. He taught 2 sections of over 100 students and you considered yourself incredibly lucky to get in. I can remember walking into class every day with incredibly high anticipation of what I would learn. 

You might think a man of his stature would simply stand up for an hour and a half and lecture, trying to force feed his knowledge into hungry young MBA students but he never once did that.  Instead, he would often take a long held management truth, introduce it to the class and challenge the fundamental thinking behind it.  The entire class would then engage in a debate trying to prove why he was wrong and why this particular theory still worked. You almost dreaded being called because it could become a very one sided fight.  Not that he was intimidating but he always seemed to know the pattern of logic that business people use and he would simply use examples and stories to refute it. 

Take for example the long held premise that businesses cannot profitably serve the billions of poor people in the world.  This argument made up the cornerstone of his brilliant book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” in which he very successfully argues that figuring out how to serve the incredible amount of people who live on pennies a day is the future of business.  It might mean selling shampoo in single serve sachets for a penny off the back of a bike or running a specialized eye hospital with such efficiency that you can help eradicate blindness while making money (see Aravind Eye Hospital in India for more).  He introduced this concept when I was there in 2004.  Six years later, there isn’t a major multi-national company who isn’t trying to figure out how to run a business in China, India or many of the developing countries in this world.  He had an incredible vision for the future but more importantly how to teach it in such a way it simply became the way business executives thought.    

Two things I will take from CK beyond his books outlining core competence, co-creation and the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid:

-Never be afraid to challenge conventional thinking

-Mediocre teachers tell, good teachers explain and exceptional teachers demonstrate and inspire